Housing vulnerabilities unravelled: impact of housing policy changes on Dutch households that have difficulties making ends meet

While Dutch housing policy has been moving towards ‘more market’ influences in this century, in response to the triple recession that the Netherlands underwent in the period 2009-2013, government started promoting a participation society. In order to analyse the impact in practice of these developments on vulnerabilities of households, a Dutch case study of the RE-InVEST1 project (Horizon 2020) studied their (perceived) housing choices. Rotterdam citizens who had difficulty making financial ends meet participated in the study, which aimed to determine their perceptions of the impact of these developments on their capabilities; e.g., their freedoms to choose their (future) housing.
By describing the impact based on the three anthropological roles developed by Bonvin and Laruffa (2017a, b) – the doer, the receiver and the evaluator – the vulnerabilities in relation to the capabilities were unravelled. The participants were able to indicate in which roles they had become more vulnerable and in which roles they identified opportunities to reduce their situation of housing deprivation. Especially, in the role of the evaluator, voicing their concerns about the real housing choices and building support for these concerns remained a wish. More generally, basing housing policy on capabilities and the elaboration of the roles allows to depart from the wellbeing definition of the individual instead of ‘paternalistic’ policy aims. Moreover, it allows to go beyond the monetary and non-monetary deprivation measure that are relevant for the receiver role to the doer and judge roles.