Liam in his stroller under a very fitting graffiti.
We came upon this while sussing out whether we could live in a certain neighbourhood. We liked the house and the street it was on, but the surrounding neighourhood was in question, and most importantly it lacked a decent supermarket close by.
Finding a place to live in Utrecht is frustrating because it’s a very tight market. There are two rental markets – social housing and free market housing. Social housing is great and cheap, the drawback being that it takes extreme amounts of waiting time to get anything decent and if you take something less than decent you lose whatever time you’ve built up and all hope of the fabled downtown apartment for no money. By extreme, I mean that people who have been waiting since the late ’90s are getting the places we want, and seeing a place awarded to someone who’s been waiting since 1992 isn’t uncommon. Ivo signed up in 2001.
Free market rental is available of course, but it is crazy expensive and even most two bedroom places would put us over the spending 1/3 of our income on rent limit – and Ivo has a decent salary. That and finding free market places is not easy since most are done through agencies, which charge the renter a month’s rent as a commission, which seems rather excessive. And there is no central listing of rental properties to even help one find a place or make decent comparisons. The high prices make sense though because mortgage interest is only deductible from your taxes if it’s for your residence, so with the high tax rates here it adds quite a bit to the owner’s expenses.
So, unless we fluke out and get a decent social housing place we’re looking at buying, even though in a normal market it might make more sense to rent because I don’t have a job yet (and am not looking until the end of the year). The good thing about Utrecht is that it’s central to most other cities in the Netherlands so if I do end up working elsewhere it won’t be a bad commute.