The housing shortage in the Netherlands is the result of poor government policy and is not being caused by an influx of migrants and refugees, a top UN official said on Thursday (Dec 21).

The Netherlands, one of Europe’s most densely populated countries with 17.8 million people, is short of some 390,000 homes, according to a recent study.

Asylum and immigration were major themes in the recent Dutch elections, particularly among right-wing parties which blamed refugees for the housing shortage.

But the shortfall is the result of government policy dating back decades, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing said.

“This housing crisis is not due to migration and refugees, but due to the failure to recognise and protect housing as a human right,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal said at a press conference in The Hague.

“This crisis has been building over a couple of decades through an active policy of encouraging the market to replace the government in the provision of housing,” he said.

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Rajagopal was invited by the Dutch government for an 11-day mission, in which he met officials, housing agencies, residents, and refugees, and travelled to housing hot-spots countrywide.

Finding an affordable place to stay is acutely difficult in the Netherlands, affecting everyone from students looking for university accommodation to asylum-seekers seeking a better future.

The average house price in the Netherlands was 430,000 euros (S$627,134), a report last month said.

“This is as much a crisis of the low number of housing stock available as it is a crisis of unaffordability of housing,” Rajagopal said.

He highlighted that many reception centres for asylum-seekers in the Netherlands are overcrowded.

This was “not due to hordes of new arrivals in the country,” but rather to a backlog at the Dutch immigration services.

Political parties laying the blame on migrants include anti-immigrant MP Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV party, which won an unprecedented 37 seats in the 150-seat Lower House.

Rajagopal said he will present a full report to the UN Human Rights Council in March with “details and recommendations.” AFP