Amsterdam @ MindSay 
Dienst Wonen Amsterdam uncontrollable; reconsider your real estate investment strategy.
The housing situation in the Netherlands has its peculiarities. Low income (and sometimes even moderate to high income) depends on renting houses from the so called Woningbouwvereniging. This is a semi governmental organization dividing accommodation to lower income people.
This applies also for Amsterdam. It has long waiting lists, because there is not enough accommodation to provide housing to this group, and people stay put in a locked pricing model even if they climb the social ladder and should be moving on.
Unfortunately there are people that make misuse of this and illegally rent their subsidized houses to others, making a bundle of money on the difference. Also brokers offer these dwellings and earn a commission on the transaction.
Therefore the city council of Amsterdam decided to pass a law which enforces rental brokers to apply for a permit. This law was passed in June of 2007.
The intention was to crack down on illegal rental brokerage.
Enforcing this law was given to Dienst Wonen, a department within the civil servant organisation of the city of Amsterdam.
For all intend and purpose they probably started off with success. Only after some time this department lost complete track of the letter of the law and started to impose this rule on well established expat rental brokers and even on private persons who offered their dwellings to the expat community, either through other’s internet site or their own. Keep in mind that the expat community by the nature of their limited stay, will never be able to apply for subsidized housing. Too high income and too short time. And even if they do comply, by the time their number comes up, they are probably already back home or on their way home. Meanwhile are they supposed to sleep under a bridge?
This was not done in the way known by the Dutch as the Polder Model, but the full fist of the law was laid down on innocent people. The traditional model -innocent until proven guilty-, was thrown overboard.
If you think you can post a message on the pin board of the grocery store, you’re wrong. You will be hunted down and confronted with hefty penalties. They may even prosecute the store owner, on the assumption that he is illegally brokering. Sounds crazy? Well it isn’t.
The style and the manner of this megalomaniac and power crazed department is unheard of.
It works as a police institution and does not add any value to the housing market. Hours and hours of civil servants time (and our tax money) is spent surfing the internet for people offering rentals. The whole atmosphere within this organisation resembles the story depicted in the German movie “Das Leben der Andern”.
If they would limit themselves to the abovementioned illegal brokerages, then that stands to reason, but these people think they have card-blanche to grill any person.
So should you consider investing in housing in Amsterdam, think twice. The political climate of some parts of the Amsterdam city council organization is such that they want to determine what is going to happen to your money. Sound considerations like return on investment and long term strategies, are a great risk in such a climate.
What is also at jeopardy is the availability non-subsidized furnished accommodation for the expat community. Amsterdam is suffering from decreasing foreign investment and not being able to house your temporary brain workers is not going to help here.
So in a nutshell, if thinking of investing in real estate in the Netherlands fine, but eliminate Amsterdam of your investment list, until the political situation changes or people are corrected by their peers and made to realize for whom they work and by whom they are being paid.
And for those that own properties already, you might want to consider putting it on the market, now that prices are still stable. Not that the target group Dienst Wonen claims to protect can afford this real estate, but nonetheless. This way they can boil in their own misguided fat and hurting the economics of Topstad Amsterdam.
Tip: use these funds to buy short term rental real estate in Florida e.g. in the Orlando region. Enough people to visit the theme parks around Orlando (Disney World, Magic Kingdom, MGM Studios, Seaworld, Bush Gardens, etc.) Dollar is cheap, housing prices low, and the political and social climate favours investment opportunities and entrepreneurship.
If you put it on a saving account in the Netherlands, you want to have a interest rate of at least 4% (very unlikely currently), for the Dutch tax authorities will charge you 30% tax on 4% return on capital (Box III).
This underlines the wrongness of council politics wanting to limit your return on investment. And you thought the Berlin wall had disappeared?
Good luck with any decision you make,
Kind regards
Next week is a jaunt to London and then a long flight home.
Or one of the places I call home.
Because not much has changed since I left, and I feel quite comfortable here. I miss it terribly. I think I could be happy living here again.
But I do love the mountains.
[And as of the 12th of April I could still not access MindSay from my work computer. So these updates may be fewer and fewer far between. But I'm still alive. As my Mum will attest. *smile*]
Hope you all are well. No time to read or respond to comments/other blogs.
Funny how easy it is to forget about a computer when one is on holiday.
Day One
I woke up at around 6am to say goodbye to my dad before he left for home and went back to sleep until 7am when I woke up, took a shower, and had some tea and toast. By 8am I was at the bus station for the 8:30am bus to Heathrow while still having been able to stop and by a 10 pack of Marlboro reds. My ticket read the 171 bus line found at terminals 9, 10, 11. When 8:45 came around I took a klonopin. By 915am a bus came that stopped at the airport routes which I took to the wrong terminal at Heathrow. I got to the airport around 12:45pm for a 1:30pm flight to Amsterdam. Because I got off at the wrong terminal, the way the airport is setup meant I had to take a train from central station to terminal 4. I arrived at the gate at 12:55pm for a 1pm boarding time. Upon arrival, I find the attendants telling the passengers the flight was delayed 2 hours. Finding this out I find a smoking area not far from the gate and have a cigarette. There I meet a guy decked out in Yankees. He had the bag, the hat, and the shirt. The dirty kind who say there’re from New York City but really live in New Jersey. I then take advantage of this newfound time by visiting that restaurant that tries to make itself like if it were an actual restaurant and not some shitty place in an airport. I order sandwich and a beer and light another cigarette simply because I can. After making myself more comfortable I glace over to the gate and see no one waiting. Confused, I run over and see that the flight in fact was about to end boarding. I rushed back to the table and told the waitress what had happened and that I needed the check immediately and said I would pay for the food anyway. I quickly got on the plane and sat back. Upon reaching the city center in Amsterdam, I soon realized klonopin does not help reading a map and after wandering for some time I learned that standing in the middle of a square with luggage at your feet, a map in hand and a shirt that literally says “I am lost” tends to warrant attention from the local homeless population. Mistakenly I asked where the street my hotel was on, not realizing it probably wasn’t the best idea to give this guy where I was staying. He proved to be no help except he claimed to know where to get a joint for 2 euros. After some more wandering I found the hotel and checked in. When I got to my room I was hardly surprised to look out the window and see my favorite homeless Dutch man. I freaked out and changed my clothes and waited an hour or two before heading back out. I decided to do some more wandering before I went to a coffee shop so that I had some bearings should I get lost. This was a brilliant idea it turned out. When I got impatient with myself I found Café Sheeba which was one of the few coffee shops I was able find information on online before the trip and happened to be about a 1 minute walk from the hotel right around the corner. I went inside and approached the back bar to look at the menu but as soon as I saw AK-47 I knew what I wanted. “Moderation” I thought to myself as I half-filled the king size papers provided. 20 minuets later a fat old man with a huge white beard and a Hawaiian shirt (think Santa on vacation) walks in and lays a 50 Euro bill on the front bar and says “50 euros of marijuana please.” No wonder Santa loves milk and cookies so much the fucking stoner. Anyway, upon leaving it started to dawn on me how high I was. It wasn’t until 20 minutes later I realized that I had completely missed my hotel and had simply walked in a straight line since I left the coffee shop. At this point I figured I was too far gone and just kept walking forward, don’t ask me why. I eventually found my way to the ocean where I couldn’t go any further but due to my previous wandering I had found myself exactly where I noted how to get back to the hotel should I become lost. Of course before I made it back to the hotel I still managed to say “I am so fucking high” out loud, although I had originally meant to think it, I discovered I said it out loud when the person walking in front of me turned around, looked at me, and stepped out of the way. When I got back to the hotel I tried to write down my thoughts on a piece of paper but all I ended up with was a single curved line. I looked in the mirror and saw my eyes the reddest they had ever been, I mean completely red. I tried to take a picture but by the time I set up the camera I became distracted by something else and the picture never got taken. I majority of the night was spent in a circular thought pattern where no matter what I was thinking I would eventually return to the fact that I was “so fucking high.”
Day Two
Since I was unsure about the complete legality of pot, I made one of my cigarettes a spliff to smoke when I got to the Van Gogh Museum. I did so and I can never look at a print of a Van Gogh again as the true color and textures of the originals are completely underrepresented in any print. After Van Gogh I went and saw Night Watch which was pretty cool. I ended the day by having a pint of Guinness at a hostel and a stop at a coffee shop where I picked up some Jack Herer.
Day Three
I chose not to smoke before going to Ann Frank’s house out of respect even though once I got there I never actually went it. There was a line all the way around the corner and I didn’t want to wait 2 hours just to be depressed all day, especially when I planned on doing mushrooms later. As I was passing the line heading back towards my hotel’s area some people in an apartment above the line threw some water out the window where it splashed on those below it. Feeling bad that I didn’t take any pictures of the house I took a picture of a sign that pointed towards “Homo Monument.” I thought it was funny. I got lunch and ate some pot cake then went to the wax museum. I got my picture taken flipping off Bush. I bought some mushrooms, went back to the room, and began to eat them. I slowly munched on them for about an hour, taking periodic smoke breaks (a smoking room was definitely a good idea). I made the mistake of calling my parents and started to feel the come up while I was on the phone with my mom. I immediately got off and smoked some more. The walls started to dance and I walked around outside for a while sitting in squares and smoking cigarettes. The red light district is fucking intense on mushrooms.
Day Four
I woke up, took klonopin, and checked out. The person checking me out thought it was weird I didn’t order any skin flicks. I met some American girls on the train back to the airport, got back to England, and picked up glasses at the pub. It was a trip.
Patrick de Man, owner of Fitworld gym in the town of Heteren, said he got the idea in part from two of his customers who are avid nudists.
"I heard that some other gyms are offering courses on 'pole-dancing' as a sport, so I thought: Why not bring something new to the market?" de Man said.
He said the response had been overwhelming — positive and negative.
The 70,000-member Dutch Federation of Naturists was curious to see if Fitworld's plan would work, spokesman Bernd Huiser said.
"We recently conducted a large survey among our members, and most prefer to exercise with their clothes on," he said. "The most popular activities (for nudists) are things you do outdoors, like walking on the beach, or swimming in a lake, or maybe gardening."
De Man said the first question Fitworld customers were asking was whether it would be sanitary.
Nude exercisers would be required to put towels down on weight machines and to use disposable seat covers while riding bikes. All machines would be cleaned and disinfected afterward. "We clean them every day anyway," he said.
The first "Naked Sunday" is scheduled for March 4.
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