Things like:
* Liberalizing height restrictions across the board from 4-5 story houses to something closer to 8-10.
* Finding some realistic compromise between the preservation of truly historic buildings, and the current policy which pretty much just enacts a blanket policy of preservation on the "look" of pretty much all existing houses in the Centrum.
* Liberalizing zoning within reason. E.g. ever wondered why there's so many phone shops in Amsterdam? It's because they're on an exhaustive list of types of shops that can be placed in certain areas. Huge inefficiencies in land allocation are created as a result of political lobbying driving zoning policy. Government subsidies via zoning for parking spaces (at the cost of residential land) are another example.
> IJburg, doesn't seem to be terribly popular
Uh, what? It was pretty much a sand field 10-15 years ago, and now 22k people live there at a density of 10k/km^2, compared to say 14k/km^2 in Amsterdam West, an already established district.
I think it's a relative disappointment that the density isn't at least 2-4x that, but IJburg's a fantastic example for their being a huge demand for housing, and the city's ability to fill that demand once it gets out of its own way.
> The city is rapidly filling in all the gaps that can be filled with new houses without hurting living quality too much[...]
I'd change that to something closer to "while tiptoeing around existing property owners, assuring them that prices won't fall, that the view out their window won't change" etc.
Nobody (well, few) are suggesting that the entire Centrum be bulldozed and replaced by Soviet-style tower blocks, just that we've struck the wrong balance between NIMBY-ism and new development.
Will that improve anything? There are places in Amsterdam where they builds higher, but those rarely turn out the way people hoped. Take the old Bijlmer flats, for example.
> * Finding some realistic compromise between the preservation of truly historic buildings, and the current policy which pretty much just enacts a blanket policy of preservation on the "look" of pretty much all existing houses in the Centrum.
But that "look" of the inner city is a big part of the appeal of Amsterdam.
Once you can build higher the costs diminish since most of the cost is opportunity cost of the parcel of land it's sitting on, not the building itself. A real rise in supply will counteract rising prices. You can build 8x 100m^2 apartments for way less than 8 million.
> Take the old Bijlmer flats, for example.
Yeah exactly my point. Some centrally planned NIMBY high-rise project that had to be put in Zuidoost because of restrictive zoning policy, of course it was a disaster.
It's also can't be compared to what a re-development of the Centrum would look like. The population density is probably no more than two or single story apartment units. They're huge tower blocks surrounded by large parks[1]. I'm talking about re-development within the A10.
> But that "look" of the inner city is a big part of the appeal of Amsterdam.
Something has to give. If your definition of the "look" is "exactly the way it is now" then yeah, we can't change anything and we'll continue to have a housing bubble, and probably long-term Amsterdam becoming a backwater as jobs & development moves to somewhere like Rotterdam.
I'm not talking about demolishing the historic Prinsengracht and dropping something that looks like the (Soviet-style) Bijlmer tower block on top of the resulting rubble.
There's lots of places in the city where the houses don't have much historic value, e.g. here on De Wittenkade: https://goo.gl/maps/BzTLyvHGUvr
It's now illegal to change any minor detail of how those houses on the left look like (just replacing a window needs to have council involvement).
We could build something in the same style, except 6 stories instead of 4. Or (more cheaply) build something in the same style as the right side of that canal, but up to a 6+ story height. Neither would fundamentally change the look of the city, but would help a lot with the housing supply. Both are illegal.
I'm arguing against my own best interests. I own a house in the Centrum that's ballooning in price due to the municipal policy. Would some part of me like to live in a time capsule? Sure. But I think the interests of current and future residents matter more than NIMBY concerns.
It's not that simple. Higher buildings need to be stronger, and they need elevators.
The are absolutely areas in the city that could have higher buildings, but plenty of areas in the city already have them. There are plenty of large apartment blocks in West, North, Buitenveldert and Bijlmer.
Inside the Ring, sure there are areas that could have higher houses, and I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but it's not going to gain as much extra houses as you think. Up to 4 floors, having no elevator is considered acceptable. Higher than that, by current rules, you really need an elevator. Do you want to have people walk up the stairs for 6 floors? Or make all the houses smaller to make space for an elevator?
There are trade-offs involved. It's not simply a matter of taller houses therefore more affordable houses.
I believe by the current plans, they intend to build high rises on Zeeburgereiland, but I've seen a very convincing argument that you can house just as many people there with lower buildings. The gain isn't as big as you'd expect.
In the Bijlmer, they're explicitly moving from large apartment blocks to low single-family houses. I don't know what the reasoning behind that was exactly, but I suspect some lessons were learned there. Maybe people actually do prefer lower houses. They're fairly affordable, and people actually get to have a yard, which is a rare luxury in Amsterdam.
I don't see the need to pack as many people as possible in the city. The city has to remain livable, and as far as I can tell, the city is doing a really good job at that. They do try to fill up all the unused spaces in the city, like de Omval 20 years ago, and Zeeburgereiland now (I'm still surprised they built IJburg before putting Zeeburgereiland to use).
It's not really a bubble when it's based on real supply and demand. The city actively tries to reduce speculation with measures like the one from the article, but because it's such a nice place to live, lots of people want to live here.
I don't see any reason for Amsterdam to become a backwater, and there already are plenty of jobs in Rotterdam. There are other towns around Amsterdam being built up, like Almere, Hoofddorp and Purmerend. Of course the Amsterdam will keep looking for places to create new houses, but opportunities for that will remain limited.
You're really making my case for me :)
Of course there's trade-offs involved. The point of deregulation is that instead of us or some council meeting having to decide say if 4 floors, 5 or 6 is OK for a walk-up, people can just vote with their money.
And yeah, I'd argue that there's plenty of people who given the choice between paying an extra couple of hundred a month and a shorter commute would be fine with walking up 1-2 extra floors.
But the point is I don't need to be right. If it's deregulated and nobody builds 5-6 floor houses without elevators we've lost nothing, but if they do we've produced a lot of value for them just by getting out of their way.
> I don't see the need to pack as many people as possible in the city. The city has to remain livable[...]
There's plenty of European cities that are nice to live in that are ahead of Amsterdam when it comes to population density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...
> It's not really a bubble when it's based on real supply and demand.
It's based on an artificially restricted supply, which is politically motivated. The city's only needing to micro-manage the market it's already ruined because it started out with intervening in it. There's plenty of cities that historically have grown in size, density and population while real estate prices have stayed level or even gone down.
> Of course the Amsterdam will keep looking for places to create new houses, but opportunities for that will remain limited.
I 100% agree that it very likely will stay that way. I'm only making the point that it's almost entirely an artificially created problem.
It is certainly possible to get affordable housing that's not rent-controlled, but that's going to be either South-East, North or New West, which are fine places to live, but not as popular as the neighbourhoods closer to the center. The center itself and the older neighbourhoods around it are either rent-controlled with insane waiting lists, or simply too expensive.
Ultimately, there's simply a limit to the number of houses available here. There's not much room for the city to grow. Nobody wants it full of skyscrapers (and I've seen an argument that skyscrapers don't really help all that much anyway), nobody wants to tear down all the historic buildings. One of the most recent major expansions of the city, IJburg, doesn't seem to be terribly popular. The city is rapidly filling in all the gaps that can be filled with new houses without hurting living quality too much, but in the end, Amsterdam wants to stay a nice city to live in. That means a lot of people want to live here, but it also means not everybody can live here.
There's other nice cities here, though. Try Utrecht or Haarlem.