No growth

Read in FD of 1 March 2015:

Why does nobody wants to know about shrinking cities in The Netherlands? Because Dutch municipalities still own 75% percent of all the land available for building homes, office space and business parks. They paid far too much for it: 13 billion euros. They all should reduce their land prices with at least fifty percent, Het Financieele Dagblad calculated. This they will not do, the newspaper wrote on 1 March 2015, because then they will go bankrupt. With buying all that land in the nineties and beginning of 2000 they hoped to make big profits. No way. Worse even, they lack the money now and there will be no growth at all. Their debt is big, so their losses will be big too. Only 20 percent they amortized. The provinces of Flevoland (Almere), Overijssel and Zeeland cannot sell their land without making heavy losses. Instead of amortizing, they boast they will grow bigger. Even cities like Rotterdam and Delft are in big trouble. Two thirds of the land they will keep, hoping to sell it in de future. 

So this makes the discussion on the spatial future of the Netherlands at this moment rather awkward. The Ministries of Finance and of Interior Affairs know it. I’m afraid the Dutch government will have to clean up the mess and hold the twelve provinces responsible for this fiasco. But they wait. Why? Because they are responsible too. No policies in VINEX for shrinking cities. There was a political ban on red and green contours in the Fifth Report on Spatial Planning. Worse even, they skipped the Fifth Report. It’s VINEX and its successors that made local government dream, and made them hope for more and speculate on growth. Friso de Zeeuw, director at Bouwfonds, first introduced the concept of the ‘rompertje’ on Dutch television in December 2008. This infant bodysuit projected on the map of the Netherlands illustrated the area around Greater Amsterdam and Utrecht that continues to grow; all the rest would shrink. Even this ‘rompertje’ is shrinking. Its nucleus is Amsterdam plus its rich, hilly landscapes on both sides: Utrechtse Heuvelrug in the east and the coastal dunes in the west, the urban region where alle the knowledge workers live. So blame the person who tells them they will gonna shrink. And hate the biggest city that will gonna win.