Choice within limits. How forced relocation affects residents’ dwelling searches and trae-offs in dwelling choice

Choice within limits. How forced relocation affects residents’ dwelling searches and trae-offs in dwelling choice

Meerts, A.
Kleinhans, R.
Posthumus, H.

OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment

2011-07-05

Each year, thousands of Dutch social renters have to deal with forced relocation from their dwellings slated for demolition. This is an essential part of Dutch urban restructuring policy in early post-war neighbourhoods. Usually, these relocatees have to find a new dwelling by themselves, facilitated with a priority status and an allowance for relocation costs. Their search process is quite different from regular house seekers in the social rented sector. On the one hand, the initial trigger is a top down force (i.e. a pending notice to quit by the housing association), although these residents may already have latent moving intentions. On the other hand, the priority status and other legal compensatory mechanisms may strongly favour their position on the housing market above regular, non-urgent house seekers. Additionally, several specific regulations further affect relocatees’ search process and outcomes in ways that are (potentially) different from regular house seekers. It is much debated whether the specific situation of forced relocatees affects their dwelling search in a primarily positive or negative way. Earlier studies on forced relocation mainly focused on either positive or negative outcomes of the search process. Moreover, most studies are of a quantitative nature, and the available qualitative research is often very small-scale. As such, the search process itself and relocatees’ personal experiences in this context are still under-examined. This especially applies to the trade-offs between opportunities and constraints with regard to dwellings and neighbourhoods. In this paper, we aim to reveal how the specific context and regulations of forced relocation (in urban restructuring) affect relocatees’ search process, choices and their perceptions of this process. We draw from a Dutch dataset of 150 in-depth interviews with relocatees in five cities. The interviews focus primarily on respondents’ relocation choices and the perceived opportunities and constraints.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4512ce32-087f-4daa-98ce-fb969e2e01f6

ENHR

23rd Conference of the European Network for Housing Research ENHR, Toulouse, July 5-8, 2011

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c)2011 Meerts, A., Kleinhans, R., Posthumus, H.