Housing corporations are unable to meet the construction and sustainability agreements made with the national government, municipalities, and tenant organizations. This is stated by the Housing Corporations Authority in the State of the Housing Sector 2026. Adjustment is needed by providing additional financial resources or allowing higher rents. If this does not happen, it will not be possible to build over 300,000 homes by 2035 and to sustainably renovate a significant part of the existing housing stock.
To give corporations sufficient resources to build and sustain homes, rents should be aligned more closely with price increases. Households can then possibly be compensated for purchasing power loss. Another option is that corporations are assisted with fiscal measures or subsidies. If this does not happen, ambitions must be adjusted.
Measures Needed in New Coalition Agreement
If the loss of social performance is undesirable, it is necessary to anticipate this already in the coalition agreement of the new cabinet. The expectation in December 2024 was that the task for new construction and sustainability would still be feasible according to the principles of the Sustainable Performance Model (DPM). In the DPM, every two years it is checked whether under current conditions the task for the next ten years is feasible. In the State of the Housing Sector 2025, the Housing Authority already indicated that at the next recalibration in 2026 conditions are expected to be adjusted. The sharply rising costs and higher interest rates now mean significantly larger adjustments than the Authority had already expected.
Rising Maintenance Costs
The increase in costs for corporations is partly explained by higher inflation and general cost increases since 2022. Personnel costs have also risen because corporations have increased activities in new construction, sustainability, and livability. Notably, maintenance and improvement expenditures at corporations have risen much more in recent years than can be explained by price developments. Corporations did not foresee this increase in their multi-year budgets. Good insight into the causes of this maintenance cost increase is lacking. This is necessary to estimate whether the increase is temporary because corporations are catching up or structural because the housing stock is aging. This can have a major impact on a corporations budget and thus on the balance between new construction and sustainability tasks and available financial resources.
Landlord Levy
Earlier, in 2020, it was seen that the balance between tasks for housing corporations and the required financial resources was lost. In response, the landlord levy was reduced in 2022 and abolished in 2023. The effect of abolishing the landlord levy has already been undone because the costs of corporations and interest rates showed a sharp increase. At the same time, rental income has risen only slightly since 2020 because politics intervened multiple times in rental policy since 2021. The goal was to improve rental affordability through a rent freeze in 2021, rent reductions in 2021 and 2023 for lower incomes, and decoupling rent increases from inflation from 2023. This means that rent is now 12% behind inflation. Affordability problems can be more targeted with, for example, rent allowances or income measures.
Continue Investing
Corporations should mainly continue investing and building homes, according to the Housing Authority. The social tasks remain urgent, and there is still financial room for investments in the coming years. Recent years also show that it is easier to adjust finances than to restart investments. If measures to align rents with price increases or to allocate extra financial resources are lacking, corporations must sell assets or postpone new projects to ensure financial continuity. Accepting the loss of social performance is then a political decision.