When I moved to Amsterdam, I felt incredibly lucky to find an illegal six-month sublet 15 minutes by bike from the centre, secured through a friend of a friend. The cost was €1,000 a month – a bargain by market standards but still well over double what my downstairs neighbour, Henrika, paid under the lifelong social housing contract she had obtained four decades earlier.

In the intervening years, Amsterdam had shifted from a pinnacle of inclusivity and progressive housing politics to one of Europe’s most unaffordable markets. In the last year, Dutch house prices have surged by more than 10%, homelessness has risen by more than 20%, and rents in the private rental sector have climbed by more than 7%.

Divides in Amsterdam’s rental system have never been starker. Outsiders – primarily young people, newcomers and lower earners – are increasingly forced into an overpriced, insecure rental market to access the city. Meanwhile, insiders – typically older residents who secured affordable homes under better conditions – are assured stability and a place to grow old. But they are not the villains in this story, just a reminder of how quickly housing politics have changed. So, how did this two-tier system come to be?

Over the past 40 years, the general direction of Amsterdam’s housing policies has shifted, from prioritising social to private housing. There has been an underinvestment in affordable housing for lower-income groups and a deliberate shift towards market-based housing geared toward the affluent. The bigger political and ideological agenda behind this shift was to gradually transform the capital from a relatively poor workers’ city to a richer city for the middle classes.

Encouraging home ownership was one strategy to........

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