The new Housing Minister must primarily provide more housing, but she has more responsibilities, argues Willem Jan van de Groep in these Sights. She must also pay attention to the climate challenge, 'because ignoring the climate challenge may ultimately undermine the security and stability of our housing environment.'
During an interview at Buitenhof last Sunday, Elanor Boekholt-O'Sullivan, the new Housing Minister, made a striking choice in words. She wants, she said, to build not just houses but th homes. The difference is not in the spelling, but in the meaning. A house is a building. A home is a place where people live, live and feel safe.
It seems like a small language difference, but it says something about how the new minister looks at her portfolio. In the same conversation, she emphasized that the Netherlands should not only build housing, but also make neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where people know each other, where public spaces are safe and where communities function.
That perspective is relevant because the minister was sent out politically primarily with a clear mission: more housing and more speed. After years of stagnation, procedures and uncertainty, this is understandable. The Netherlands needs housing and the pace needs to pick up.
At the same time, the Ministry of Housing has a responsibility that receives remarkably little attention in the political debate. After all, the built environment accounts for a significant portion of the Dutch climate task.
That responsibility is in two places. The first is the energy use of buildings. The better homes are insulated and the more efficient installations are designed, the lower the energy consumption and thus the CO₂ emissions of the built environment.
The second component gets much less attention, but is at least as big. That is the emissions released during the production of building materials. Concrete, steel, glass and insulation materials produce large amounts of emissions before a building is occupied at all. Material production in the construction sector alone is responsible for at least 13 percent of total Dutch CO₂ emissions, while we do not even have a full picture of the actual impact.
So those who accelerate housing construction without taking this aspect into account are also accelerating a significant part of the climate problem.
Yet building with less carbon emissions is often portrayed in the debate as an obstacle to housing construction. More sustainable materials would be more expensive, additional requirements would delay projects and higher ambitions would make housing construction impossible.
That frame is persistent, but rarely complete. Much of the delay comes not from ambition but from fragmentation. Municipalities, developers and investors are all trying to anticipate European regulations that are coming. As national standards lag behind, different indicators, calculation methods and interpretations emerge. To the market, this feels like complexity and above-legal requirements, when in fact it is a lack of national direction.
If the minister really wants to build homes instead of just houses, that includes a realistic look at the future of the construction industry. After all, homes are built for multiple generations. The buildings we construct today will almost certainly still be there in 2050 and probably beyond.
For this very reason, ignoring the climate challenge may ultimately undermine the security and stability of our living environment. European regulations on material emissions are becoming increasingly stringent. If the sector does not prepare for this in time, the same dynamics can arise that we now know from the nitrogen file: sudden restrictions, scarcity of materials and sharply rising costs.
In that scenario, building does not become faster, but rather more and more difficult.
The irony is that delaying the climate challenge could thereby achieve the exact opposite of what the minister wants: less housing, less security and fewer homes. So the Housing Minister is not just about houses or th homes. She is also about the conditions under which we can continue to build at all in the Netherlands. And those who want to build th homes for the future cannot afford to treat the climate issue as an afterthought.
