Marc steps outside the squat and hunches his shoulders against the rain blasted down the narrow street by the North Sea wind. A group of Russian tourists stops in front of him and the graffiti-daubed front of the five-floor townhouse on Amsterdam’s central Spuistraat. The tourists want their photograph taken next to the striking, 1,95m-tall squatter.
“The house is a monument,” said Marc (34), a musician and part-time filmmaker. But if right-wing politicians have their way, it will not be for much longer. The Netherlands is in turmoil after an inconclusive election in November and, if the conservatives bolster their hold on government through a new coalition, squatting is likely to be made illegal.
“We have to wait and see, but it doesn’t look good,” said Lotte (25), a squatter “by political choice” who works in a bookshop. “There are people who are very keen to push the law through, and it won’t be hard for them to do so.”
Squatting, for so long a feature of cities proud of their “ultra-tolerant” reputation, is one of several key symbols of urban Dutch liberalism to come under attack in recent years. There have been moves to reduce the size of Amsterdam’s extensive red-light district. Famously lax drugs laws have been tightened. A generous immigration policy has been the centre of fierce debate and criticism.
“It is all a symptom of a general movement back towards law and order in Dutch society and politics,” said Bas Heijne, a respected Dutch commentator. “It is a trend towards certainty and away from pragmatic compromise and tolerance.”
The new law, which has already been passed as a parliamentary motion, will make almost all squatting illegal. At present squatters just need to install a bed, a chair and a table in a property that has been vacant for more than a year and call the police to make an official declaration. It is then up to the landlord to get them out; a long, difficult and costly process.
This has led to a recent boom in another activity that will be hit by the new law — “anti-squatting”.
Joost Koenders, director of the nationwide anti-squatting agency Anti-Kraak, has more than 400 properties on his books. The tenants are people who need cheap housing, have no deposit and do not mind the fact that they can be given two weeks’ notice to leave. The landlords want their property occupied so that it can’t be squatted legally.
“It’s straight supply and demand, 100% free- market,” Koenders explained.
One such tenant is Denis (27), a market trader who is paying about â,¬100 a month to share with five other tenants a 24 000-square-metre office block that is scheduled for demolition. “It’s OK,” he said. “It is better than nothing.”
Critics of anti-squatting, which is set to go to the United Kingdom with the expansion of Dutch companies to London, say it is “exploitative”.
“It neither eases Amsterdam’s chronic housing shortage nor usefully employs some of the city’s huge number of empty properties,” said one campaigner. Critics also point out that anti-squatters miss out on the cultural scene that goes with long-established squats, many of which run cafés, workshops, theatre groups, discussion forums and even newspapers.
As coalition talks continued last week, The Netherlands’ estimated 50 000 squatters remained defiant. On a battered house near Amsterdam’s central station, squatters recently thrown out by police have slung a banner: “You can’t evict an idea.” — Guardian Unlimited Â