Housing internationals? “It’s not my responsibility!”

You have probably heard something about it lately: problems with the housing of international students in Groningen. The municipality and the university keep passing the buck on this issue. Nobody seems to be able to solve the problem. But what are the true ins and outs of this problem? Who is responsible for the problem? We will discuss all the main characters in this dossier. To understand the bigger picture, we added an infographic. And, last but not least, we share our ideas about possible solutions for the problem with you. Get ready, because it is a complex issue, but definitely worth sharing!

A quick overview

We’ve summarized our analysis in an infographic with the relations between all parties, the problems we’re currently facing and possible solutions. Don’t have the time to read the whole analysis or just want a quick overview? Click on the image for a bigger version or download the PDF below.

Municipality of Groningen

We start with the player that is essentially responsible for housing: the municipality Groningen. Our municipality usually points to the individual responsibility of students to find a room, but 83% of the rooms are owned by private parties. International students can make use of these rooms too, but they encounter higher risks on the private housing market: violent landlords, excessive housing prices, shadowy placement agencies… the housing market in Groningen is spoiled. Dutch students are already vulnerable, let alone the international students who don’t speak the language and have to fix their housing from afar. That leaves 17% semi-public sector for them. Within this sector, the municipality could mandate housing corporations to build new accommodations, but building costs a lot of time, while we need a solution as soon as possible.

Housing corporations

These are the owners of most of the buildings that the SSH rents out to students. But not all of the buildings they own are rented out by SSH. Housing corporations also rent to non-studying younger people and other inhabitants of Groningen. Too often, this leads to old and badly maintained buildings being the ones made available to the SSH.

Also, when making plans for new building projects, they make plans for decades. Considering that the influx of students in Groningen will decrease over time, housing corporations aren’t eager to invest in premises for student housing. Because if this leads to vacant rooms in 30 years, who is going to pay for those vacancies?

SSH

The SSH (Stichting Studentenhuisvesting) rents out and manages premises to international students. In Groningen, they do so on behalf of the UG and Hanzehogeschool. However, the SSH isn’t the owner of the premises that are rented out. The SSH rents premises from existing housing corporations, such as Huismeesters, Lefier and Nijestee, and subsequently rents the rooms in these premises out. This causes two problems: First, the quality of the buildings isn’t very good. Two examples are the Diakonessenhuis and the Van Houtenlaan. Secondly, since the SSH rents out the rooms, students turn to them when they have complaints or need something to be repaired. Since SSH isn’t the actual owner of the premise, they forward this to the concerning housing corporation. For them, this problem isn’t very urgent, since they only have to do with the SSH and not with the complaining students. The result? Complaints are responded to very late, and often in an insufficient way. But the prices for international students are high, because SSH can avoid the housing rules by using legal loopholes. So, low quality rooms for high prices. Obviously, that leads to dissatisfaction.

University

The university reserves rooms for internationals at the SSH. They use an assessment of the amount of students, based on the amount of internationals who have signed up for the UG on the 1st of May. However, not everyone that signs up actually ends up studying in Groningen. Often, a student also applies for other universities and makes a final decision over the course of the summer. Because of this, the university must make an estimate of how many students will start their study in September. Imagine that 100 students apply in May. The university knows that about 60% of these actually start their study in September, so they retain 65 rooms at the SSH, who will prepare these rooms for the new international students.

The university then gives out guarantees to the SSH that these rooms will be rented out for a year. If a student leaves the SSH room after 7 months, the university must pay the rent for the last 5 months. That’s why the university doesn’t take a huge margin when retaining rooms at the SSH: If too many rooms will be empty half way through the year, the university will lose a lot of money. The university gives out a guarantee of  800.000 euros each year. But be aware: A guarantee is not an expenditure. If the student rents the room for the whole 12 months, to university doesn’t lose a cent. In the financial statements of the university in the year 2016 there was no money allocated to these expenditures.

Last summer’s problems originated from way more students coming to study at Groningen in comparison to last year: So instead of the 60 students there were 75 students. Because of this, there were too few rooms available at the SSH and a lot of internationals had issues finding proper housing. Some students even went back to their home country because they couldn’t find proper housing.

The Next Step

The situation is very complex, since there are many interests and parties involved. It’s easy to keep pointing fingers to each other, but that doesn’t help anyone. Since the university has great ambitions regarding internationalization, action needs to be taken now.

In the short term there are few options. One of the best is creating emergency housing, which the RUG, Hanze and the municipality did last year. A former asylum centre was converted into a temporary home for internationals without a place to stay. Therefore we want to have more emergency housing in place next year.

Most of the solutions are long-term projects. One of those solutions could be a situation in which the RUG and the Hanze will guarantee the SSH that if a room is not rented they will pay for it, for several years. In this way housing corporations will be able to invest in more buildings, thus ensuring a higher supply of rooms for internationals. This solution alsa has some drawbacks: If, in the future, far less international students would come to Groningen, the RUG would have to pay for the empty rooms. Furthermore, this will not solve any problems in the next few years, because building something tends to take a while.

Another possibility is to increase pressure on ‘huisbazen’, private persons and who rent out rooms to students, to ensure that international students can find a room. For example, the municipality could force ‘huisbazen’ to accept international students and to ensure that contracts must also be available in English. Doing so could alleviate some problems among internationals.

Yet another way is to make the SSH into a full-blown housing corporative owning their own buildings. But, in order to do so, the SSH will need funds. These funds must be provided for by banks or other organisations willing to invest in housing. Whether that is possible, will remain to be seen.

Some solutions will bring rents down for international students. Currently the SSH uses Short Stay contracts, which allows them to duck certain legislation aimed at preventing extreme rent increases. Their argument for doing so is that they have to ensure that students leave after their first year. But, new legislation allows the SSH to provide 1-year contracts, without having the obligation to renew them. If the SSH switches to 1-year contracts, the rent for international students will go down.

Another radical solution worth mentioning is: the SSH stops after the contract with the RUG and the Hanzehogeschool has come to an end, so that they can focus on the housing cooperatives directly. This means that the RUG has more people to have the conversation with, but bypasses the problematic function that the SSH has at this moment. This will not make sure that there are more rooms available, but the RUG would have the possibility to demand hard guarantees: if they do not deliver proper housing, the RUG won’t pay. This has the effect that the housing will be of better quality. Sidenote is that the SSH delivers rooms with furniture. This is convenient for internationals. Housing cooperatives usually do not do this.

The problem turns out to be big, but it is not impossible to solve. Whichever solution will be chosen, it will take a long time. However, the RUG has the obligation to be a good host for her international students and has to keep making an effort for a solution.