There’s a major housing shortage and rents on the private room market continue to rise. For years there have been calls to also give rent allowance to students renting a room. Their high monthly costs would then decrease and student housing providers would build more non-independent homes.

More lucrative

Ever since the rent allowance for people renting a room was abolished in 1997, expensive independent studios with their own kitchen and bathroom have mainly been built. As people living there are eligible for rent allowance, this type of housing is much more lucrative: owners can charge more rent for it. Kences, the umbrella organisation for social student housing providers, has advocated the return of rent allowance for non-independent housing units for years.

The previous Housing minister, Hugo de Jonge (CDA), liked this idea. New construction of student rooms is 21 percent cheaper, he wrote to the House of Representatives last spring. Moreover, according to him, research showed that students who live in student housing are happier than students who live at home or independently.

He did warn that a reliable register would then have to be created for non-independent housing and that the government would spend between 600 and 840 million euros on additional rent allowance each year.

Too expensive

His successor Mona Keijzer (BBB) is more pessimistic. She estimates the costs at 925 million to 1.3 billion euros per year, she writes to the House of Representatives. The cabinet currently doesn’t have the money for this.

Isn’t it possible to come up with alternatives for students renting a room, ChristenUnie asked, costs aside? You could give them something similar to rent allowance via the student financing, says Keijzer, but that’s fairly complicated and leads to legal problems. Among other things, it would result in unequal treatment between students and non-students.