What causes the lack of building?

kazen44 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

a combination of many things.

For one, Cities in the netherlands are already quite dense, and the dutch are focused on building family houses attachted to each other mostly (row housing).

Also, thanks to the massive agricultural sector and a lack of oversight on industry, the netherlands has a massive problem with nitrogen in its soil which prevents building because building stuff generates more nitrogen.

Speculation and the liberalisation of the housing market has also massively contributed to price increases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_crisis_in_the_Netherl...

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y-curious 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is news to me and interesting re: nitrogen crisis. That said, isn’t construction a very minor contributor relative to the agricultural nitrogen impact? Like, taken to an extreme, preventing construction based on this is like preventing people from having children because children will produce nitrogen compounds

	▲	jeroenhd 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The nitrogen problems has been ignored for so long and nitrogen compound deposition has been so intense for a long time that you can't really do anything anywhere without depositing nitrogen compounds in an area already suffering from the environmental effects. The Netherlands is a very densely populated country compared to the most of Europe. Furthermore, there are industrial hubs bringing in polluted air through the wind from the west, south, and east, making up a significant source of the nitrogen compound deposition. All efforts to solve the problem have so far upset very powerful lobbyists whose income relies on being allowed to pollute more to stay ahead of the competition (not to mention caused violent protests). There are many factors to the housing problem, it's not just nitrogen compounds. In my opinion, the entire construction sector coming to a standstill after the 2008 crisis was probably what kicked off a storm of seemingly unrelated issues, from population pyramids to the water table levels to investors using property to accumulate wealth to hyperintensive farming practices. New measures to supposedly solve the nitrogen compound crisis have been announced. By the looks of it, I expect the agriculture lobby to riot again, and new elections by the start of next year when the government inevitably collapses itself again in an attempt to use populism to gather more votes.

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PeterHolzwarth 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for that link and info - I had never heard of this issue, even obliquely!

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ako 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s expensive to build (many rules, not enough construction workers, expensive materials), expensive land, nitrogen policies, economic crisis 2008-2013 when there were no buyers for new houses caused a backlog of new houses.

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ben_w 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lack of building is the default natural state, one should (in general) ask what causes building.

Even with the stuff in the sibling comments, the Netherlands also famously makes new land.