No rent allowance for students renting rooms

The housing shortage is high and rents on the private room market continue to rise. For years, there have been calls to give rent allowance not only to people living in studios but also to those renting rooms. This way, their monthly expenses would be reduced and developers would build more shared homes.

Since the rent allowance for room residents was abolished in 1997, most investors have preferred to build studios with their own front door, kitchen and bathroom, instead of homes where each room would be rented to a different person. They do so because people living in studios qualify for a rent allowance, which makes these properties more lucrative: owners can charge more for them as the state will reimburse part of the costs. Kences, the umbrella association of social student housing providers, has been calling for a comeback of rent allowance for room renters for years.

The previous Minister of Housing, Hugo de Jonge (CDA), was favourable to it too. This spring, he wrote to the House of Representatives that building new student rooms would be 21 percent cheaper. He also mentioned that research has shown that students living in rooms are happier than their counterparts living with their parents or in independent studios. 

At the time, he warned that a reliable register for non-independent housing would have to be created and the government would lose between 600 and 840 million euros in additional rent allowance each year.

His successor,  Mona Keijzer (from the farmers' party BBB) ​​is more pessimistic. She estimates the costs at 925 million to 1.3 billion euros each year. According to her, the government has no money for that right now.

The political party Christian Union asked whether there really were no alternatives. They suggested giving them something similar to a rent allowance through student financing, but the minister says that would be complicated and lead to legal problems such as a difference in treatment between students and non-students.