During the last decades a holistic approach for neighborhood regeneration efforts was dominant in the western world. Under the holistic scheme, an urban regeneration intervention has to target simultaneously at least three distinct improvement objectives, namely economic, physical and social (and even safety and the environment). The holistic approach is not necessarily a planners’ exclusiveness, since it was also promoted by the EU.
The same holds true in the Netherlands, although with variations (more state-driven, more locally planned and with some additional emphasis on social matters) and temporal fluctuations in the proportion of each dimension in the policy mix. In this model, the renewal of the building (and especially housing) stock was (is) considered a key element for promoting local (social, economic and environmental) sustainability.
Nevertheless, some scholars criticize this approach both on the ground of its efficiency and its reasoning. Furthermore, there are pressures on the model which originate from the lack of funding and the prevalence of urban governance. Simultaneously, these two reasons, with the addition of a new shift to redevelopment, motivate planners to seek innovative market-oriented instruments.
Such an instrument is the ‘klushuizen’ approach which was developed in Rotterdam and is now well appreciated and expanding nationwide. Klushuizen (literally: work-houses; loosely translated as DIY-houses) refers to the supply of obsolete houses in deprived neighborhoods in low prices, on the condition that the buyers invest a certain amount in the house (and its surroundings) and that they live there for a period of two years. People who wish to acquire a self-owned home but luck sufficient funding can find a golden opportunity in this market often by investing personal labor in the reconstruction.
The success of the approach, in terms of supply and demand, is not doubted since almost every house that was made available in the market was eventually sold. However, the contribution to the renewal of the area as well as the transferability of the instrument is not self-evident as it has been applied in parallel, or in combination with other regeneration policies due both to the aforementioned holistic model and a specific political climate that prevailed in the city.
In Rotterdam there is some spatial segregation based on social class. There are wealthy neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods for the middle class. The good news are that the ‘average’ neighborhoods are dominant in number .
In the areas where the lower social strata concentrate (Cluster 2), a correlation between home ownership and higher incomes is observed. There is also literature that correlates homeownership with the safety index, with which the city of Rotterdam is obsessed. Perhaps these correlations are among the reasons that drove the municipality to privatize a significant share of the existing houses during 2006-10, but one has to bear in mind that this shift in housing ownership didn’t exclusively happen in the highly deprived areas.
Besides reducing the share of social housing, the city adopted gentrification policies that aimed to improve the built environment, reinforce social cohesion, attract creative strata and change the city's business profile. It is hard to conclude that these policies were unsuccessful in terms of restoring social order as it is measured by the safety index. But regarding the alteration of the social mix, the evidence indicates that such a change requires a long term effort or the ‘old school’ approach of reconstructing the whole neighborhood.
The Klushuizen is a form of privatization of the most obsolete houses which is accompanied by private regeneration investment. It was used in areas with high vacancy rates and/or low share of private homes, in socially deprived (‘hotspot’) areas and extreme makeover areas or just where obsolete houses where available. However, Klushuizen is an approach very limited in extent in order to influence the gentrification in the neighborhood.
Based on a small survey sample, the main motives that drove the investors into buying this type of property were the desire for a private-owned and/or bigger home in combination with the low price. This finding is in line with the marketing strategy that the municipality used to promote the houses.
Focusing in these aspects to promote the Klushuizen, proved to be a winning strategy for the program’s success in the Netherlands, where the share of owner occupied homes is relatively low (the fifth lowest in the EU-27 according to CECODHAS; Pittini and Laino 2011) and the average house surface is considered small 1 . As these conditions don’t necessarily hold true abroad, any attempt for the transfer of the program must discover new principals which would correspond to the local context.
Nevertheless, the volume of the private investment that newcomers offer doesn’t seem sufficient to start up a renovation wave. Besides, after the initial implementation attempt of the instrument -the now well-known Wallisblok experiment- the approach was never used as the primary renovation tool but it was always a part of a more integrated approach which included more state interventions of physical improvement.
In addition, contrary to the declared policy goal, the program doesn’t necessarily address the needs of the neighborhood’s current inhabitants. So far, the bigger size of the new houses is not destined to roof bigger families and so to correspond with household’s cycles, nor do they concern a local issue. On the contrary, the approach brought in the neighborhoods new ‘better- off’ households which are in their vast majority of the average size and arrive from other neighborhoods or even other cities.
More specifically, the newcomers are young Netherlanders with small families, middle 2 income and a university degree. Based on their demographics, if the limited physical renovation they cause can be seen as a gentrification approach, their relocation can be seen as a ‘social re- conquest’ by the Dutch middle class, but considering the small scale of the program other consequences may be more important, e.g., the reduce of nuisance spots or the reduce of municipal’s real estate exposure to market risk. (However, examination of these aspects requires a different research). Furthermore, despite that the newcomers have a roughly common profile the neighborhood status is a factor which causes preference differentiations among them related to their individual characteristics. In that sense, the (social) gentrification potential of the private housing is limited by its surroundings.
Finally, in the survey’s replies there is evidence that newcomers face some difficulties / dislikes regarding their new ‘habitat’, a finding that gives credit to the argument that a less homogenous (more diverse) social mix doesn’t automatically promote social cohesion.
