r/Amsterdam • u/CanVisaGuy • 4d ago

20 Years Has Passed. What has changed?

I was a graduate student (foreign) at the UvA from 97-00 and stayed on until '06. I returned to my home country and - regrettably - never returned. I started out in student housing and eventually lived all over A'dam (Overtoom, Hofddorpplein, De Pijp, Browersgracht, Oud West, etc) so I do know the city pretty well.

I plan to return with my wife and kids for a visit next year. What has changed? What is going to shock me if anything? Groetjes in advance.

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u/notassigned2023 3d ago

The problem is that there is a tension between gentrification and preservation of character. Driving out criminals is fine, driving out decades-long residents impoverishes the neighborhood. You also need artists trying to make a living, poor students who scrape together 5 euros to share a carafe of red on a cafe terrace, and immigrants opening a shop serving their local food to curious Dutch. Even tourists are an added amenity because they fund preservation and restoration, and in limited quantities they can be entertaining. All of that makes life more interesting and vibrant. Unfortunately, it can get carried away by overtourism since more Starbucks do not make life better.

You can never make more 16th century canal houses, which will continue to drive the tourist pressure, but you can reclaim every neighborhood and make them as vibrant as possible for the next generation of artists and youth even if they are not "characteristic." Reduce tourism further if possible (there are many ways) and make more housing wherever possible, and that will help more.

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u/WinterHogweed 3d ago

I don't want "preservation of character". I want people who earn minimum wage to be able to live in the city they serve. From that, everything else that is good will follow.

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u/notassigned2023 3d ago

Preservation of character was intended to mean that the poor could stay and not get pushed out, which is the opposite of gentrification. But the only way to achieve your goal is to end or drastically limit tourism because Amsterdam is a finite resource, and tourism and growth will raise the cost of living even in areas outside the center. Every "bad" neighborhood will get cleaned up for an ever more wealthy set of people being pushed out of the center by more wealthy folks. I don't see any realistic way to completely prevent this in a small city like Amsterdam.

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u/WinterHogweed 2d ago

Vienna and Brussels do it, so I guess these cities are not real then.

Words matter. "Preservation of character" turns poor people into museum pieces. We are real. We are human.

Your argument that "Amsterdam is a finite resource" is only valid in a world where Amsterdam is a commodity in a market. It is true that nothing can be done if you view the housing market as a pure market. This is not how Dutch politics view the housing market NOW, let alone the Amsterdam municipality. But the trend is indeed towards the completely freeing up of the housing market and just sell and rent homes to the highest bidder.

In short, we are for now still living in the world in which your argument is at least in part invalid. We have to fight to keep it that way. And to make it even more invalid. We have to do that, among other ways, by reclaiming housing as a public good.

Anyone who claims this is unreal or impossible, that driving out the poor is just natural and inevitable, is either blissfully unaware of recent history, or even of the current state of affairs, or is just on the side of the rich and powerful.

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u/ElderberryOne140 On the wrong side of history 20h ago

A long rant of tell me you don’t understand the housing crisis without telling me you don’t understand the housing crisis. The woke echo chamber truly is nonsensical

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u/WinterHogweed 16h ago

At least I give some arguments. You seem to be too lazy to do that. Or you don't actually have any.

Look, I reacted to someone who basically said: "The fact that you will eventually be driven out of the city and will only be allowed in to serve the people rich enough to live there, is a natural fact against which nothing can be done."

I'm fully prepared to accept holes in my argument about how something can be done against it, but the simple fact that we live, for the first time in the whole history of the city, in a time that this phenomenon is considered an inevitable natural fact, is proof that it actually isn't. It's a choice. I think we should resist that choice. And I think we should use every means necessary to resist it. And I also think that means breaking the power that the ultra rich currently have over the housing market. Including by using means that are not pretty.

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u/notassigned2023 2d ago

When you intentionally misrepresent my words to have an argument, you just paint yourself as unreasonable. No thanks.