The late Dutch author and Holocaust survivor Marga Minco once wrote about an empty house in Amsterdam where she and a group of artists and students took refuge towards the end of the second world war. Last month, the house she lived in for decades was squatted by a new generation of the dispossessed. In the Dutch capital’s overpriced, overcrowded housing market, where homes fetch more per square metre on average than they do in London, the squatters, or krakers, are back.
They are the byproduct of a crisis that has spiralled out of control, in which growing anger is justifiably focused on a startling and unsustainable unfairness. The cost of the country’s generous tax breaks for homeowners, who make up more than half of the population, is being borne by hard-working tenants. The return of squatting is a symptom of a public mood that is increasingly furious about the lack of solutions. And with a general election on 29 October, it is an anger that could be politically decisive.
