Amsterdam’s New Wave of Cooperative Housing

<p>In an article published in the Guardian earlier last year, Jon Henley reported on the state of the housing crisis in Amsterdam. The article’s title took a quote from one of the people that Henley interviewed: “Everything is just on hold”. For a lot of people in Amsterdam, everything really is on hold, as in, stuck where they’re living, usually with several other people, unless they’re a yuppie or coming from money or they somehow got a foothold on the housing ladder right before it got incredibly difficult to do so.</p> <p>This is the situation for me, Charlie Clemoes, one of the Failed Architecture editors and host of this episode of the podcast. I’ve struggled with housing in Amsterdam for a while now, but something about having the situation reported on in the paper that my parents read back in England felt like a moment. After eight years living here, just about managing to fly under the radar in a series of cheap but temporary dwellings, the crisis properly caught up with me in late 2023, when, after moving back to Amsterdam after a year in Maastricht, I had to find a new place, which then brought me face to face with the open market, where there’s basically nothing available to anyone on a low income (which I have as a teacher and a writer and a cultural worker). I’ve known many people who have simply given up trying to live here. I almost did before, luckily chancing upon another antikraak (an anti-squat or guardian property in British parlance, where you look after an empty property by living in it, without normal tenant rights in return for lower rent…</p>