“Amsterdam has become a city for the highly educated”
According to UvA researchers Willem Boterman and Wouter van Gent, Amsterdam's politics focuses mainly on the middle class. Not everyone agrees in Pakhuis de Zwijger: “Some 48 percent of housing is social rent.”
The Pontsteiger has undeniably become a symbol of the city: architecturally unique and strikingly situated on the banks of Amsterdam's IJ River. But with a monthly rent of over €25,000 for the tenant of the penthouse (415 m²), also a huge “excess,” argues UvA researcher Willem Boterman.
For Boterman and fellow researcher Wouter van Gent, the futuristic building in the Houthavens neighborhood symbolizes the politics of the past 40 years in Amsterdam’s administrative circles. Both men work as social geographers at the UvA. In the fall of 2022, they wrote the book Making the Middle-class City - An analysis of 40 years of urban transformation in the capital. At Pakhuis de Zwijger, they explained their research on Tuesday evening in front of nearly 100 attendees and several roving cameras, including city broadcaster AT5.
The middle class
“I'm not allowed to say it at Pakhuis de Zwijger, but Amsterdam has become a city for the highly educated,” Boterman began. This happened step by step, he explains, starting in the 1980s: the benchmark for Boterman and Van Gent. But since then, under the leadership of Amsterdam's alderman for housing, Jan Schaeffer, the free sector has seen additional structural construction with too narrow a focus on the middle class, the researchers contend.
The Van der Pek neighborhood in Amsterdam-North is exemplary. This former working-class neighborhood was initially slated to fall prey to the sledgehammer. But after the emergence of urban renewal thinking, the neighborhood was redeveloped as an attractive residential area for people from the creative sector and students, or “people who have yet to enter the creative sector,” according to Van Gent, who drew laughs during his lecture. The original market disappeared (and with it the old residents), and an organic market emerged in its place.
The thrust of the argument is that this trend of building for the middle and higher educated, with the inevitable disappearance of the lower social classes, has been taking place in the city for ages.
 (1).jpg)
Political choices
Political choices, among other things, are said to be to blame. Left-wing radical voting behavior faded into the background and liberal parties such as the VVD and D66 made inroads. The Amsterdam election victory of D66 in 2014, which ended the long-standing hegemony of the Partij van de Arbeid (Labor Party) in the city, would have definitively heralded the end of social democracy in the city, according to the researchers.
Or was that already the final act? As UvA lecturer in Interdisciplinary Social Science (ISW) Anouk Kootstra rightly points out, in the last Municipal Council elections in 2022, the Labor Party became the largest in Amsterdam ever, closely followed by GroenLinks. In addition, the latter party recently gained the most seats in the capital in the Provincial Council elections, with the PvdA and the Party for the Animals in their wake.
These are not exactly parties that do not care for the lower social classes, one is tempted to say. Nothing could be further from the truth, say the UvA researchers. These leftist parties, especially the PvdA, actually stand up more for the interests of the middle class, the researchers argue. Boterman says: “When the working class disappeared and moved to Almere or Purmerend, the Labour Party went looking for another electorate. They found it, among other places, among students (the highly educated, for short, ed.).”
Beside him, Maarten van Poelgeest gradually begins to frown more and more, as the story of “the decline of social democracy” progresses. Van Poelgeest is a former alderman and city councilor in Amsterdam on behalf of GroenLinks. He finds the researchers’ analysis “too short-sighted.”
Social rent
Some 48 percent of housing in Amsterdam is still for social rent, he says. “If you contrast that to London or Paris...” it compares favorably. In the French capital, almost a quarter of the housing is available for social rent. “It just depends on what city you compare it to,” Van Gent objects. “In Vienna, on balance, there is more social rent than in Amsterdam.”
Van Poelgeest also decries the recurring comparison with the more social period of the 1980s. There were hardly any houses for sale in the city at that time and there was a great deal of poverty, he explains. “A conscious decision was made then to raise that percentage. That is justifiable, if you look at the situation at the time. But as a city, you don't want to cut yourself off from the highly educated, either.”
However, he also acknowledges, “I also think we sold too many social housing units. We may have gone too far.” The Pontsteiger, on the other hand, he feels is a good investment. “That building generated €30 million in land value. If the Pontsteiger hadn't been built, the neighborhood behind it wouldn't have been built, either.”
