{"id":9252,"date":"2025-02-13T16:30:58","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T16:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.willedonker.nl\/nieuws\/strengthening-public-housing-control-law-what-developers-need-to-know\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T11:40:19","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T11:40:19","slug":"strengthening-public-housing-control-law-what-developers-need-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.willedonker.nl\/en\/nieuws\/strengthening-public-housing-control-law-what-developers-need-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Strengthening public housing control law: what developers need to know"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The housing market in the Netherlands is under pressure. To address these challenges, there is the proposal for a Law to strengthen the direction of public housing. Today the Second Memorandum of Amendment for this bill was published. The accompanying parliamentary letter announces some other important choices. In this blog, we discuss the main changes and proposals and what they mean for project developers.

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Background of the law<\/h3>

The Strengthening Public Housing Control Act should ensure that governments and developers get housing projects off the ground more quickly. The Act aims to ensure a balanced distribution of housing, both in terms of number and affordability, and to speed up procedures in the administrative courts for projects of serious social interest. <\/p>

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Key changes<\/h3>

1. Directing affordability<\/h6>

Provinces and the state can issue instructions on the number of homes to be built and the locations where they should be located. This should ensure that enough housing is built in the right places. The central government is now directing that municipalities must program 40% of the housing to be built in the middle segment, or 30% social rent, for the entire territory. There will be some specific exceptions. In a regional context, two-thirds of the new housing to be built must be affordable for people with middle and low incomes, 30% of which must be social rent. These instructions on the so-called public housing program (the successor to the housing vision) cannot be appealed to the administrative court. This means that project developers must take even more account of a mix of social rent, middle rent and owner-occupied housing. <\/p>

The municipality is given room in the housing ordinance to determine the situations in which priority should be given, and municipal agreements must be made on a distribution of categories of house seekers.<\/p>

2. Direction on locations<\/h6>

The ladder for sustainable urbanization no longer needs to be applied by the national government for the housing component. If a location is suburban, there is no need to justify why housing development cannot take place in the built-up area. <\/p>

3. Permit-free assisted living and family homes.<\/h6>

More options are being explored for permit-free placement of a home for informal care in a rear yard, as well as the possibility of being able to use such a home not only for informal care, but also for first-degree relatives.<\/p>

4. Expansion and simplified procedure for experimentation<\/h6>

The 2010 Crisis and Recovery Act offered opportunities to experiment and deviate from rules. The administrative law accelerations from that law (appeal to a single body; ruling within six months; no possibility of submitting new grounds of appeal) will have a place in the project procedure under the Environment Act. The intention is to make that project procedure easier to use for designated housing projects. The Second Memorandum of Amendment is also intended to make it faster and easier to designate such housing projects. <\/p>

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What does this mean for developers?<\/h3>

For project developers, the following is important:<\/p>