‘Luxury takes time. We don’t have time’: The former top military officer on a mission to fix the Dutch housing crisis

Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan is on a mission. The new housing minister of the Netherlands is charged with building 100,000 homes a year and breaking through a planning deadlock to combat one of Europe’s worst housing crises.
The Irish-born 50-year-old is new to politics. Until a fortnight ago she was the country’s top female military officer, famous for getting flak jackets redesigned for women’s bodies and holding her own in a male-dominated sphere.
Now she is clear. With a shortage of 400,000 homes, average house prices of almost €500,000 and a growing population, the country must build like it did after the second world war – and be prepared to make some compromises along the way.
“What I take from working in defence is that you keep your eye on the ball,” Boekholt-O’Sullivan, from the liberal-progressive D66 party that now leads the coalition government, said.
“The homes have to be built: that is the primary need right now. Luxury takes time, and we do not have time.”
Many European countries are struggling with shortages of affordable housing, with punishingly high rents and sky-high property prices locking younger and disadvantaged people out of the market and proving a divisive issue at the ballot box.
But in the Netherlands, a densely packed nation of 18 million people, the crisis feels particularly biting. Nationwide, house prices have doubled in the past decade; in more sought-after neighbourhoods they have surged 130%. A new-build home can cost 16 times an average salary.
The rental market is equally dysfunctional and waiting lists for social housing in the bigger Dutch cities, particularly in Amsterdam, can stretch to 10 years. During the election campaign last year before he became the Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten accused other parties of a “lack of courage and ambition” as he promised to build 100,000 houses a year, create 200,000 new homes by “splitting” larger ones – and create 10 new cities.
Boekholt-O’Sullivan believes that, faced with the crisis, something has to give. “If you want to achieve 100,000 homes being built every year, that will not work if you also want it to be perfect – so where are we prepared to water down our demands?” she said. “In the army, especially during missions and deployments, people are satisfied much more quickly. I make sure I can eat, sleep, shower, work. We need to be simple again.”
Her comments may irritate those who feel they have a legitimate right, in one of the world’s richest countries, to a decent and affordable home. But Boekholt-O’Sullivan is not asking people to lower their standards. Rather, she is asking for the systems to be made more effective.
Due to concerns that councils are not meeting their building targets, the new coalition has pledged to standardise building quality requirements nationally and stop an expensive patchwork of local requirements and objection processes. It intends to make planning permission quicker, scrapping “costly and unnecessary” building regulations, and set a target for two-thirds affordable housing that still allows room for private developers to make enough to offset their risk.
Taking a simpler approach might also mean asking the population, gently, to give up a little for the sake of the community, Boekholt-O’Sullivan suggested. Compared with the rest of Europe, Dutch people enjoy more space, with an average of 2.1 rooms per person compared with the average of 1.7.
Another point of compromise could be necessary if the country is to make room for more housing without further swamping its already gridlocked electricity network: people might need, for example, to put the washing machine on at night.
“All of us, at least in the Netherlands, cannot go on living as we do now, under the assumption that everyone can buy new electrical appliances and switch them on all day, whenever they want,” Boekholt-O’Sullivan said. “The electricity grid cannot support that, with the economy that depends on it, the companies connected to it, schools, communities, individuals. We need to have an adult conversation, a practical approach.”
For this, too, she draws on her military experience. “When I was in Afghanistan, you got a token for a shower and a token to call home,” she said. “And if the token ran out but you hadn’t rinsed your hair, it was tough luck because the water was gone. I’m not saying we should move to tokens here, but if you live together as a community, you have to make agreements, because [the supply] is not endless.”
In the Netherlands, water poses quite a different challenge: rising sea levels and extreme rainfall mean as much as 60% of the country is at risk of flooding. Up to one in 10 houses need foundation repair, land reclamation is back on the agenda and only smart thinking will transform flood plains into resilient housing – with ideas such as a recreational lake that doubles as a water storage reservoir.
On a visit to a gusty polder – a reclaimed tract of land that will by 2035 become the new city of Rijnenburg – Boekholt-O’Sullivan mostly listened, asking a few focused questions. “We always need to think about the water,” she told the Guardian. “You need to build from a different philosophy. You don’t tell the water where it needs to go: you let it go where it goes and you work around it, in an adaptive way.”
The government will need to build alliances to pass laws. This month, Boekholt-O’Sullivan signed a policy to allow municipalities to levy fines on empty homes and faced sharp questions in her first housing commission meeting – particularly on the pressure of migration, although a state commission has said the country needs “moderate” population growth to maintain prosperity.
She sees her new post as a chance for a pragmatic reset. “The sector doesn’t know who you are; they need to introduce themselves,” she said. “I will do my best, but they will too, because I’m not impressed. For 20 years we’ve been stuck in a certain perspective. I come with a blank slate.”