Those already on the property ladder are fuelling a shameful disparity. Until they wake up, the krakers will keep coming
T
he late Dutch author and Holocaust survivor Marga Minco once wrote about an empty house in Amsterdam where she and a group of artists and students took refuge towards the end of the second world war. Last month, the house she lived in for decades was squatted by a new generation of the dispossessed. In the Dutch capital’s overpriced, overcrowded housing market, where homes fetch more per square metre on average than they do in London, the squatters, or krakers, are back.
They are the byproduct of a crisis that has spiralled out of control, in which growing anger is justifiably focused on a startling and unsustainable unfairness: the cost of the country’s generous tax breaks for homeowners, who make up more than half of the population, is being borne by hard-working tenants. The return of squatting is a symptom of a public mood that is increasingly furious about the lack of solutions. And with a general election on 29 October, it is an anger that could be politically decisive.
Squatting was made a criminal offence in the Netherlands, partly in response to the Vondelstraat riots of 1980, during which military tanks rolled on to the streets for the first time since the second world war to battle the squatters. But barely a month goes by now without reports of riot police being called in to clear another squat.
