“The emergency housing must be regarded as a means of emergency. Once the housing shortage has been curbed, the emergency housing can disappear.” This quote comes from 1920, but is still highly topical, especially in Amsterdam. The container homes that the municipality of Amsterdam started installing a few years ago were also intended as a quick, but mainly temporary solution to the enormous shortage of student rooms.
The container homes themselves are a great idea, it only goes wrong when they think they are temporary. Seven years after the creation of the first group of containers, there is still not enough improvement in the supply of permanent student housing. The municipality seems to be mainly building new emergency housing.
The problem with this is that these constructions cannot withstand prolonged use, and are now slowly starting to fall apart. And it takes quite a long time to replace a cheap broken Polish water heater. In addition, it is annoying for residents that there is so much uncertainty about how long their home will remain standing.
How did the latter end at the beginning of the last century? In the 1910s there was also a great housing shortage in Amsterdam, and this trend was reinforced during the First World War when many refugees sought refuge in the capital of the neutral Netherlands. As a solution to this, several emergency villages arose in Amsterdam-North from 1918. One of them was called Vogeldorp. As the then director of the Municipal Housing Company Arie Keppler indicated in the opening quote, the intention was to leave this garden village for no more than 35 years.
However, the houses are still there to this day. And the boiler problems of the containers are nothing compared to these houses:until the early 1990s residents of Vogeldorp did not even have a bathroom! Nowadays Vogeldorp has been refurbished, and not only are the small houses now sold for a lot of money, the whole has also been designated a municipal monument. The container residents therefore have to bite the bullet. In about fifty years they might say that they too once lived in a very expensive monument.