In places like Amsterdam – as opposed to for example the Sittard-Geleen area where the housing shortage is much lower or Schouwen-Duivenland where it’s negligible – it takes about TWO DECADES to find affordable housing.
Twenty years.
This housing shortage in Holland’s central area results in a great deal of homelessness, by definition. People may find alternative ways to house themselves but they still need the blasted “inschrijving” (registration) to be allowed to exist here officially. Rules have been loosened in recent years, by which I mean that municipalities can now allow you to use their office address, but in order to register without having an official residence you have to have ties.
(I have worked and lived in Amsterdam for most of my adult life in the Netherlands, with the exception of a mere few months elsewhere, but I don’t qualify. I have much stronger ties to England than to the Netherlands. I don’t quite qualify as a Dutch citizen any longer in all sorts of ways; I’m not sure how to explain, qualify or phrase it. And that’s apart from things such as that the Dutch are sometimes offended by for example my English understatements because they don’t want to know about my Englishness as I speak Dutch.)
Support for homeless people generally is not free in the Netherlands and often very limited. Just like for women who flee from domestic violence, it usually requires being registered as living locally (having local ties), which requires having a local home address.
(This latter mechanism also often pushes homeless people out of the mandatory Dutch healthcare system because it has the same address requirement. Are you surprised to learn that there’s a Dutch concept called “address fraud”?)
People are frequently forced to run all over town all day long, to several different locations to apply for access for 1 night, to be sent to a specific location for the night, to be sent to a different location in the morning, then back to the other location if they want to apply for another night and then perhaps back to the other location or to a different location if they want a meal.
Typing this is exhausting enough. Doing it is on another level.
All the while, it may be freezing cold and pouring and while these tired souls walk all over town, they get soaked and so do their belongings. Remember: They have no place where they can dry their things.
Support websites sometimes use language in which the organizations seek to distance themselves from the people they are supposed to serve. They speak of “these people” and create invisible walls between us and them.
Utterly deplorable.
It makes some people write or decide that it’s better to die under a bridge than to rest in a temporary bed. Not because they want to be miserable and die but because they want to live and be seen as human.
