Martin's account of the housing protest

Writer: Martin Voogd

Last Sunday, 12 September, I woke up in my fourteen-square-metre, 580-euro-a-month room in Oud-Zuid. 580 euro, according to Kamernet, is below average for a room in Amsterdam [1]. I count myself lucky to have parents who are well-off and pay a large part of my rent. For many young people, moving out of home has simply become unaffordable. Between 2010 and 2018, the percentage of 25- to 30-year-olds living at home increased from 14 to 18 per cent [2]. Rents and house prices are skyrocketing and politicians do not seem to take this crisis, for that is what it is, seriously. Time to protest, then! I had been looking forward to this Sunday for several weeks. After all, the Housing Protest was going to be my first protest. In this blog, I am going to share with you how I experienced this day.

I woke up with an amount of excitement that comes with doing something you have never done before. Wearing my DWARS jumper, I cycled towards Westerpark. It felt a bit awkward cycling around the city with my political affiliation on my jumper. Not that I want to keep it a secret, but even in Amsterdam there will be quite a few people who are not big fans of GroenLinks. After about 20 minutes of cycling, I parked my bike a 10-minute walk from the place where the protest was to take place. With some members of DWARS Amsterdam, we gathered at restaurant Pacific. While we were waiting, a delegation from Volt came walking onto the grounds with an overflowing of flags. A DWARSer remarked that my jersey was the exact same colour purple as Volt's purple. Suddenly I regretted not having chosen a green jersey.

At 14:00, the protest started. With a group of DWARSers and GroenLinksers, we stood a little to the right of the stage, where it was relatively quiet. The speakers were sometimes difficult to hear from here, but corona-wise this was perhaps a wise choice. The programme had a number of speakers highlighting different aspects of the housing crisis. ‘No cancer expensive cancer housing’ shouted Fatima Faïd of The Hague City Party who chatted up the programme. This naturally led to many indignant reactions on Twitter from people who are more concerned with form than substance. Incidentally, this was not one of the slogans we were taught. Those were slightly less controversial: ‘man over market’ and ‘fuck the housing market, housing is a right’. These were chanted, sometimes not quite in harmony, between speakers.

After about two hours of standing and sometimes sitting, the programme came to an end and it was time to walk in a procession towards Dam Square. At first, there wasn't much momentum and we walked down the grounds at a snail's pace. I wondered if we would arrive at Dam Square before dark. After a while, the pace picked up slightly and we walked through the streets of Amsterdam. Regularly, someone would shout a slogan through a megaphone and everyone would shout along. Sometimes this was accompanied by drumming on a road sign, which sounded surprisingly musical. It felt good to walk through Amsterdam with such a large group, 15,000 people I read afterwards. I got the sense that the protest was widely supported, including by spectators. After about an hour of walking, we reached Dam Square, where we were asked to leave the square again. My first protest was over. I walked back to Westerpark, where my bike was still parked, and went home feeling satisfied.

[1] https://kamernet.nl/tips/verhuurders/huurprijs/kamer-verhuren-in-amsterdam-de-gemiddelde-huurprijzen

[2] https://www.nu.nl/algemeen/5578244/jongeren-wonen-noodgedwongen-steeds-langer-bij-ouders.html