AMSTERDAM PRESENTS: HOUSING HORROR STORIES (PART 2)

APRIL 25TH, 2022

Illustration by: Karolin Eks.

In the first part of the Housing Horror Stories series, we followed the struggles of two international UvA students who tried to live in Amsterdam for a decent price. We encountered hypocritical landladies, lost housing applications and bedbugs. 

In this episode: more bedbugs, a billion reasons why you shouldn’t pay your landlord in cash, explosions, near-death experiences, and last but not least, the Amsterdam housing mafia.

Below, you can delve into the experiences of Slim Radio’s very own director Felix Faillace (explosions can be found here!), and a group of UvA students whose stories represent Amsterdam’s finest selection of housing horror stories. 

FELIX FAILLACE: THEY BLEW IT (HA)

“Chris, my flatmate, nearly died,” Felix’s story begins on a very drastic note, “he went downstairs to check the door after the first blast which came at 3 or 4 am. And he was halfway down the stairs when the second bomb went off and the whole wall flew off in front of him and crashed into the other wall.”

Felix and his friends live in an apartment above an ATM cash machine. The Dutch government advises companies to keep their ATMs closed at night to avoid robberies. Yet some private companies chose to keep the machines running due to higher profits made at night when all other competing  ATMs are closed. “It was always a risk but my flatmates and I never perceived it as a real risk, something that could actually happen,” Felix recalls. 

“Chris, my flatmate, nearly died…”

Aside from the obviously traumatic experience of having a series of bombs go off under your house, the incident caused significant damage to the home of Felix and his flatmates. “We haven’t received any proper help since [it happened], like rebuilding the wall that was destroyed…” 

Felix explains that the hole resulting from the explosion had been secured but not fully rebuilt in the four months since the event: “The housing corporation owns the exterior of the building and they were supposed to rebuild the wall but they haven’t done it yet which means it’s cold in our house sometimes.”

“It also means that we had a lot of pest issues. Mice started coming into the house, and we had insects that bit Ipek [his flatmate] really badly,” Felix says, “It made us want to leave the house for a while which would have been a shame because we love living there — we’re like a family in that house.”

LUKAS: 1000 EUROS IN CASH FOR BEDBUG BITES

Lukas, a Dutch master’s student at the UvA, currently lives in a pleasant apartment that he is renting with two of his friends. Before he managed to find it, though, he went through a whole ordeal with a room found through Kamernet. 

Like many students in the Netherlands, Lukas began his search for a house online. He made a profile depicting himself as a good housemate and a chill person. Some housing sites charge a small fee to use their services, but it’s considered a negligible cost in the pursuit of securing an enjoyable home. 

After a few tries, he found a reasonably priced room in Amsterdam West. “I went to visit the house and it wasn’t gross, but you could see that it was an old house that wasn’t properly taken care of. There were four rooms, mine was the second smallest, for 500 a month, for about 14 square metres,” Lukas recalls.

He had doubts, “but the landlord said that he had other people coming over, and from what I had seen on the website, houses that were put online usually found a locator within a few days.” He was told that the first one to pay 1000 euros (500 rent and 500 deposit) in cash would get the room and be able to move in one and a half weeks later.

Lukas promptly decided to give the room a try: “During dinner, I called the guy and told him I wanted to take it. He asked me to come to Leidseplein at 10 in the evening with a thousand euros in cash.” He still had some doubts because there was no written contract — the renting was illegal due to a limit on how many people could legally rent and register. 

“But I knew where the house was, and I felt that even if I got scammed, I could find him and he couldn’t just disappear and take the house with him,” Lukas admitted. He also had the comfort of being able to register at his parents’ place. “So, I took a leap of faith and I came to Leidseplein at 10 in the evening with a thousand euros in cash and gave it to him.”

“I moved into the house 1,5 weeks later. There was a bed there with a mattress and the landlord said I could keep it, so I decided to keep it.” Lukas set up his room, and got to know his cohabitants, ”the housemate who was on holiday earlier came back — she said the landlord is a bit weird, but you can get on his good side.”  

As he got to know them, he became aware of new potential problems, “at some point, the girl told me there are bedbugs in the house sometimes. Then she said that there were six bedbug periods in the last three years and that the landlord never really did anything about it. He’s his own exterminator, so to speak.” 

This news worried Lukas, but he decided not to worry too much. Until…

“A few days later I woke up with red rashes all over my body, and I knew immediately that these were the bedbugs that the girl told me about,” he said with frustration still audible in his voice although this happened half a year ago. “I didn’t want to be in a room with bed bugs and I freaked out a bit.”

He messaged his landlord who, as expected, said he would come to take care of the problem but refused to hire a professional exterminator. Lukas began to lose faith in the possibility of having a good time living in the flat. “I had to pack up my stuff before he was supposed to spray the bugs but throughout that whole process,” he says, “I realised that he wasn’t going to deal with the bedbugs properly. So, with my stuff packed up, I decided to leave.”

In the end, Lukas managed to get some of his money back, and a few weeks later found a more expensive yet less shady apartment. 

CATHERINE*: RENTING WITH AN AMSTERDAM CRIME LORD

Catherine, a former UvA student, had been looking for an apartment with three of her friends. They got in contact with a renting agent who had been able to find an apartment for with enough room for all of them. He promised houses in an excellent location for a decent price.

“The apartment he showed us was big,” Catherine recalls, “he kept saying that it was fine to have four people living there even though only two could register, everybody does it anyway.” A friend of Catherine’s, Sanne*, was shown the same apartment and received a similar message, “when we asked him if we can live there with three or four people, he made it clear that we can’t, but he will close his eyes and ears if that were to happen.”

In the end, Catherine and her friends agreed to take on the flat, “because at that point we were very, very desperate.” After they moved in they found out that many of the neighbours were living in a similar situation since the apartments were all quite spacious. “Everything was okay,” she told me, “until one day the Gemeente came and checked the properties of the landlord asking very invasive questions of how many people were there in the house.”

Sanne also recalls that time, when during the pandemic the Amsterdam municipality decided “to get on the landlords in whose houses my friends were living.” She recalls doing some research and finding out that, “their landlord owns a good chunk of all the buildings in Amsterdam and lives in a massive villa close to Vondelpark, probably one of the biggest properties in Amsterdam, and is very eccentric. 

He makes young people sign a contract that if they do anything illegal like live with four people, they will have to pay the fine, although this is, legally, the landlord’s responsibility.” This is why as inhabitants of the flat, Catherine and her friends had to hide who was actually living there.

Catherine sums up her story by pointing out the hypocritical, twisted dance that landlords, renters and the municipality are engaged in, “in the end it felt like we weren’t allowed to officially say that there were four people living there but everybody knew it. Yet there was this constant play of ‘oh no, there are just two people living here’.” She remarks that, in the end, living in such a situation was stressful and she is glad to have moved out.