A long-term Amsterdam resident's former home was recently squatted, joining other empty properties claimed by a new generation of dispossessed people. Amsterdam's housing market is highly expensive and overcrowded, with prices per square metre exceeding London's, pushing krakers back into action. Generous tax breaks for homeowners benefit over half the population while costs are increasingly borne by tenants, creating an unsustainable unfairness. Public anger over lack of housing solutions has intensified and surfaced in frequent confrontations and police clearances of squats. With a general election on 29 October, housing unrest and resentment over inequality could influence political outcomes.
In the Dutch capital's overpriced, overcrowded housing market, where homes fetch more per square metre on average than they do in London, the squatters, or krakers, are back. They are the byproduct of a crisis that has spiralled out of control, in which growing anger is justifiably focused on a startling and unsustainable unfairness: the cost of the country's generous tax breaks for homeowners, who make up more than half of the population, is being borne by hard-working tenants.
The return of squatting is a symptom of a public mood that is increasingly furious about the lack of solutions. And with a general election on 29 October, it is an anger that could be politically decisive. Clashes outside a squat in Amsterdam during the Vondelstraat riots, 1980. Photograph: Rob Bogaerts/Anefo/National Archives Squatting was made a criminal offence in the Netherlands, partly in response to the Vondelstraat riots of 1980,
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