New Housing Concepts: Modular, Circular, Biobased, Reproducible, and Affordable

For a moment, it seemed that the architect had disappeared from the construction supply chain for sustainable and affordable housing provided by Dutch housing associations. Large contractors were making direct agreements with housing associations and wanted to scale up production with their housing factories. However, with the ‘So You Think You Can BUILD’ challenge, architects, consultancies, and contractors reinvented themselves within the construction supply chain and acquired a position as providers of circular building concepts. The aim of this challenge is to stimulate providers of homes to design and produce (in great numbers) affordable and sustainable houses. This not only scales up building production in empty fields but also within difficult and dense build urban areas. A whole new generation of Dutch architects, consultancies, and contractors working in collaboration are now intensively involved with circular and biobased residential buildings, innovative materials and production processes. They are managing to provide attractive products for housing associations and other clients. In the first part of 2021, ‘So You Think You Can BUILD’ challenged teams of designers, engineers and contractors to develop new concepts, with the three winners applying the principles of the ‘passive house’, which is modular and circular, as well as a smart building skin and smart core with open floor space in between.

Heating the Dutch housing stock without natural gas

This paper studies the level of improvement of building envelopes required to heat the Dutch housing stock using an energy supply without natural gas, such as a district heating network at lower supply temperature or a heat pump. We identified 35 building types to represent the Dutch housing stock of single-family dwellings. A 4R2C building model was used to assess whether the dwellings could be heated at lower supply temperatures after they were renovated according to six renovation packages of different ambition level.

Do households prefer to move up or down the urban hierarchy during an economic crisis?

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between adverse economic circumstances and the desire of Dutch households to move up or down the urban hierarchy. We apply three consecutive waves of the Dutch Housing Demand Survey (WoON) in a repeated cross-section setting, with data collected at the time of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its aftermath. We find that households desire to move down the urban hierarchy during the volatile and uncertain periods following the GFC. This is a surprising result, given that urban areas are generally considered more opportunity rich. In order to uncover the mechanisms driving this result, we considered the impact of the economic circumstances on the general willingness to move and on the underlying motives. We find that willingness to move increased when the adverse economic consequences of the GFC hit Dutch households. Further, it appears that this willingness to move is only partially related to work. Besides work, desires to move for health, education, vicinity to family and friends, and reasons related to the dwelling, also become more prevalent during the aftermath of the GFC as well. This heterogeneity in impacts and consequences for household desired mobility serves to explain some of the mixed results in the literature, and generates lessons for current and future crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Assessing Dutch housing cycle and near-term market prospects

Purpose This study is a practice undertaking examining three main concerns that currently dominate Dutch housing market debate: how long is the cycle, will the current house price inflation continue and is housing market in a bubble. With national house prices reaching record highs across all major cities, future market prospects became a topic of significant debate among policymakers, investors and the populace. Design/methodology/approach A triangulation of well-established academic methods is used to perform investigation. The models include Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, volatility autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH approximation) and right tail augmented Dickey–Fuller (Rtadf) test (bubble screening technique). Findings Interestingly, over the years from 1985 to 2019 research period, filtering extracts only one Dutch national housing cycle. This is a somewhat distinct characteristic compared to other advanced Western economies (inter alia the UK and the USA) where markets tend to experience 8- to 10-year gyrations. Volatility and Rtadf test suggest that current house prices in most Dutch cities are in excess of historical averages and statistical thresholds. House price levels in Almere, Amsterdam, The Hague, Groningen, Rotterdam and Utrecht are of particular concern. Originality/value Retail investors should therefore be cautious as they are entering the market at the time of elevated housing values. For institutional investors, those investing in long-term, housing in key Dutch metropolitan areas, even if values decline, is still an attractive investment conduit.

Strategically Measuring Quality of Existing Building Stock

Dutch housing corporations generally have two methods of assessing the strategic value of existing housing stock. The first is by calculating the financial return on investments with a life expectancy of fifty to sixty years. The second method is to balance the technical quality against maintenance and renovation planning. A Dutch housing corporation needed a integrated method, so in a single case study, a new method was developed based on research on how to monitor the technical and financial assets better. Four problems were detected: (1) the existing strategy did not seem to be resilient to future changes, (2) there was no instrument for measuring progress, (3) there was no way to translate strategic data to individual estates and (4) there was no instrument for monitoring the results of improvements set off against the strategic goals. With one integrated tool to fix these four problems, an integrated approach to a closed asset management strategy and policy would be available. Such a tool would make it possible to make adjustments to the strategy based on facts gained by measuring the results of former adjustments to the strategy. The goal of this paper is to present the research supporting the design of a new model. The result, the so called Return Matrix, is a fully elaborated model. It supports the management team in decision making about strategy (five years) and vision (twenty years) development. It creates insight into and support for the outcome of the strategy among policy professionals, staff and colleagues. And finally, it creates understanding among the tenants, it s understood and supported by the civil servants and gets approval and agreement of cooperation from the municipal executives. With the knowledge gained by this study, it will not be difficult to compose the instrument for other cases too.