The construction industry needs to spend a little less time pointing out what municipalities are doing wrong and focus much more on showing how it believes things can be done right. That will be more helpful to municipalities than yet another call for fewer regulations.
On Monday morning, I saw Arno Visser on WNL once again arguing that housing construction is being slowed down because municipalities impose all sorts of their own—and sometimes conflicting—requirements on developers. I get the point, but what exactly are we talking about? Is it parking standards, visual quality, sustainability, climate adaptation, zoning regulations, or technical building requirements? These tend to get lumped together rather easily, even though the distinction matters a great deal when it comes to finding a solution.
After all, standardization for technical building requirements has long been in place. These are regulated at the national level. So if municipalities do go the extra mile locally, we don’t so much have a problem of a lack of uniformity as we do of existing rules not being properly applied.
Beyond that, things get more complicated. The idea that The Hague can prevent municipalities from making their own decisions about neighborhoods and buildings does not seem realistic to me. While there are now robust national and regional frameworks in place for planning and affordability, the concrete implementation remains a local matter. Land, mobility, water, landscape, and existing buildings simply vary from place to place. Nor do quality and ambition all need to be rigidly regulated in advance as hard requirements. When allocating land, you can leave room for various market-driven solutions and then select the best proposal based on predetermined criteria.
I think that’s where the real problem lies. Local requirements are repeatedly translated into unique approaches to soliciting bids, evaluating proposals, contracting, and development—each with its own evaluation methods, planning rules, and process steps. That’s where things get complicated for the construction industry, especially if we also want to build more industrially at the same time.
A factory doesn’t become more efficient when the beam dimensions have to be slightly different in every municipality, the eave and ridge heights are strictly defined and vary, or the roof has to take on a different shape due to slightly differently formulated requirements. At that point, an industrial concept ceases to be a concept and becomes, once again, simply a traditional project that just happens to be manufactured in a factory.
The question then is why the construction sector keeps waiting for the government to resolve this. Bouwend Nederland, NEPROM, WoningBouwersNL, and developers know very well where projects get stuck and which conditions do or do not fit within existing housing concepts. Put that in writing. Not in yet another lobbying letter about what the government shouldn’t be doing anymore, but in practical guidelines that help municipalities organize housing construction more effectively.
Anyone serious about industrialization must also accept that not every location needs to be an excuse to design yet another one-of-a-kind housing project in the Netherlands.Jan Willem van de Groep
Start with land allocation. How do you challenge market participants to perform without locking in the solution in advance? What details do you specify, and where do you leave room for flexibility? Which standard clauses work well under the Environment Act? How do you select based on quality, speed, affordability, and sustainability without first having multiple parties develop a complete plan at great expense? How do you ensure urban planning quality without unnecessarily hindering industrial housing construction? When do you involve the market, when does a plan selection work well, and when does a partner selection work well?
A foundation is already in place. The Area Development Guide addresses many of these kinds of questions, although, in my opinion, it places far too much emphasis on partner selection. That approach can work well, but it certainly isn’t a solution for every area development project. It seems more interesting to me to use the Guide as a starting point and build much more practical guidance around it.
With housing cooperatives, we’ve already seen with “De Woonstandaard” that this is possible. There, the requirements are formulated in such a way that providers can develop their concepts based on them without every client having to redesign the product from scratch. That principle can also be applied more broadly to municipal housing development.
Create effective models for land allocation and selection, develop sample texts for planning regulations, specify the planning parameters required for housing concepts, and—most importantly—compile the wealth of practical lessons that developers, builders, and municipalities all know but that are currently scattered across various sources. And then train the municipalities, designers, and your own members to work with them. Because anyone who is serious about industrializing must also accept that not every location needs to be an excuse to design yet another one-of-a-kind housing project in the Netherlands.
I no longer have much faith in a single national standard that solves all of this from the top down. If industry organizations and municipalities work together to develop approaches that are proven to work, those approaches will naturally gain recognition. Smaller and medium-sized municipalities, in particular, are seeking help to realize their ambitions without making the process unnecessarily complicated.
Meanwhile, the national government has enough on its plate with matters that do need to be regulated at the national level: clear technical building codes, faster procedures, and as much clarity as possible regarding what is regulated uniformly nationwide and where local discretion begins.
The construction industry should focus less on pointing out what municipalities are doing wrong and much more on demonstrating how things can be done right, in its view. I believe this would be more helpful to municipalities than yet another call for fewer regulations.
