Kirsty McHenry | The academic year is at its end and so the hunt for a house is (again) open
It’s finally summer again and that means finally time to ... look for a house in Amsterdam, writes columnist Kirsty McHenry. “As their desperation grows in the coming weeks, a large number of students will respond to increasingly dubious ads and attend increasingly poor viewings.”
It’s that time of year again! The temperature is up, the sun sporadically breaks through the clouds, and thousands of UvA students are desperately searching for somewhere to live before the start of the next academic year. Online, crowds of restless students queue up in the inboxes of landlords hoping to get their foot in the door of a rental property. By now, the feverish countdown to secure a room by the beginning of the semester has already begun. As their desperation grows over the coming weeks, a great number of students will find themselves responding to progressively more dubious ads and attending increasingly shadier viewings. Among them, many will sign whatever rental contract they can get a hold of in the frenzy.
During the summer in Amsterdam, you are never more than six feet away from a student seeking housing. This season is well acknowledged as the most competitive (and therefore most gruelling) period within which to be looking for a place to live. Not only are the year-long university-facilitated housing contracts coming to an end, but droves of prospective students are also flocking to the city. In the scramble for secure housing, students emerge either with their tail between their legs as they are forced to return home or with a thicker skin toughened by the mercilessness of the rental market. However, in spite of their newly cultivated grit and tenacity, by the time the first weeks of classes have rolled around, housing will still elude many. This leaves some students with no choice but to couch surf, commit to costly hostels, take up residence in tents or resort to other forms of precarious, risky accommodation before they can locate somewhere more permanent.
Unfortunately, even after students have risked life and limb to obtain a rental contract, they often realise that, upon closer inspection, it is not quite the catch they had imagined. Most will only have to wait for winter to come and the heating to break to discover just what kind of landlord they’ve managed to hook. Although the Dutch state has made an effort to establish stronger protections for renters (this is the intention behind the Fixed Rental Contract Act which was implemented earlier this month), students will be an exception to this legislation. What all this means is that many of the students who will spend this summer clambering to secure a rental contract will find that, even after they have signed the lease, the struggle will not necessarily be over. And now that the house hunt is on, those looking to exploit their tenants may well see students as enticing prey.
In the dog-eat-dog world of the Amsterdam rental market, securing certainty in one’s living situation can be a seemingly unwinnable fight. Moreover, as anyone who has experienced the Amsterdam rental market in recent years will know, it’s hard to be picky about your contract when the choice is between a roof over your head or a tent canvas that threatens to leak at any moment. Having said this, I promise all those still searching that when you can finally collapse back on your bed, the rent paid and the contract signed, there is no better feeling.
