- Student
- 15/03/2023
78 additional living units at student complex next to Berenkuil
Tenants received the keys to their student apartment as long ago as December, but the official ceremony by housing corporation Woonbedrijf/Vestide to mark the completion of 78 additional living units that were recently added to the student complex consisting of three hundred apartments next to the Berenkuil will take place tomorrow afternoon. These are temporary apartments, Woonbedrijf’s spokesperson says, “but they will remain in place until at least 2035.”
In these times of housing shortage, housing corporation Woonbedrijf continues to explore ways to reduce that shortage in Eindhoven, communication advisor Luc Nabben says. “We saw that there was space available at our existing student complex next to the Berenkuil, which was placed in 2019 and consists of four blocks, for an additional block of 78 additional apartments. Such a project doesn’t take long to realize. The time between drafting the plan and the handover of the keys is just twelve months.”
These are temporary apartments, similar to the three hundred units that were realized at the location next to the Berenkuil three years ago. Nabben says that they will remain in place until at least 2035. “An agreement was made with the municipality that these units can stay there for a period of fifteen years. After that, we will look for alternative locations, in collaboration with the municipality. That’s because these are modular living units, which makes it easy to dismantle them and rebuild them somewhere else. This makes the project commercially viable for Woonbedrijf, because a useful life of fifteen years is rather short for a housing corporation.”
The common room of the Berenkuil complex, which can be used by all residents, has been furnished by now and will also be opened tomorrow during the ceremony to mark the completion for the 78 new apartments. Nabben says that seventy percent of these new apartments are intended for Dutch students, and thirty percent for internationals. “We opted for a free registration this time, which means that we didn’t settle on a fixed number of TU/e and Fontys students in advance.” It will come as a surprise to no one that Woonbdrijf has rented out all additional living units by now, he says with a smile.
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What is the status of Woonbedrijf’s potential construction activities for students in the near future? Nabben: “We are currently working on two large new residential towers at the TU/e campus, the construction of which commenced in November 2022. This needs to result in the realization of 735 student apartments in the summer of 2024. The municipality recently designated fifteen potential construction locations in the city. But Woonbedrijf won’t use all fifteen locations for student apartments alone, because we also have to consider other groups in Eindhoven that need affordable housing.”
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