2017 Masters Thesis Crispin Pownall Profile of Entrants To Amsterdam Social Housing

Crispin Terry Pownall 11250496
Precarious and marginal? A profile of

entrants to Amsterdam’s social housing
Master Thesis
Urban Geography
Crispin Terry Pownall
Supervisor: Dr. Aslan Zorlu
20450 Words
21st August 2016
Enquiries: crispinpownall@gmail.com
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Preface
Dear reader,
This thesis was carried out as part of an internship with the Amsterdam Federation of Housing
Associations/Amsterdam Federatie van Woningcorporaties (AFWC) during which I, among others,
assisted the AFWC in setting up and contributing to the first International Social Housing Festival, with
events centring around the themes of segregation, diversification and migration, themes upon which I
was asked to base this thesis. However, the approach of the AFWC regarding the research process was
a hands-off, facilitator approach, helping me get access to the data and pointing me in the right directions
for literature and information, whilst leaving me to choose my own topic and not regulating the process
in any way.
The right to accessible housing is one which I have, for a long while, felt passionate about, and this
thesis is my way of contributing, in the very smallest way, to the debate. Increasing restrictions in the
accessibility of decent housing across much of Europe and the world, not least in my home city of
London and my adopted home of Amsterdam, are something that we should all be concerned about,
because the way a society houses its people is reflective of how much it cares for them.
On this note, I would like to extend thanks to the people who have helped me through this thesis. To
Aslan Zorlu, for keeping me on the right path, away from deep and dangerous tangents, and always
having a moment and a kind word to spare. To Cody Hochstenbach, for taking the time to read through
and consider this thesis, as its second reader. To Jeroen van der Veer, for taking me and my fellow
interns under his wing, always being excited about our work, and having a brain bursting with insights
that he is happy to share. To Hester Booie and Annika Smits at OIS, for guiding me through my long
days of data manipulation at the OIS’ office. And finally, to my friends and family, who have always
supported in me in what I do.
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Abstract
The once-broad tenant profile of Amsterdam’s social housing stock, especially that owned by housing
associations, has narrowed in the past three decades, with regulations increasingly restricting entrants
to an ever-stricter definition of socio-economic deprivation. Starting in 2011, with that year’s
introduction of rigid income criteria for social housing entrants, this thesis compares data from the
Wonen in Amsterdam surveys of 2011, 2013 and 2015 to bring the tenant profile of Amsterdam more
up to date. The thesis looks at recent entrants to both private and association-owned social-rent housing,
focusing on the latter, interrogating the intersections of tenure with socio-economic and cultural
difference. Privately-owned social-rent housing, at 15% of the city’s stock in 2015, is an important yet
neglected feature of Amsterdam’s housing landscape, and appears to cater for a demographic with
higher social, economic and cultural capital than the association-owned stock. Using multinomial
logistic regression, this thesis finds that, though they lag behind income especially after 2011, other
predictors besides income for social housing entry (such as education level and ethnicity) remain
important. Housing pathways into social rent increasingly originate from less ‘orthodox’, and possibly
more precarious, tenures. The thesis ends with a recommendation that similar research be undertaken
incorporating the upcoming Wonen in Amsterdam 2017 dataset.
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Contents
Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 2
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 5
Amsterdam’s social housing: holding the door open .......................................................................... 5
Thesis structure ................................................................................................................................... 7
Literature Review.................................................................................................................................... 7
Conceptual framework ........................................................................................................................ 8
Philosophical justification: the right to a just city? ......................................................................... 8
Using one’s assets: Bourdieu’s conceptions of ‘capital’ ................................................................. 9
Graduated citizenship and housing residualisation ....................................................................... 12
Housing pathways and careers .......................................................................................................... 13
The history of Dutch social housing ................................................................................................. 14
1901-1980s: the slow birth of decommodified housing ................................................................ 14
1990s-2017: zenith and decline— the bottleneck tightens ........................................................... 15
Residential mobility, tenure and urban restructuring in Amsterdam ................................................ 16
The tenure landscape of Amsterdam ............................................................................................. 18
Research design .................................................................................................................................... 19
Research questions ............................................................................................................................ 19
Research area .................................................................................................................................... 19
Research design ................................................................................................................................ 20
Data: OIS’ Wonen in Amsterdam ..................................................................................................... 21
Limitations of the data .................................................................................................................. 21
Methods ............................................................................................................................................ 22
Variables and operationalisation ....................................................................................................... 23
Dependent variable ....................................................................................................................... 24
Explanatory individual and household-level variables ................................................................. 24
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Results ................................................................................................................................................... 27
Descriptive statistics ......................................................................................................................... 27
Graphs: change over time of the housing pathway tendencies (as a proportion) of sub-sample
categories in this study .................................................................................................................. 29
Multinomial logistic regressions ....................................................................................................... 36
Fit of models ................................................................................................................................. 36
Multicollinearity of socio-economic variables.............................................................................. 36
Predictive margins ........................................................................................................................ 37
How to read the models ................................................................................................................ 39
The models .................................................................................................................................... 39
Discussion ......................................................................................................................................... 51
Recent movers to the association-owned social rent sector .......................................................... 51
Recent movers to the privately-owned social-rent sector ............................................................. 54
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 55
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 57
Appendix a: descriptive statistics, categorical variables ....................................................................... 63
Appendix b: summary statistics, people per household by survey year ............................................... 77
Appendix c: Predictive Margins ........................................................................................................... 77
Introduction
Amsterdam’s social housing: holding the door open
There is a strong case for the argument that Amsterdam’s social housing has been the single most
important institution in shaping the culture, society and economy of Amsterdam since the dawn of the
20th century, its massive stock, affordable rents and presence in all districts of the city facilitating the
cosmopolitan mix of social, cultural and ethnic groups that Amsterdam is today. Prioritising
accessibility by tenants over profitability, the municipality and associations of Amsterdam pioneered a
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shift of housing away from a commodity to a service, rendering it almost paradigmatically different
from most other housing systems in the Global North. The main criterion for entry, aside from personal
situations of real urgency, was not how one scored on any sort of means test, but their place on the
waiting list (Uitermark 2009), although higher earners were unlikely to get a place. The sector’s
inhabitants were thus diverse, as it was a genuine option for anybody earning a median income or below
(Murie & Musterd 1996). The association-owned part of the sector was built up slowly from its genesis
in 1901 until it reached its pinnacle in 1995 at 58% of Amsterdam’s total stock (Duijne & Ronald 2016).
But the social housing sector in Amsterdam and nationwide also extended, and extends, into private-
owned homes for rent, which are bound by similar, if somewhat broader and more easily circumvented
(Hochstenbach & Boterman 2014), restrictions on tenant income on entry and rent. During the late 20th
century, the sector was large enough to have a variety of societal-level effects, from the dampening of
rents and house prices across all sectors (ibid) to savings in household expenditure that allowed savings
in other areas (chiefly wages), doing much to maintain the Netherlands as a competitive centre for
global business (Musterd 2014; Ekkers & Helderman, 2010, cited Duijne & Ronald 2016). The tying
of peoples’ ability to exist in the city to their ability to afford housing, as is the case in most marketised
housing systems, was successfully negated as the sector grew and strengthened, such that the housing
market in Amsterdam became ‘decommodified’ (Duijne & Ronald 2016).
The social diversity and accessibility facilitated by the sector were such that Amsterdam has
been singled out as a city containing the building blocks for ideal-type (if not always utopian or perfect)
abstractions such as the ‘just city’ (Fainstein 2010) and the ‘arrival city’ (Doug Saunders 2012). The
spatial dispersal of the stock throughout every neighbourhood of Amsterdam has been the crucial
feature in keeping the city’s districts socially heterogeneous (Musterd & Van Gent 2016). If Lefebvre’s
‘right to the city’ (1996/1967) is to be interpreted as the equality of opportunity to exist and work with
a good quality of life in an entire city, then the ‘right to the city’ as it exists in Amsterdam is certainly
to be lauded. Yet the system cannot be held as perfect, as this would ignore stark aspects of
inaccessibility, notably the forbiddingly long waiting lists that exclude those not meeting the criteria
and which may push even those on the lists to more risky and less stable tenancies (as prospective
tenants on the association waiting list almost by definition cannot or can ill-afford other forms of
tenancy). Another area of unjustness historically was the initial complete exclusion of the so-called
‘guest workers’, largely from Turkey and Morocco upon their arrival in the late-middle 20th century
(Schutjens et al 2002), before they were recognised as permanent
There have been moves away from that decommodified housing model in the last 25-30 years,
with the 2011 introduction restrictions on entry to social housing based on criteria of vulnerability and
low income, and the reduction of the stock through increased sales, and diminished (but not depleted)
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construction. To place the onus of entry criteria for the majority of entrants on income alone will also
change the profile of entrants in other ways, due to income’s inherent correlations with myriad
intersecting socio-economic and socio-cultural predictors. If the affordability gap between social rentals
and other forms of housing continues to widen, this risks making some groups reliant on social housing,
with decreasing agency to choose between ever-fewer, homes of diminishing quality, if governmental
efforts targeting the sector continue to intensify. To this end, this thesis will explore the changing tenant
profile of entrants into both privately-owned and association-owned social-rent housing, to gauge the
effect of this legislation and to measure divergences not only from re-commodified forms of housing
but also between these two quite disparate sub-sectors.
Thesis structure
The thesis will begin with a review of the literature used to inform the philosophical justification, the
theory, context, and assumptions behind it. The second part of the thesis is the research design, which
explains the data, how they were manipulated and should be interpreted, and the frameworks that
informed why these decisions were made. Then we move on to the results of the data, showing the
outcomes of the statistical analyses and some key descriptive statistics (the full list is in Appendices a,
b and c), and some limitations of the data. The interpretation and broader analysis of these results will
be run through in the subsequent discussion session, before we conclude with the wider implications of
the study and suggestions for future research.
Literature Review
The range of literature that is relevant to this thesis is broad. Abstract philosophical arguments
supporting the equality of housing opportunity such as Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ (1996/1967) might
not, in the end, explain who is going into Amsterdam’s social housing or how they are different from
other movers, but they do go some way to explaining the ever-changing context, and provide a
philosophical justification for this research on urban social change and housing, to calibrate our
response to the findings, and an aspirational benchmark against which we can measure progress. There
are also more empirically-based theories on urban development in mature capitalist economies, and the
socio-economic behaviour of their citizens, such as Bourdieu’s writings on the forms of capital
(Bourdieu 1977), and others’ work on residualisation (Malpass & Murie 1982, cited Pearce & Vine
2014), and ‘graduated citizenship’ (Ong 2006, cited Rogers & Darcy 2014) In order to explain how the
social housing entrant profile evolved to the present day, it is imperative to also explain the historical
development of Amsterdam’s social housing structures and allocation systems, as this has been
decisive.
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Conceptual framework
Philosophical justification: the right to a just city?
The overarching philosophy which justifies and has helped to calibrate this research is the ‘right to the
city’ debate that was classically articulated by Henri Lefebvre in ‘Writings on cities’ (1996/1967).
Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ revolves around the idea that urban space is formed by the social relations
of its inhabitants (Fainstein 2014), and vice versa: it is in generalised urban space, rather than the
workplace, that social relations are formed, and what constitutes urban space is that realm within which
those transactions occur (Marcuse 2014). The ability to form and influence the physical, as well as the
socio-economic and social-structural realms, should therefore be recognised and enabled on a
universalist basis, such that the city becomes a collective ‘oevre’, meaning, in this sense, a resource and
project co-produced by all its citizens. The use-value of a city (the non-financial goods and services
such as shelter and community) should be prioritised over the financial profitability, or exchange-value
of its spaces, thereby subverting the current orientation of urban space and process towards ever-more
exploitative, maximal-profit uses. Applied practically to cases of urban socio-spatial change, it is a
philosophy rejecting anti-egalitarian economic and social processes such as commodifying housing and
the resultant stratifying of housing quality and accessibility along socio-economic lines.
Taken through David Harvey’s recalibration for the neo-liberal age (2008), the ‘right to the
city’ refers to the unequally-distributed ability to economically, culturally and socially cope in urban
environments where increasing financial deregulation and state cutbacks of public goods increase
inequality of wealth and access to resources, including housing— a right to the city guaranteed only to
the affluent, placing them above dedicated citizens who may have lived and worked there all their lives.
In this environment, the use of urban space for universally-accessible public goods is threatened by an
increasing focus from authorities and property developers, and a resulting campaign of re-purposing
land, towards exchange-value uses (Ryan 2010, cited Aalbers & Gibb 2014). The public goods that
social housing once provided and aided now become irrelevant in the shadow of the prospect of higher
profit margins from commercial use, including for-profit housing. Now, in Amsterdam it might be
argued that the continued retention of most of the social stock, continued strict rent controls, and lack
of a British-type ‘right to buy’ policy for tenants means the inclusive ‘right to the city’ is still a reality
in Amsterdam. This assessment holds some water, especially when its housing and development
structures and processes are compared to other cities in Europe (Kadi & Ronald 2014; Musterd 2014;
van Kempen & Murie 2009) and North America (Kadi & Ronald 2014; Newman & Wyly 2009;
Fainstein 2010, cited Fainstein 2014). At the same time, inequalities of opportunity and resources are
significant (non-Westerners in Amsterdam earned a third less on average than Dutch-born people in
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2013 [OIS 2016: 23]), and neo-liberal funding cuts to local authorities make spatial commercialisation
and housing sell-offs attractive sources of income in the absence of others (de Koning 2015: 1211).
Fainstein (ibid) sees Amsterdam as, relative to New York and London, an example of a ‘just
city’, with more inclusive planning and redevelopment policies that manage to deliver a high degree of
equity, democracy and diversity, despite those three values’ sometimes conflicting natures. She accepts
criticism that a relativist study cannot draw absolute conclusions—that is, that Amsterdam being more
just than New York and London does not make it just. She goes on to say that justice should be measured
in terms of the opportunities available to people to live how they please without sacrificing prosperity
in the process (idem: 13). But, given that Fainstein sees relativism as a fallacy, consider this: if less
affluent people’s opportunities to exist and thrive in Amsterdam are becoming fewer and their
guarantees of social security increasingly stratified along socio-economic lines, how can one call this
‘just’, except with the qualifier that these processes are happening on a more rapid, more intense, and
more prejudiced level elsewhere? The only possible argument for this case is relativist, and this
argument necessitates a degree of wilful ignorance. In Amsterdam, the accessibility of all stable, licit
forms of tenure is shrinking (Kadi & Musterd 2014), and precarious, illicit forms of tenure are
increasing in popularity to take their place (Hochstenbach & Boterman 2014). And in this comes a
justification for pursuing our research question: we know the current trajectory of structural-institutional
change in Amsterdam’s housing landscape, but how is that changing who uses the housing? Although
the ‘just city’ may be a fallacy when applied to the real-life situation of Amsterdam, the idea of a
generalised, utopian ‘just city’ can be useful as a motivation for research and activism, a benchmark of
what is to be worked towards and what is worthy of our attention.
Using one’s assets: Bourdieu’s conceptions of ‘capital’
To adequately describe the current tenure-related behaviours and tendencies of Amsterdam’s

residentially mobile population, it is useful to adopt Bourdieu’s (1977) division of capital into ‘social’
‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ elements to better describe how differential capital accumulations create
differences in propensity and ability to enter social housing, and combine this with Rogers & Darcy’s
(2014) writings on ‘graduated’ forms of citizenship.
The concept of ‘capital’ can be explained as an individual or group’s ‘sum of [tangible and
intangible] resources’, and ‘social capital’ is that part of those reserves gained ‘by virtue of possessing
a durable network of more or less institutional relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’
(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, cited Whiteley 2015). It can be further simplified as the potential or
realised positive effect that one’s personal network has on their social and economic development. This
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form of capital, when applied to residential mobility, is often a crucial element of whether somebody
seeking a home will find one, the speed and ease with which they find it, and whether that home will
be of the desired quality and price (due to their networks and insider knowledge affording them a greater
range of options). In Amsterdam, although entrants to both association and private social housing are
ostensibly vetted on their income and personal circumstances, social capital remains a central predictor
of success in attaining housing.
The relevance of social capital for even social housing outcomes can be explained largely as a
result of institutional mechanisms in the private and association rental sectors. Amsterdam is a city with
a large split between ‘insiders’, who have been in the city for a long time and have developed social
networks that can aid them with finding good quality and affordable housing, and ‘outsiders’ who have
fewer channels to openings that are not advertised through formal channels such as Woningnet (the
social housing allocation site) or estate agents. Waiting times are an element of the city’s housing
allocation apparatus that perpetuate and exacerbate this split, with waiting times for association-owned
social housing in 2013 averaging at 11 years (Hochstenbach & Boterman 2014), meaning that, firstly,
contacts, including family, are useful to help find interim accommodation during the waiting period;
secondly, those applying for association housing can take advantage of advance knowledge of openings
to maximise their chances of getting a home by, for example, applying for large, newly available
projects with many dwellings (ibid), or through knowledge about specialised housing schemes for
certain socio-demographic groups of which they may be a member.
Inter-group disparities of social capital can be seen to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, in that

the movement of social capital by a member of a social group, even when towards socio-economic
development, usually serves to underline socio-economic difference. Social groups such as ethnicities
and socio-economic classes can be seen to be of the ‘bonding’ typology of social group (Putnam 2000),
as groupings that largely share and reproduce social capital amongst their own members, through family
and social ties, so that social capital, in this case manifesting as knowledge of housing opportunities,
flows more freely within these groups than across them, creating a mechanism of inequality
reproduction. This is one explanation for continued stratification of housing pathways along lines other
than merely income. Thirdly, access to the privately-owned social market is often through the landlords
or estate agents (ibid), making social capital the second-most important factor deciding success in
finding such a home, after the income parameters are taken to account.
A second form of capital identified by Bourdieu (1977), cultural capital, is also important in
predicting one’s propensity to realise a certain housing pathway. This can be split into the components
of education and knowledge on one hand, and a symbolic part on the other, encompassing aesthetic and
moral values. The application of cultural capital to behaviour and tendency is known as the habitus,
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(Bourdieu 1986, cited Butler & Robson 2001) and makes up a crucial element of how housing pathways
on a group scale are understood. For example, despite cultural and socio-economic similarities between
Turkish and Moroccans relative to other groups, Turks are far less likely to opt for social rent in the
Netherlands than Moroccans, which Musterd (2014: 477) suggests is because of a more ownership-
oriented culture, and Moroccans are not significantly likely to settle in areas with higher Turkish
populations, though the inverse is true (Zorlu & Mulder 2008). This is in spite of very similar migration
histories in the Netherlands, including the same arrival period and both groups being initially barred
from social housing in their early history while they were still seen as ‘guest workers’ rather than
permanent migrants (Schutjens et al 2002) (because of this, they initially largely settled in private rental
housing, which is largely in Amsterdam’s inner city stock built in the 19th century). Given their similar
circumstances and backgrounds, cultural differences become a plausible explanation for their different
housing habituses.
Therefore, cultural capital and habitus must be taken into account in analyses of group
residential mobility patterns. A third form of capital is economic capital, defined as one’s monetary
assets and the monetary value of one’s tangible and intangible property, making tenure itself central to
assessing group or individual economic capital (Butler & Robson 2001). Economic capital could be
seen to affect housing habitus in deciding what options are within reach in the first place. Although it
could be argued that lower accumulations of economic capital have a positive effect on one’s propensity
to enter social housing, income is only one aspect of economic capital: private social housing can
occasionally be illicitly ‘paid for’, as Hochstenbach & Boterman show with their respondent who, in
practical terms, bribed an estate agent to put them at the front of the queue for a private social dwelling
(2014: 267-268). Economic capital, being the most visible and tangible form of capital and the only one
that can be exactly quantified, is the only one of the three types measured to assess eligibility for social
housing entry. However, individual and group accumulations of economic capital are also often
dependent on the deployment and potential reach of one’s social and cultural capital, and so to base
entry criteria on the possession of a low income means that often this will cut across to low levels of
social and cultural capital too. Social housing in the Netherlands is largely inhabited by those groups
with lower reserves of all three types of capital: the elderly; the less-qualified; and people of non-
Western migrant origin (Musterd 2014; Schutjens 2002), to name three. The twin processes of
residualisation, explained below, and housing market deregulation mean that these less affluent groups
are at risk of being shut out of other stable forms of housing as property prices spiral out of their reach.
This growing chasm is a gap between those whose social, cultural and – most importantly – economic
capital lends them agency in the housing market, and those who have insufficient reserves. In the
concept of ‘graduated citizenship’ (articulated further below) as formulated by Rogers & Darcy (2014),
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individual economic agency has become the defining characteristic around which (globalised
neoliberal) societies evaluates their members, and therefore might be seen as differentiating features of
a new class system. In this way, tenancy can be seen to be a powerful, if not the most powerful, indicator
of individual reserves of social, economic and cultural capital (ergo, socio-economic class) in today’s
‘consumer citizenship’ model of society.
Graduated citizenship and housing residualisation
In the era of Keynesian-Fordist capital accumulation, an individual’s place in the community was
guaranteed by the condition of national citizenship, with the state enabling and protecting substantive
rights and wellbeing on a collective scale through interventions (Marshall 2009, cited Rogers & Darcy
2014), including broadly accessible social housing in the case of the Netherlands. The aim of
redistribution was to create a society where everyone had a similarly decent quality of life, which they
had earned through being a citizen. However, with the neoliberal era of globalised capital accumulation,
market-centric ‘global city’ discourses of transnational competition permeate all aspects of economic
and social life including housing, and being a model citizen, or deserving of citizenship, has become
more tied to the condition of to being a model consumer. Citizens’ deservingness of affluence is thus
stratified with their contribution to the economy. With the restructuring of cities to fit the new globalised
mode of accumulation, city-dwellers must increasingly ‘participate in the global city and global
economy for their actions to be legitimated in the urban regeneration process’, with marginal groups
left out of the mainstream narrative of urban progress (Rogers & Darcy 2014). The implication of this
‘graduated citizenship’ model is that groups unable to deploy and reproduce reserves of capital and
flourish in the hallowed realm of the free market, including in property, are ‘flawed consumers […] the
antithesis of the morally superior consumer or neoliberal citizen’ (ibid). This can be given as morally
justifying territorial and social stigmatisation and neglect of social housing’s places and people
(Wacquant 2007; Sibley 1995: ch.1 & 4). Their redefinition as irrelevant and undeserving, as less a part
of society than other tenants and forms of tenancy, then cushions against moral arguments protesting
policies of residualisation.
This term, ‘residualisation’ can be explained as the policy programmes and resulting changes
in the availability and stock of housing that accompany a graduated or consumer citizenship model,
where the scope, size and power of social housing is diminished and the vetting of entrants’ ‘need’ for
the housing becomes ever-stricter. With the accompanying withering of funding for maintenance and
renovation, quality of housing increasingly mirrors the income of its inhabitants as differences in
housing quality across class grow. It is ‘the process whereby public housing moves towards a position
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in which it provides only a ‘safety net’ for those who for reasons of poverty, age or infirmity cannot
obtain suitable accommodation in the private sector’ (Malpass & Murie 1982, cited Pearce & Vine
2014). Entrants become subject to tests on whether they truly cannot transition to for-profit housing
(Harloe 1995). The commodification of other sectors drives prices up, the gap between social housing
and these sectors widening and placing them further out of reach for less affluent people. In 1999, Van
Kempen & Priemus assessed the trajectory of changes in the Dutch social housing system and came to
the conclusion that it was headed towards residualisation. In 2016, Duijne & Ronald came to the
conclusion that the sector was already largely residualised due to its diminished size and marginal tenant
profile, but that the still-large amount of stock meant the market as a whole remained ‘unitary’ rather
than ‘dualised’ (i.e., with sub-‘market’ rents in direct competition with private rents, keeping them low).
However, ‘residualisation’ of social housing is arguably since the 1990s a policy objective of
government, as it fulfils free-market economic agendas by opening new sections of the housing
landscape to the market and ostensibly pushing its inhabitants into the commodified sectors too, whilst
reducing state ‘intervention’.
If we look at the logical conclusion of these changes, social housing might in the worst case
become, more than a ‘safety net’, an ‘ambulance service’ (Duijne & Ronald 2016), allowing inequality
to deepen and neglect of marginalised groups to worsen whilst averting the very worst social and
economic repercussions such as mass homelessness. It therefore ceases to have progressive effects, as
it only functions to stop poor people being a threat to the appearance of societal functioning as
homelessness is. The guarantee of shelter in the case of unpredictable societal or personal crises, which
might be seen as an acceptable obverse side to the ‘ambulance service’ outcome of moderate
residualisation, is also under threat if stock continues to fall and means tests for entry continue
increasing in strictness. But if the other services continue to be whittled away and standards of living
continue to drop, then the new ‘ambulance service’ status of social housing would turn it from a public
good into a public necessity as people drop out of the housing ‘market’.
Housing pathways and careers

One of the most important considerations when looking at residential mobility is the extent to which
those changing tenure (through residential mobility or in-situ change) are downgrading in terms of
value, quality and their degree of ownership over the home, and whether their tenure change is related
to any socio-economic or life-course changes: whether they are moving up or down in their ‘housing
career’. Kauppinen and Vilkama (2015), for instance, show that in Helsinki’s metropolitan area, all
minority-ethnic groups (categorised by country of birth) are moving towards greater proportions owning
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their homes, which they see as evidence that all the studied ethnic groups are positively developing
(idem: 472). They also found that ethnicity was the strongest predictor for the rate of this change, with
socio-economic predictors being insignificant (idem: 478). Yet, an assumption within this discourse is
that moves to more expensive and proprietary tenures (i.e., towards home ownership) are a sign of
development, and so their study concentrates on moves to owner-occupancy. It is for this reason that
Hochstenbach and Boterman critique ‘housing career’ discourse as being too linear, rigid, and
normative, with ‘housing pathways’ being preferable as a name for the study of movement across
tenures, in all ‘directions’, and its socio-economic implications (2014, after Forrest and Kemeny 1984).
The history of Dutch social housing

1901-1980s: the slow birth of decommodified housing
It was only in the last few decades of the 20th century that Amsterdam’s housing became truly
decommodified: a service rather than an instrument of profit, to which ‘people were entitled […]
because of their citizenship status rather than because of their income’ (van Kempen & Murie 2009,
after Esping-Anderson 1990). In the 1970s and 1980s, the stock held by associations greatly increased,
through construction and acquisition. New bureaucratic instruments such as the pegging of rent rates to
objective use-value criteria such as floorspace of the dwelling, plus a central system organising tenant
allocation based on urgency and waiting times, made Amsterdam’s social housing a service that was
broadly accessible (Uitermark 2009). Yet much of the expansion of the association sector was ‘by
default as well as design’ as landlords were not incentivised to fund construction themselves or buy
new properties to rent, and the government had to step in to avert crisis (Schutjens et al 2002). By 1989
the composition of association housing across the Netherlands’ five biggest cities in terms of the income
of its inhabitants was a microcosm of its cities at large: in both the association sector and in the housing
of the cities in general, the lowest 3 income deciles made up around 60% of households; the middle 3
made up 30%; and the 4 highest deciles of earners made up 10% (Dieleman 1994: 458). The nationwide
context, however, began to be more favourable towards home ownership, spurred on by a 43% real
wage increase 1981-1998 (Michiels 2000: cited Helderman et al 2004) and the increasing attainability
of mortgages (Boelhouwer 2000, Mulder & Wagner 1998: both cited Helderman et al 2004), among
other factors. This effect ironically would have been helped along by the positive effect on household
spending that low housing costs would have created. Home ownership also received a boost in
Amsterdam, growing 22% 1981-1989, still eclipsed by the association sector’s 49% growth in that
period. Nevertheless, an increasing tenure-income correlation, plus the decline of municipal housing
that decreased the tenure diversity of Amsterdam (Musterd & Murie 1996), were among the first
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symptoms of residualisation. Stratification of housing habitus along socio-cultural lines deepened

within this period, with an increasing propensity to enter social housing among ‘Mediterranean’ (largely
Turkish and Moroccan) groups compared with Autochtoons1 (Schutjens 2002).
1990s-2017: zenith and decline— the bottleneck tightens
The 1990s marked a turning point in terms of the state of the social housing sector, foreshadowed by
the 1989 governmental white paper entitled ‘Housing in the nineties’, which marked a turn in rhetoric
and policy towards a definitive re-commodification and dualisation of the housing ‘market’.
Residualisation was a means as well as an end; increasing restrictions on entry to social housing for
those earning above-average incomes helped toward the primary goals of reducing government
spending and increasing home ownership (Ministerie van VROM, 1989: cited van Kempen & Priemus
1999). The tenant profile of social housing dwellers continued to move towards a steadily older,
‘Mediterranean’, sub-modal income population during this period (Schutjens 2002). The Social Rented
Sector Management Order, which came into force in 1995, was the first major piece of such legislation
on entry criteria: under its brutering clauses, housing associations became, ostensibly, fully responsible
for their real estate (yet heavy regulation continued, to ensure delivery of affordable housing) and their
debts to the state were written off, thus beginning to resemble quasi-autonomous NGOs (Duijne &
Ronald 2016). In lieu of government funding and to achieve tenure re-structuring targets set by
government, sales of vacant housing became a significant source of income for housing associations,
and they also began to increase their for-profit rental activities (idem). Thus, from here, associations
became hybrid organisations responsible for both tightly-regulated social stock as well as less-tightly
regulated private stock. Yet in 1995, Amsterdam’s social housing also reached its all-time zenith of
55% of all housing, and it took almost fifteen years of steadily decline, dropping below 50% in around
2008 (Rijksoverheid 2011, cited Musterd 2014: 470). Van Kempen & Priemus (1999) furthermore show
that housing polarisation or ‘segmentation’ along income and tenure lines was seen to slightly decrease
in the very early part of the 1990s- this may, as the authors suggest, question linkages between state
retreat from welfare and inequality, or it could simply be the effect of the availability of still-cheap
housing for ownership, an effect that, if present, was certainly not to last, as the affordability gap
between public-rent and private owned housing widened. In any case, foreign-born households were
increasingly shut out from home-ownership compared to Dutch ones during this same period, as were
the lower two income quartiles (Van Kempen et al 2000).
1
‘Autochtoon’= Dutch-born
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The process of residualisation continued accelerating around this period with increasing
restrictions for higher-income households on entry to social housing. In 2008, this process was given a
boost when the European Commission ruled that associations’ leverage and agency within the Dutch
housing system, including ‘soft loans’ from government for construction and still-broad entry criteria
for prospective tenants, placed them in a position of unfair competitive advantage over fully private
landlords, and ordered the Dutch government to, for the most part, ban from entry to social housing
those earning more than €33,000 (SGEC 2009, cited Priemus & Gruis 2011). 90% of available stock
was to be allocated to this group, with the remaining 10% allocated to other groups with alternative
criteria marking them as vulnerable— large families and people in need of care, for example (idem).
This was realised in 2011, with new regulations abiding by these percentages and setting an upper limit
for entry to social housing, which is far higher for privately-owned than association-owned social
housing. As of 2017 the income cap for association social housing was €36,165 and for private social
housing €44,360 (Gemeente Amsterdam n.d.). From 2011, entrants to social housing were to be strictly
assessed on their vulnerability. The sector was also largely purged of more affluent sitting tenants, who
were from 2011, subject to 5% additional annual rent increases, on top of usual increases, for households
earning above €43,000 (Musterd 2014). Tellingly, this penalisation could, in some cases, be applied to
those with incomes under that limit, but who were living in more expensive areas (idem), putting it in
no doubt that the aim was to push as many people into the recommodified housing market as could
afford it, and make profits from sales where margins were high. Yet the housing associations are, as per
the EU recommendations from 2008, no longer permitted to fully engage in the market, with their ‘for
profit’ activities being curtailed and discouraged and future increases in government funding all but
ruled out, in the name of fair competition (Blessing 2012).
Residential mobility, tenure and urban restructuring in Amsterdam

Savini et al (2016) talk about how Amsterdam’s internal migration history has, up until now, been
characterised by large-scale migration out of the city, particularly by the (white) middle class, from the
inner city to the satellite suburbs, outweighing continued immigration from abroad which nevertheless
effected a demographic shift towards foreign-origin minorities (idem:105). There has, however, of late
been positive net migration from other regions of the Netherlands, and migrants to the city within the
A10 ring-road are of an ethnically whiter, more middle-class makeup than those migrating outside the
road (idem: 107). De Groot et al (2011) demonstrated linkages between intentions to move and the act
of successfully moving, exploring a variety of intermediary factors such as income, intention of tenure
change, and current tenure, and background variables such as age, ethnicity and neighbourhood
crowdedness. Crucially, one’s current tenure affects the ‘tempo’ at which one is likely to move, with
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renters being more mobile than home-owners (idem: 312). Furthermore, ambitions for tenure change
were highly significant in affecting the nature of one’s residential mobility due to reasons of differing
levels of urgency— owner-occupiers meaning to move into rented housing (‘downgrading’) were
likelier to move than renters who had no intention of moving, perhaps having lost the capacity for
owner-occupation due to family breakup, or a loss of financial resources (idem: 320).
Zorlu & Mulder’s study (2008) focusing on the residential mobility tendencies of migrants to
the Netherlands is also instructive for my research. It shows that country of origin is a very strong
predictor for mobility patterns, and that mobility peaks in the first two years after arrival in the
Netherlands. Again, these results are stratified by socio-economic and demographic characteristics on
not just an individual, but also a neighbourhood scale, too. This has some unexpected manifestations:
for example, Moroccan-born people have a significant tendency to settle with areas of high percentages
of other Moroccan-born and higher percentages of Surinamese people, but are not significantly likely
to settle in areas with a higher Turkish-born population, even though the reverse is true and Turks and
Moroccans are highly socio-economically and culturally alike (idem: 251-253). The study also,
significantly, shows that residential mobility of rental-dwellers is most likely to constitute a move to a
more segregated neighbourhood, and that once in a segregated neighbourhood, renters are least likely
of all groups to move (idem:261). The measurements of spatial and segmented assimilation cited in the
study (idem: 247-8) refer to, firstly, the degree to which the spread of a minority ethnic group resembles
that of the ‘host’ group, in this case Dutch Autochtoons, and secondly, the tendency for socio-economic
assimilation to occur differentially along socio-cultural lines. These to an extent explain differential
housing patterns among different groups, and are relevant for describing the relationships between
neighbourhood-level characteristics and their associations with mobility patterns.
Boterman and Van Gent (2013), looking at in-situ tenure conversions, also find that predicting
who is most likely to be the buyer of former rentals is stratified along ethnic lines, but also along life-
course stage (family formation, career stage and so on). Tieskens and Musterd (2013) focus on the
related phenomenon of displacement after regeneration and demolition of social housing in Amsterdam.
Looking at where the relocatees chose to move, they report similar stratifications along ethnic lines,
with non-Western-origin people least likely to move away from the study area of Amsterdam’s
borough/stadsdeel of Nieuw West. This again shows that moves deepening what is often identified as
‘segregation’ are often not an undesirable outcome for the individuals undertaking them, but rather a
result of residential preferences. Looking at the different but largely comparable regional context(s) of
the Nordic nations, Skifter Andersen et al (2015) find that there is a strong relationship between spatial
tenure segregation and ethnic segregation, with ethnic segmentation of tenure (strength of relationship
between tenure and ethnicity) as an intermediary factor also affecting both. Gender can also be a factor
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influencing mobility: due to assistance from family being more significant and common than for men,
women are, in the Netherlands, more likely to leave home early (Blaauboer & Mulder 2010).
The tenure landscape of Amsterdam
The breakdown of the landscape is as follows: in 2015, 58% of all homes were social-rental housing of
which 43% were association-owned and 15% privately-owned; then there is the separate 12% of rentals
which are free-sector (deregulated), of which 3% are association-owned and 9% privately owned. This
shows that the private and social ‘sectors’ have more overlap than may be inferred by many a study that
has either homogenised the two social-rent sectors, or alternatively simply lacks nuance and has not
adequately explained exactly what sector is being studied (e.g., Musterd 2014; Tieskens & Musterd
2013; Helderman et al 2004). On the other side, 31% are owner-occupied (OIS 2016a: 503; N.B. these
figures add up to 101% because they are rounded to the nearest integer). This is up from a brief period
of stabilisation between 2011 and 2013 when the owner-occupied sector was 27.2% (OIS 2012b: 25;
OIS 2016b: 20), which may have been related to the economic and housing crisis that begun in 2008,
and is . Privately-owned rental properties provide the third major option for tenure. The sector, whilst
far behind the other two in terms of stock, is growing after a long period of decline in the mid to late
20th century (OIS 2014: 17; OIS 2016a:350; cf Murie & Musterd 1996). Newbuilds are an important
area in which private rentals have become paramount: by 2015, they had overtaken the other tenures to
become the major tenure of new-build homes on the market for the first time, their rate of growth in
this aspect tripling from 2014-2015 alone (2016a: 346). It remains to be seen what the result of this is,
but this could foreseeably lead to a significant rise in the proportion of social-rent homes provided by
the private sector.
In sum, as far as the official figures can tell, despite the drive towards greater tenant ownership
of homes, Amsterdam remains an overwhelmingly social-rent city, with owner-occupancy in at second
and private rentals at third place, the latter two steadily rising at the expense of the former.
These numbers only tell a small part of the story, starting with the fact that there are many more
types of tenure than the data code for. Some tenure types are difficult to gauge due to being subsumed
under other types: intermediate or regulated homeownership/koopgarant; private co-operatives; and
antisquat/guardianship/antikraak housing, as well as student housing of private- and association-owned
types. There are other types that fall under the radar due to being illegal or illicit: the obvious example
is subletting, which may have accounted for up to 20% of households in the first decade of the 21st
century (Ferwerda et al 2007, cited Musterd 2014). There are people who are not commonly counted as
being within the housing stock: those living in institutions, shelters and hospitals for the aged, ill and
vulnerable; street-sleepers; prisoners; sub-letters. Although the latter types of tenure (or, indeed, the
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lack thereof) exist in Amsterdam, they are not included or coded for in data for normative reasons of
people within them having ‘dropped out’ of society and/or the housing market, and thus lacking
coverage by housing surveys and having no fixed address to record. These alternative tenures are all
encouraged by the movement of all three major tenure types away from the middle in terms of
affordability and inaccessibility, leaving an increasing amount of people too poor to afford owner-
occupancy or free-sector rent, but too affluent to enter social housing. Yet entry to private social-rent
housing is not as strictly regulated as association-owned social housing (Uitermark 2009; Elsinga &
Wassenburg 2014), opening the way for deployments of social and economic capital. This might
perhaps manifest in a bribe, or perhaps exploitation of inequalities with other home-seekers to one’s
advantage (Hochstenbach & Boterman 2014). The result is often short-term housing in which
exploitation is more likely and security of tenure diminished (ibid). One source from which the scale of
these tenures might be gauged is the ‘other’ response to a question in WiA asking respondents to
categorise their previous tenure.
Research design
Research questions
Some research questions were formulated to calibrate this largely descriptive project. They are three,
and broadly summarise the themes under investigation:
1. Which socio-economic, cultural and life-cycle factors identifiable as answers to the WiA
surveys increase or decrease the propensity to move into privately-owned and association-
owned social housing in Amsterdam?
2. Are there significant differences between the two types of social housing, and between them
and non-social-rent forms of housing?
3. Are there any changes between the years studied; if so, can we infer any causes?
Research area
The area of study is the area within the municipal borders of Amsterdam, the capital and largest city of
the Netherlands. Amsterdam is a city of 834,713 registered residents as of 1st January 2016 (OIS 2016a:
64). It is fairly young, with the largest single age group being those aged in their mid-20s to mid-30s
(ibid: 62-63), and its population are spread through its seven residential stadsdeelen/boroughs and one
largely non-residential stadsdeel (Westpoort). The city consists of a high real-estate value and relatively
old (largely 16th to early 20th century) inner city within the A10 ring road, and a newer (largely post-
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War), largely lower-real estate value outer city outside the A10 (Savini et al 2016). The average
household income in 2013 was €31,800, but ranged from €21,600 for single households to €50,500 for
couples with young children (ibid: 23). The city is ethnically diverse, with 34.8% of the city categorised
as ‘non-Westerners’ and 48.3% as ‘Autochtoon’ (‘native Dutch’). But the ethnicities are unequally
spread through the city, being more concentrated in the outer part of the city (not to exclude large
pockets of diversity within the inner city too): for instance, stadsdeelen of Zuid-Ooost and Nieuw-West
have 63.7% and 51.5% ‘non-Western’ populations respectively, whilst stadsdeel Centrum has an 85.1%
‘Western’ (including Dutch) population (idem: 66).
Research design
A quantitative research design was adopted as the most appropriate approach towards finding adequate
answers to the research question. The aims of this thesis are to measure to what extent the explanatory
individual-level, household-level and neighbourhood-level variables relate to the dependent variable of
a recent move into social housing, and with each other too; and thereby establish what major factors are
statistically important in deciding who is likely to move into social housing (and which are not)— fine,
detailed measurements of interrelationships are best achieved through quantitative studies (Bryman
2012: 164-178). The thesis began life as a deductive project: the main aim was to measure
residualisation and test the ‘suburbanisation of poverty’ thesis (Hochstenbach & Musterd 2017) with a
broad philosophical basis of researching the changing ‘right to the city’ or lack thereof, in the vein of
David Harvey (2008). However, as the limitations of both the data (there were plans to also use the
OIS’ register data logging limited characteristics of every registered Amsterdam resident) and my own
capabilities (chiefly, time!) became apparent, and as did the richness and potential of the WiA data, the
aims and hypotheses of the project also changed. Eventually the project became more inductive as new
hypotheses were introduced in line with the findings. In terms of the scientific philosophy informing
how the findings should be interpreted, I adopt and recommend a critical realist approach (Bhaskar
1989, cited Bryman 2012: 616), appreciating the methodological rigour of the natural sciences but
recognising that there are other factors for which observation may be impossible or very difficult
(O’Mahoney et al 2014), for example factoring in all the aspects of vulnerability and personal crisis
from a survey in which people are not guaranteed to provide a correct answer, or any answer at all.
Therefore, try as it might, this thesis cannot expect to uncover the entire constellation of relationships
between and amongst individual, household and neighbourhood-level characteristics and one’s
propensity to move into social housing. The findings are as much to generate questions for future
research as to answer my own.
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Data: OIS’ Wonen in Amsterdam

‘Wonen in Amsterdam’ (WiA) was used for the dependent variable as well as the individual and
household-level explanatory variables. WiA is a biennial survey conducted by a partnership of the
Research, Information and Statistics department (OIS) of the Municipality of Amsterdam (Gemeente
Amsterdam) and the Amsterdam Federation of Housing Associations (AFWC), asking respondents a
variety of questions about their ‘housing situation, income, housing costs and housing needs’, including
opinion batteries gauging how they feel about their lifestyle and neighbourhood. The study population
for the survey in 2011 and 2013 is all people living in self-contained dwellings within Amsterdam, but
in 2015 it for the first time also includes those living within student and other larger specialised
residential complexes.
In 2011 the total sample was 17,900, in 2013 it was 18,920 and in 2015, 18,705 (OIS 2012a,
2014, 2016b). These are mostly done online and through hand-written surveys delivered by post, but a
small number are done face-to-face and by telephone, especially to meet targets that OIS set for
retrieving certain response rates from certain ethnic groups and neighbourhoods (OIS 2016b). The use
of relatively large-scale secondary data from WiA had benefits such as the generalisability of the
findings to the scale of the city of Amsterdam; the ability to focus in on very specific groups who may
have been missed out with data on a smaller scale; and the larger amount of time that could be spent on
analysing the data rather than gathering; and the possibility for others to re-attempt the work done here,
and modify the parameters and variables to their agenda (Bryman 2012: 312-316).
Limitations of the data
One limitation of the data is the sample size: although, as mentioned, it is large enough to focus in on
some specific groups, it was still too small to feasibly test for certain variables that would have been
interesting, especially those signifying specific responses to a larger number of variables in the survey
data. For instance, in a previous version of this project, ethnicities (except Autochtoon) were split into
first and second generations, but this led to dubious results as large shares of tiny sub-samples would
record for one housing pathway. The size limitation was also evident in the parts of the analyses dealing
with privately-owned social housing, though it accounts for a reasonable share of the research
population. For instance, there were no Turks recorded in the 2011 dataset who had gone into privately-
owned social housing. This also affected the feasibility of many possible interactions analyses
(combining two variables to analyse all the intersectional categories- see the ‘methods’ sub-section
below). Despite this, the WiA datasets are the best fit for our purposes, as they are they are arguably the
best compromise between richness of data and sample size. Athough the larger OIS population register
(recording some characteristics of all those registered in Amsterdam as of 1st January every year) is
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larger, it is much poorer in the range of variables, lacking crucial and arguably necessary controls,
chiefly income.
Furthermore, there are too few categories in some of the variables, most notably ethnicity and
gender. There are only two options with the ‘gender’ variable, which means that those identifying with
a non-binary option were not identifiable in the data. The limited choice in the surveys of six possible
ethnicities to identify also lead to some ethnicities being inherently invisible in the data. Extra (2007)
identifies four blindspots in terms of ethno-cultural categorisation in most Dutch statistical data: of third
and further generations of migrant-origin etnicities, who are classed as ‘Autochtoons’; different
ethnocultural groups of the same national origin (cf. Turks and Kurds from Turkey or Afro-Surinamese
and Indo-Surinamese from Suriname); groups of singular ethnocultural categorisation but multiple
national origins (cf. western migrants); and ethnocultural groups without territorial status (cf. Roma
people). Additional categories in the categorical variables would have reduced already small subsample
sizes, and it may be the case that these would render results dubious, as it did when ethnicities were
split by generation. However, the ability to focus on smaller groups might be useful for other studies
getting larger samples from the frame (of WiA surveys), and in any case, the homogenisation of
culturally and economically disparate groups under singular categories does not benefit the validity of
the results.
Methods
With our two discrete outcomes (a recent move into private social-rent housing, and a recent move into
association social-rent housing) and base outcome (recent moves into non-social-rent tenures, i.e. all
other pathways), a multinomial logistic regression model was an appropriate way to test for differences
between these, and also somewhat test the interrelationships between and amongst the explanatory
variables. Multinomial logistic regression models work by taking a dependent variable with more than
two outcomes, and using one of the outcomes as a ‘base outcome’. Our dependent variable’s predictor
outcomes are a move within the last two calendar years into either association-owned social housing,
or privately owned social housing; the base outcome is the respondent having moved in the last two
calendar years into a non-social housing form of tenancy. For nominal and ordinal categorical
explanatory variables (which make up 13 of 15 of our explanatory variables), each variable will have a
reference category too. For these, every score (coefficient) displayed shows the effect that a predictor
outcome (the displayed outcomes of the dependent variable) has on scoring positively for each non-
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reference category of the explanatory variables, relative to the reference category, and all this in
comparison to the same process occurring with the same explanatory variable in the base outcome—
and holding all the other variables constant. For the remaining two continuous variables (those
pertaining to number of people per household), the coefficient shows what a unit change of 1 (here, an
addition of one person) will have on one’s propensity to enter each form of social-rent housing, versus
non-social rent forms of housing. In brief, multinomial logistic regression models control for all
variables to show which variables and outcomes are still statistically important when the whole picture
(or at least, all the variables entered) is taken into consideration, holding each variable against the same
yardstick of the base outcome on the one hand and, within each variable, the same yardstick of that
variable’s reference category.
I also carried out predictive margins for the categorical variables in the multinomial models.
These show the probability that a respondent would score for an outcome of the dependent variable if
all respondents were of a certain category. The score for recent association social housing entrants in
2015 of the age group 18-25, then shows a number between 0 and 1 as 1 would be a positive response
to this outcome of the dependent variable and 0 a negative response, and respondents only scored one
or the other (the actual score here is 0.31, the second lowest of all age categories for this housing
pathway and year). This was especially useful for the private social housing models: even though the
results are somewhat less rigorous due to the fact that the results do not control for the effect of the
other variables, the lack of significant results for privately-owned social housing entrants meant that we
have to largely settle for these results. This statistical analysis was all done using the statistical software
STATA 14.
Variables and operationalisation

The variables used will now be explained and justified, along with, if relevant, any manipulations
applied to create them, and their limitations. I will begin by explaining the dependent variable, which
remained (relative to each survey) the same in both types of model, before going through the variables
in the individual and household-level analyses, and finally those from the neighbourhood-level
analyses. This study is novel in its higher level of disaggregation of ethnicity compared to Schutjens
(2002), Groot et al (2011; 2012), and Musterd (2014), with ethnicity split into 6 national-origin
categories; and previous tenure, compared to Groot et al (2011) and Groot et al (2012), splitting this
into six categories (as is in WiA) as opposed to their two (renter versus owner).
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Dependent variable: a recent move into either private-owned or association-owned

social housing
My dependent variable for each year was the respondent reporting having moved into their current
social-rent home within three years including the year of the survey, with responses split into one
category for privately-owned and one for association-owned social-rent homes. This was done through
combining one variable showing the date the respondent moved in, a second showing the category of
rent the respondent paid, and a third indicating who the proprietor of the house was. The reference
category here was all other moves during the same period into all other tenures: broadly, commodified
types of housing. The other tenure categories coded for that were included in the reference category
were non-social private rent, free-sector corporation rent, and owner-occupancy, but it is highly likely
that respondents recording any of the three outcomes also lived in another tenure type not coded for,
for instance institutional housing, sub-letting, co-operative housing, ‘social home ownership’, and
student housing, the latter of which is subsumed under corporation housing in the surveys. This variable
highlighted what is different and special about those moving into social housing, by comparing them
with the rest of the recently mobile population. By focusing on recent moves, this variable focuses on
changes in the human makeup and socio-spatial nature of social housing in Amsterdam. It also
highlights how, in terms of their makeup, privately-owned and association-owned social-rent housing
should be treated as two very different tenures. Comparing recent movers into social housing with the
existing tenants might give some idea of change within the social sectors, but this would necessitate at
least two additional non-multinomial logistic regression models, as well as new justifiable parameters
in terms of how long the reference category had lived in their current home. It is therefore perhaps a
topic for another study, as the findings of this one are plentiful enough.
The dependent variable did change from year to year, but remained relatively consistent: the
2011 survey included respondents who had moved since 2009, 2013 since 2011 and 2015 since 2013.
The rate limit for hose categorised as social renters corresponded in 2011 to those within the
‘cheap/goedkope’ and ‘affordable/betaalbare’ sections, that is, with rents under €653 a month. For 2013
and 2015, ‘social renters’ are classed as those whose rents are below the ‘liberatiegrens’ or
‘liberalisation bar’ which signifies relaxed rent controls and withdrawal of subsidies for tenants in rents
above it: in 2013 this was €665 and in 2015 €710. Below this, all rentals are considered social-rent.
There are differential income caps for each type of social-rent housing, with the cap for private social
housing much higher than for associations: for association housing this was €36,165 and for private
social housing €44,360 in 2017 (Gemeente Amsterdam n.d.).
Explanatory individual and household-level variables
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I: ethnicity. This is split into six categories of regional and national origin: Autochtoon; Turkish;
Moroccan; other non-Western; Western migrant; and Surinamese/Antillean.
II: gender of respondent. This was based on a single variable in all three surveys that shows whether a
respondent is male or female, with the reference category as ‘male’ and with a third ‘missing’ category,
which shows when a response was missing or, in the case of 2011 when it also includes, in the case of
face-to-face interviews, when the surveyor did not know. This might account for other gender identities,
which are not coded for in the surveys, but most likely also comprises mistakes and omissions.
III: age of respondent in categories. This ordinal variable grouped respondents into five categories
based on parameters of age, with an 18-25 group, followed by two ten-year categories (26-35; 36-45),
a group signifying mature working age (46-65) and a final group for over 65s. The last group is the
reference category.
IV: respondent is a student in fulltime education. This dichotomous nominal variable could only be
gleamed for 2013 and 2015, yet was included in those models because it is an important control on
many of the other variables, not least age. This is also important as a control, as WIA does not list
student housing in terms of current tenure as different from association or private social housing. The
reference category is ‘not in fulltime education’.
V: highest qualification of respondent. This ordinal variable codes respondents into five categories:
basic education; ‘VSO, VBO etc’, corresponding to secondary education; HAVO and VWO,
corresponding to higher general and pre-university education; university education, including
polytechnics/hogescholen- the reference category; plus a category for a ‘missing’ response. In
Amsterdam, 39% of the population are classed as ‘highly [i.e., university] educated’, compared to a
Netherlands national average of 25% (OIS 2016a: 14), a 1% rise from 2012 (OIS 2012b: 15).
VI: respondent’s household is a family household. This variable controls for if a household had children
living at home, versus the reference category in the case they didn’t.
VII: respondent’s household is a single-person household. Dichotomous nominal variable controlling

for if there was only one person living at the respondent’s household (i.e., themselves), versus the
reference category of the household having more than one person living there.
VIII: number of people living in the household. Along with its quadric counterpart below, one of the
only continuous or ratio variables in the models- shows the effect that an increase of one person in a
household has on the likelihood of the dependent variable’s outcome, controlling for all the other
variables.
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IX: number of people living in the household, squared. Shows the non-linear effect that an increase of
one person per household has on the likelihood of the dependent variable’s outcome, controlling for all
the other variables.
X: respondent’s previous home was outside Amsterdam. This dichotomous nominal value coded for if
the respondent’s previous home was outside Amsterdam, but within the Netherlands. This therefore
controls somewhat for the insider/outsider dichotomy in Amsterdam.
XI: respondent’s previous living situation. Nominal variable showing what the respondent’s previous
tenure situation was, grouped into six categories: renting a single room or student housing; living with
friends, family or others, which may be seen to largely show those who have just left their family home,
but also may show a more precarious form of tenure where respondents lived with others because they
did not have their own home; private rental (not differentiating between social-rent and non-social-
rent); renting from housing associations (not necessarily, but overwhelmingly social-rent: see section
‘Residential mobility’ subsection ‘…tenure landscape…’); owner occupancy (the reference category);
and ‘other’, which includes institutional housing and homelessness, and may also include subletting, so
therefore is a good indicator of more precarious housing types.
XII: respondent is a new arrival to the Netherlands. A dichotomous ordinal value indicating whether
respondents arrived in the Netherlands in the past 10 years. This value was chosen bearing in mind the
long waiting lists for association social housing.
XIII: income category of respondent. Ordinal category grouping respondents into household income
categories: below low income threshold, which in 2015 meant those single-adult households earning up
to €1438 and multi-adult households earning up to €1775 (AFWC 2015); low income up to modal
income (for 2011) or EU bar (see section ‘…zenith and decline…’) for social housing entry (2013 and
2015); modal income up to €43,000 (2011 and 2015) or €43,785 (2013); €43,000 or €43,785 up to 1.5x
modal income; 1.5x to 2x modal income; >2x modal income.
XIV: household heads have no wage. This is a nominal dichotomous variable, showing if neither the
respondent nor their possible partner received income from work.
XV: cash welfare. Nominal dichotomous variable showing if the respondent received UWV financial
assistance due to disability or unemployment. In 2011 and 2015 the variable is based on the institution
that the respondent received the assistance from; in 2013 the variable is based on the reason (i.e.,
disability or unemployment). This initially included a third outcome, ‘receipt of pensions’, as in
Musterd’s (2014) study, but this was eventually found to be undesirable in the models due to their large
26 | P a g e
collinearity with age (and nothing else much), which made older age groups appear less or not
significant.
Results
Descriptive statistics
In this section, the main findings of the descriptive statistics will first be described before a section
containing 13 stacked bar charts showing the relative percentages outcomes per model, this is a concise
way to do this. Full descriptive statistics are in appendices a, b, and c.
Most WIA respondents in 2011, 2013 and 2015 who reported moving in the preceding three
years were following housing pathways other than moves into social housing (graphs 1-3). For 2011
and 2013, those moving into association social housing made up just over a third of all recent moves,
and those going into private social housing made up 8.5%-9%. In 2015, the proportion of those
actualising non-social housing moves rose to 64%, with private social movers rising slightly to 10.1%,
and association-social moves dropping to a quarter of all recent moves. This is a substantial change,
and may reflect the success of government policy to reduce social housing in favour of owner-
occupation. In terms of age, recent movers to private social housing (graphs 6-8) have a much older age
profile than association social housing (graphs 4-6), with the youngest two groups (18-25 and 26-35
years) making up more than two thirds of the former. This may be down to the better accessibility of
private social housing for younger people due to the waiting periods: even if one applies for association
social housing at the age of 18, one could reasonably expect to wait a decade to be allotted a home.
Association-owned social housing has far higher percentages of non-Westerners than privately-owned
social housing, the latter being never less than 80% Western including never less than 70%
Autochtoon— in fact, the 2011 survey registered no Turkish people moving to private-owned social
homes at all.
By contrast, although Autochtoons make up about or just over half of recent movers into
association social housing for all years, non-Westerners make up a substantial proportion too, with over
40% in total in 2015, with ‘other non-Westerners’, ‘Surinamese and Antilleans’ and Moroccans making
up the more substantial part of this—Turkish respondents never make up more than 5%. Therefore, we
can see a clear ethnic split between the two, with association social housing being far more diverse
ethnically. At 60.9% of the total population of Amsterdam (OIS 2016a: 38), Autochtoons are
overrepresented in private social sector entrants and underrepresented in the association sector in-flow.
‘Other non-Westerners’, who make up 6.6% of the city’s overall population (idem), are the most
overrepresented regarding recent association-social entrants, constituting more than 13% of association-
27 | P a g e
social entrants in 2015. One interesting finding is that females are hugely overrepresented in private
social housing but males are slightly underrepresented in association social housing, a clear gender split.
The fact that the ‘missing’ category for ‘gender’ in the association-social housing pathway may be
significant, as there are no non-binary gender options in any survey: assigned males are over three times
more likely to receive gender reassignment treatment in the Netherlands (Kesteren et al 1996), which
probably reflects levels of gender dysmorphia and non-binarity. Yet, to attribute the prevalence of the
‘missing’ category to these two facts alone would be a fallacy in lieu of any hard evidence—mistakes
and illegible answers surely make up a part of this too.
The lowest income category make up the largest group by far for association social housing
entrants, rising through the three years to reach 47% in 2015. The proportion of recent entrants earning
over the mode or EU bar moving to the sector never reaches much higher than 10%, and so reflects the
EU recommendations for allowing 10% of dwellings to vulnerable people based on non-income related
criteria, even in 2011. Private social entrants are somewhat more spread out in terms of income, but
those entrants earning higher incomes do drop as a percentage, from about one-third earning above the
mode in 2011, to a quarter earning above the EU bar in 2013, and then down to around a fifth in 2015.
The lowest income category sees significant growth through the three surveys, from just over a quarter
in 2011 to a third in 2015. The largest growth in this sector, however, was from the ‘missing category’.
We cannot come to any definitive conclusions based on this, but given that most missing data in the
income category is likely to be of the item nonresponse type (i.e., the respondent gave answers to other
questions in the survey), we could infer that a non-response here was most often a matter of choice
rather than the respondent being excluded from the sampling frame.
In terms of the housing pathways of recent entrants into association social housing, those
moving between association-owned rental homes were by far the largest group, but that housing
pathway’s dominance still fell progressively and significantly over the three surveys, from 44.48% in
2011 to 34.17% in 2015. The greatest gainer seemed to be the single room or student home rental
category, gaining 5% from 2011 to 2015, which could well be down to the aforementioned novel
inclusion of large student dwellings in the 2015 survey, but otherwise the gains were spread over the
other sectors. The second-largest housing pathway to association social housing in 2015 was from living
with friends, family or others, raising the question of association housing’s major role in taking in
people from precarious tenancy situations, from care, or even as a first home: there are a few ways this
could be interpreted. With privately-owned social-rent housing, recent entrants coming from renting a
single room or student housing, living with acquaintances and family, and from private rental take up
the top three spots in all three surveys. By 2015, a clear hierarchy between the three is in place, with
those coming from the single room/student home category being the most common at over one third,
28 | P a g e
followed by the living with friends/family/others category at just over one quarter, and those coming
from private rentals at 16.85%. Both social-rent sectors take in comparable proportions (relative to their
total intake) of former owner-occupiers (3% - 6%), which a downgrading in either case; and of those
coming from ‘other’ tenures (6.6% - 8.4%), demonstrating they are both still significant destinations
for people from precarious and institutional tenures.
Graphs: change over time of the housing pathway tendencies (as a proportion) of sub-
sample categories in this study
The thirteen graphs beginning overleaf show the change in the proportions of each category of each
variable going into each of the three housing pathway types measured in this study, to help the reader
visualise the different shares of categories, and the changes over time in the data. For the exact sample
sizes and percentages, see the descriptive statistics in appendix a. Please note that the data does not
pertain to the population Amsterdam as a whole, but the research sample: that is, the respondents to
Wonen in Amsterdam in 2011, 2013 and 2015 who had moved into their current home within the last
two calendar years.
29 | P a g e
Key
Aut. Autochtoon
Turk. Turkish
Mor. Moroccan
ONW Other Non-
Western
WM Western
Migrant
Suti/Ant Surinamese/
Antillean
30 | P a g e
Key
Elem. Elementary
Second. Secondary
Uni. University
Voc. Vocational
Oth./ Other/
Miss. missing
31 | P a g e
32 | P a g e
Key
a. single room/
student housing
b. friends/ family/
others
c. private rentals
d. rented from
association
e. owner
occupation
oth. other
33 | P a g e
34 | P a g e
Notes
* ‘Mode’ in
2011; ‘EU
limit/
boundary’
in 2013
and 2015
** €43,000 in
2011 and
2015;
€43,785 in
2013
35 | P a g e
Multinomial logistic regressions

This section is largely a run-through of the numbers in the multinomial regression models, to point out
the changes in the results as variables are added, and the changes in the strength of the variables relative
to one another, from to one year to the next. Table 1 shows 2011; table 2 shows 2013; and table 3, 2015.
Fit of models
For the individual and household characteristic models, 2011 has a pseudo-r2 of 0.3886, 2013’s value
is 0.3411 and 2015’s is 0.3109. These are reasonable pseudo-r2s, and given the relatively large number
of predictors in the model, and that the pseudo-r2 that Stata uses (McFadden’s r2) penalises prolific use
of variables, as well as that the overall p-score for each model was at the 99.99% confidence level, these
pseudo-r2s are sufficient.
Multicollinearity of socio-economic variables
Given the legislation passed in 2011 tying eligibility for social housing entry overwhelmingly to
income, we would expect, for 2013 and 2015, that income would have high multicollinearity, meaning
that income is correlated strongly with both the dependent variables and many of the explanatory
variables, including some that are not included in the models, and potentially some not directly in the
data at all. Because of this, the inclusion of income in the multinomial models has a very strong effect
36 | P a g e
on the other variables. Therefore, I have created estimation tables for the models that have two models
without, and then one with, the income variables: ‘income by category’; the ‘receiving social assistance’
categorical variable showing social assistance payment receipt; and the ‘no work-related income’
dichotomous nominal variable. We can see, looking at the estimation models, that introducing income
variables greatly changes the models for all years- in fact, the effect of income as a confounder of the
other variables can be interpreted to be as strong in 2011 as in 2013 and 2015. This came as a surprise,
as I was expecting a much more tangible difference, given that 90% of entrants to social housing would,
after 2011, be vetted on much narrower and stricter parameters of income than before.
The influence that the introduction of income and social assistance have on the models for
association-movers is far greater than that for private-movers, which is also not surprising given how
much more tightly and closely regulated the former institution is than the latter. For association social
housing entrants, looking at the predictor of having a basic education in 2011, the introduction of
income and social assistance lowers the coefficient by more than 0.9, in 2013 by 0.7 and in 2015 by
more than 1.0: the reductions in 2011 and 2015 being the largest two changes created by introducing
those variables. This shows that education is greatly bound up with income as a factor explaining this
particular housing pathway. However, even with private movers, one could draw completely different
conclusions from the models with income, to those without: one could say that, in both 2013 and 2015,
recent movers to private social-rent housing were fairly likely to be students, but once income is
controlled for, the significance of this variable disappears. This shows that there is a relationship
between moving to private social housing and being a student, but this relationship is better explained
by socio-economic factors instead: student tenure is stratified by income or (less likely) receipt of social
assistance. For 2011, being in the Moroccan ethnic category is the strongest predictor (after low income)
of a recent move into private social housing in the second model, versus the reference category,
controlling for other variables and compared to the base outcome, and is the second-strongest predictor
out of all outcomes once income is introduced, showing that much of Moroccans’ propensity to move
into private social housing compared with Autochtoons is not better explained by income considerations
instead or by their receipt of social assistance funds. In sum, other factors remain strong indicators of
the dependent variables, showing that, despite legislation focusing solely on income as a criterion
governing for whom it is appropriate to live in social-rent homes, many other considerations continue
to be important.
Predictive margins
After the multinomial logistic regression models were calculated, the predictive margins for all
categorical variables, for all three dependent variable outcomes and all three survey-years, were
37 | P a g e
calculated. These will be discussed as we progress through the models to help to reach a clear and
correct interpretation of the models. However, one drawback of predictive margins is that they do not
control for the other explanatory variables, as the multinomial logistic regression models do (although
they compare the probability of one dependent variable outcome against the other outcomes), so they
should only be used as a supplement to the regression models. The category with the highest probability
(not controlling for the other variables) for a move into association-owned social housing (table 9) was
the ‘Moroccan’ outcome of the ‘ethnicity’ variable in 2011 and 2015 (it was the second-strongest
category in 2013), and the second-strongest category for 2011 and 2015 was the ‘low income’ category
of the ‘income group’ variable, which was also the first-strongest predictive margin category in 2013.
These two categories are the only ones to score above 0.5 for this pathway, meaning that if all recently-
moving respondents had identified in the survey with these categories then more than 50% of them
would have moved into association-owned social housing rather than the two other housing pathway
outcomes measured in the dependent variable. Other strong predictors in these models include the
‘Turkish’ ethnic category (although less so in 2015), having a more basic level of education (especially
in 2011 and 2013), and being a receiver of financial social assistance.
For recent movers to privately-owned social housing (table 10), strongest predictor categories
were far less constant. The top predictor, not controlling for the other variables, was the ‘missing’
response to the ‘gender’ variable in 2011, the ‘low income – EU boundary’ income category in 2013,
and the ‘other’ response to the question recording previous housing situation in 2015. One of the only
constant results is that being in the ‘18-25’ age group is the strongest category of age and (relative to
the other categories in the model) a strong predictor, remaining in the top five predictive margin
categories across the years for recent movers to private social-rent housing. The key word in this last
sentence, it should be kept in mind, is ‘relative’, as the predictive margins for this housing pathway only
reach 0.18 at their pinnacle (‘other’ previous living situation, 2015), dwarfed by the other types of
housing in Amsterdam, overwhelmingly the two ‘giants’: association social-rent and owner occupancy.
The results for non-social-rent forms of housing will not be discussed here in depth as they have
less resonance for the multinomial models, but they are testament to the fact that, taken as stand-alone
categories, most socio-demographic groups in Amsterdam, if one were to generalise, rely on
commodified and less regulated, non-social-rent forms of housing as a destination to move into, save
for certain groups such as Moroccans and people below the low-income line. Turkish respondents and
‘Other non-Western’ score below 0.5 only in 2013. People whose highest qualification was
‘elementary-level’ have a score below 0.5 in 2011 and 2013, and those for whom it is ‘secondary-level’
in 2011 do too; as do those receiving financial social assistance in 2011. These were the exceptions: if
respondents of every other category across the models and years were viewed without controlling for
38 | P a g e
the other variables, they would all have more than 0.5 probability of moving to non-social-rent forms
of housing if they moved in the last 2 years.
How to read the models
With continuous variables, the coefficients show the effect on the propensity to achieve a predictor
outcome of the dependent variable that a 1-unit increase in that continuous variable would have, relative
to the same process with the base outcome of the dependent variable. The significance levels, displayed
in the form of asterisks next to the coefficients, show the P-score, indicating the percentage level of
confidence with which we can reject the null hypothesis that an outcome (coefficient) is equal to zero,
with three asterisks (***) signifying ≥99%; two (**) asterisks, ≥95% and <99%; and one asterisk (*)
≥90% but <95% confidence that we can reject the null hypothesis. No asterisks mean that we cannot
reject the null hypothesis with an acceptable degree of certainty, leaving the outcome statistically
insignificant. So, for movers into association-social housing, the score for ‘46-65’ in the variable ‘age
groups’ in 2013 (-0.7604**) shows that, controlling for all the other outcomes in the model, the
propensity for 46-65 year olds to move into association social housing relative to the propensity for the
reference category (over 65-year olds) to do the same is fairly negative, when compared to the mirrored
process into non-social-rent housing, and we can accept that statistic with a good degree of confidence.
For that same predictor outcome of the dependent variable and year, the score for ‘people per household’
(-0.2866*) shows that, controlling for the other outcomes, an increase of one person in a household
would have a negative effect on one’s propensity to have recently entered association social housing,
and that this outcome is also negative in comparison to the same relative movement into non-social
housing. We can accept that statistic with a sufficient degree of confidence too.
The models
Individual- and household-levels: Recent movers into association-owned social-rent homes
We can see in all tables a large drop in coefficients for most variables from the first model to the second,
which suggests that the effect on individuals’ likelihood of this housing pathway of much of these
largely birth-assigned characteristics are better explained by household and economic criteria. When
income and social assistance are introduced, we see further, often equally large drops in coefficients
across most outcomes, and where this occurs we can interpret disappearances of significance as meaning
that it is, statistically, not scoring for that outcome that explains the relationship with that housing
pathway, but income-related criteria instead. This is an effect that we see strongly in 2011, as well as
in 2013 and 2015. In fact, the change that the introduction of income and social assistance creates is the
39 | P a g e
Table 1: Multinomial logistic regression, recent moves into social housing vs non-social-rent pathways, individual & household-level
variables, 2011 coefficients. (base outcome: recent movers to non-social-rent housing)
Variable Association social rental entrants Private social rental entrants
Ethnicity (refcat: Autochtoon)
Turkish 1.6850*** 1.3297*** 1.1114** -14.694 -14.1669 -13.0179
Moroccan 3.1351*** 2.6222*** 2.8008*** 1.5102** 1.6962** 1.9429***
Other Non-Western 1.2056*** 0.7393*** 0.5608* 0.3487 0.4242 0.4216
Western Migrant 0.0416 0.0525 0.1304 -0.2905 -0.1001 -0.014
Surinamese/ Antillean 1.5200*** 0.9930*** 0.9083*** 0.1207 0.0468 0.0309
Gender (refcat: male)
Female 0.3418*** 0.207 -0.0256 0.5557*** 0.3562* 0.1671
missing 0.106 -0.514 -0.8421** 0.3998 0.4731 0.5305
Age group (years) (refcat: >65)
18-25 -0.4166* -0.267 -0.4584 1.6861*** 1.3055** 1.0405*
26-35 -2.2618*** -1.6285*** -1.1984*** 0.2761 0.1506 0.2877
36-45 -2.1063*** -1.5139*** -1.2017*** -0.7334 -0.5904 -0.486
46-65 -1.1198*** -0.7124** -0.7604** -0.6 -0.4784 -0.449
Education level (refcat:
university)
elementary 2.5658*** 1.6276*** 1.138 0.7023
secondary 2.0729*** 1.4958*** 1.1063** 0.7972*
Pre-university/ vocational 1.0075*** 0.5850*** 0.5316** 0.2464
other/ missing 1.2904*** 0.7472** 0.3036 0.1117
Family household with children 0.5416** 0.2392 0.5859* 0.3986
Single-person household 0.7079*** -0.0943 0.6384* -0.0773
People per household -0.3463** -0.2866* -0.4669* -0.4064*
People per household squared 0.0034** 0.0028* 0.0039 0.0033
Moved from outside Amsterdam -0.0839 -0.0305 -0.2071 -0.1734
Previous living situation (refcat:
owner occupancy)
Single room/ student 2.4190*** 1.9745*** 1.7207*** 1.3991***
Lived with familiar(s) 2.3033*** 1.7548*** 1.5030*** 1.1231**
Private rental 1.3948*** 1.3074*** 1.4087*** 1.3505***
Association rental 2.5849*** 2.3857*** 0.9271** 0.7569*
other 2.4814*** 1.8951*** 1.6946*** 1.2527**
Migrated to NL ≤10 years ago -0.0464 -0.0454 -0.4212 -0.323
Income group (refcat: >2x modal
income)
low income 3.9460*** 2.8827***
Low income -EU limit 3.1875*** 2.3942***
EU limit - €43,000 2.2976*** 2.1341***
€43,000- 1.5x modal income 1.2950*** 0.8138
1.5x - 2x modal 0.7703* 0.8554*
missing 2.4610*** 1.2529***
No wage from work 0.6675*** 0.2822
Receives financial social
assistance 1.1253*** 0.5356
_constant 0.4700** -2.1079*** -3.9516*** -2.4729*** -3.2005*** -4.2237***
N 3110 3073 3073 3110 3073 3073
r2_p 0.1438 0.2877 0.3886 0.1438 0.2877 0.3886
legend: * p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001
lowest in 2013, despite being after 2011’s legislation, only two coefficients changing 0.5 or more either
way, and both towards zero (ethnic category Moroccans’ dropping -0.5; Age category ’26-35’ moving
+0.5).
40 | P a g e
In 2015 we see the greatest change when income and social security are added, especially to
the education level ‘basic’ (a drop of -1 towards 0, though it remains a strong predictor), as well as in
other outcomes for ‘education level’, ‘age category’ and the ‘single-person household’ dichotomous
nominal variable. The effect of income and social security being introduced is usually to weaken other
variables by taking the coefficients closer to 0. Yet in 2011 the introduction of income has the effect of
strengthening as a predictor the ethnic category of being Moroccan (+0.2). In 2013 this does not happen,
with the introduction of income dampening the effect of that ethnic category versus the reference
category, taking that coefficient -0.3 towards 0 and in 2015 -0.1 towards 0. This shows that in 2011,
ethnicity (specifically, being Moroccan), stands out as an independent predictor, but this is probably
due to its inherent intersections with other socio-economic and demographic criteria: there are many
‘invisible’ intermediary factors between ethnicity and social housing entry. The change from 2013 could
be down to increasing stratification of Moroccans along income lines. It remains to be seen whether
this same trend will be continued in WIA 2017, though it seems likely as the same legislation is in place.
No coefficients not mentioned above change by any more than 0.1 away from 0 in any model.
The strongest predictor for all WIA surveys for recent moves to association-owned social
housing is the ‘low income’ outcome for the ‘income category’ variable, with ‘>2x modal income’ as
the reference category. The other income outcome ‘low- EU limit (2013 & 2015) / modal income
(2011)’ versus reference category ‘>2x modal income’ is also, in 2011 and 2013 the second strongest
predictor (in 2013 it is the third-strongest, behind the ‘missing’ income category versus reference
category ‘>2x modal income’). The difference between and the next-strongest predictor after the income
categories is always considerable: the gap is 1.8 in 2011, 2.1 in 2013 and 1.76 in 2015 (versus the
ethnicity category ‘Moroccan’ versus reference category ‘Autochtoon’). Other income predictors
remain strong relative to the reference category and descend neatly in strength as the income increases,
and in 2015 the score for the category of the second highest income, ‘1.5-2x modal income’, becomes
insignificant versus the highest-income (reference) category, showing that entry to this form of housing
has become as statistically unlikely for the second-wealthiest category as for the wealthiest. In 2011
and 2013 this category was only barely significant, at the 90% confidence level. The variable for neither
respondent nor possible partner having a wage from work (‘no wage’) is a fair predictor versus the
reference category of having an income from work, showing some relationship between this outcome
and entering association social housing, controlling for the other variables.
‘Ethnicity’ categories versus the reference category Autochtoon, as stated, always contains the
third-strongest predictor (after the income categories ‘low income’ and ‘low – EU limit/mode’) of a
move to association-owned social housing, which is always the Moroccan outcome (versus the
41 | P a g e
reference category of Autochtoon), controlling for other variables and versus recent moves into non-
social-rent housing. This shows the Moroccan community as particularly predisposed in their housing
habitus towards association social housing. They are also the only ethnic group in the predictive margins
for this housing pathway to score above 0.5 (all years; Appendix c: table 9), confirming that they as a
group are especially predisposed towards association social housing when they move. Indeed, in 2011
and 2015, of all the categories in the predictive margins, the ethnic category ‘Moroccans’ was the
strongest, and in 2013 the second strongest scorer. These show that, should all recently moving
respondents have identified as ‘Moroccan’, then more than 50% of them would have entered
association-owned social housing for any of the years. However, the number falls through all three from
59% in 2011 to 51% in 2015. They are the only ethnic category to score above 0.5 for the predictive
margins in all, indeed any, of the models for this housing pathway. Returning to the multinomial
regression models, another constant is that all ‘non-Western’ groups, where significant, score positively,
meaning their habitus is more predisposed than Autochtoons towards association-social housing.
Another thing that repeats itself throughout the surveys is the other ethnic category ‘Western migrant’
never coming up as significant versus the reference category, compared with the base outcome and
controlling for the other variables, showing that, despite being present in the in-flows into association
social housing, their housing habitus as regards this housing pathway is indistinguishable from
Autochtoons, and we can infer this means a tendency towards commodified (non-social) housing. This
is confirmed by the predictive margins (appendix c tables 8-10), which show that, without, being a
Western migrant always gives a similar score to Autochtoon for all three measured housing pathways/
pathway groups.
Turkish, Surinamese/Antillean and ‘other non-Western’ people also score positively, but fluctuate in
their relative position. Surinamese and Antilleans are in 2011 the third most likely group, and in 2015
they are the second most likely group after Moroccans, to effect a move into association-owned social
housing, versus Autochtoons, against the same comparison of ethnicities for the base outcome of a
move into non-social housing in the same time period and controlling for all the other variables. In 2013
they score quite low compared to others (but still having a positive propensity to move into association
social housing). ‘Other non-Westerners’ also score positively but lower than other ethnicities. Where
significant, the coefficient for Turks is always either in 2nd (2011, 2013) or 3rd place (2015) behind
Moroccans. ‘Other non-Westerners’ score fairly in 2011 and 2015 after their coefficient rises above 1.0
in 2013. Thus, we can see a picture in which all ‘non-Western’ groups are more likely in each year to
move into association social housing than Autochtoons, but Moroccans remain the most likely as a
group, and where the difference between Autochtoons and ‘Western migrants’ is not statistically
significant, though their sample size would be large enough to show such a difference if it indeed
42 | P a g e
Turkish 1.4732*** 1.2955*** 1.2312*** -0.6683 -0.2578 -0.3676
Moroccan 2.1132*** 2.0968*** 1.6413*** -0.1176 0.4768 0.1611
Other non-Western 1.6806*** 1.5145*** 1.0896*** 0.7305** 0.6109* 0.3391
Western Migrant -0.0303 0.0341 -0.0336 -0.0730 -0.0930 -0.1360
Surinamese/Antillean 1.2676*** 0.9409*** 0.7251*** 0.3727 0.2889 0.0685
Female 0.3243*** 0.1990* 0.0710 0.3030* 0.2293 0.1106
missing 0.3171 0.1047 0.0351 -0.0901 -0.0720 -0.1273
18-25 -0.1605 -0.9854*** -0.5648* 0.7232** -0.1137 0.1801
26-35 -2.0960*** -1.5892*** -0.8065*** -0.6277** -0.7755** -0.2070
36-45 -2.0419*** -1.0944*** -0.5331* -1.4923*** -1.1881*** -0.7338*
46-65 -0.8253*** -0.3998* 0.0399 -0.7532** -0.6149* -0.2378
Education level (refcat: university)
elementary 1.7985*** 1.0657*** 0.7863* 0.2859
secondary 1.6273*** 0.9121*** 0.3583 -0.1717
Pre-university/ vocational 0.7255*** 0.3081* 0.1165 -0.2254
other/ missing 0.9195*** 0.4985* 0.1082 -0.1350
Student 1.6884*** 1.1660*** 0.6264** 0.2720
Family household with children 0.1725 -0.1585 0.0084 -0.2759
Single-person household 0.9443*** 0.4145 0.3457 -0.2068
People per household -0.3536 -0.2041 -0.8295** -0.6932*
People per household squared 0.0210 0.0100 0.0602* 0.0505
Moved from outside Amsterdam -0.4973*** -0.5425*** -0.0685 -0.0708
Previous living situation (refcat: owner
occupancy)
Single room/ student 2.2674*** 1.7861*** 1.6791*** 1.3219***
Lived with familiar(s) 1.9874*** 1.4944*** 1.7409*** 1.3392***
Private rental 1.1878*** 0.9496*** 1.2572*** 1.1129***
Association rental 2.0408*** 1.7405*** 0.8995** 0.6699*
other 2.3925*** 1.9028*** 1.8673*** 1.4872***
Migrated to NL ≤10 years ago -0.2842* -0.2229 -0.0223 0.0788
income)
low income 3.5480*** 2.6113***
EU limit - €43,000 1.3154*** 1.1616***
€43,000- 1.5x modal income 1.2052*** 1.1302**
1.5x - 2x modal 0.7482* 0.3361
missing 2.3222*** 1.3836***
No wage from work 0.2206 0.3331
Receives financial social assistance 0.4741** 0.2122
_cons 0.2193 -2.1300*** -3.9775*** -1.5452*** -1.6892** -2.9199***
3704 3619 3619 3704 3619 3619
N
R2_p 0.1210 0.2647 0.3411 0.1210 0.2647 0.3411
existed. The considerable fluctuations between years for ‘Other non-Westerners’ is of interest, and
could be down to the fact that ethnic groups are usually tied to their certain areas, and, as should now
43 | P a g e
be clear, to certain tenures; and that a programme of urban change, for example demolition and
refurbishment, in one or more specific areas affiliated with a certain ethnicity may mean that they move
into the housing in higher or lower numbers than usual, as dwellings become available or perhaps
change to more expensive tenure types. It could also be due to the high degree of heterogeneity of this
ethnic category, with the combination of these two suggestions meaning that, perhaps, there was a
development in an area favoured by a certain, larger ‘other non-Western’ group that skewed the results
for this year. This heterogeneity, however, can also be seen as a reason to cast doubt on the results for
this category as a whole.
After the introduction of income, the ‘female’ gender outcome, with reference category ‘male’,
and against the base outcome, is never significant, controlling for the other variables. However, in 2011,
the ‘missing’ response for gender becomes significant against ‘male’ once income is introduced, and is
notably negative (-0.8421**). Again, we cannot draw solid conclusions from this, but the fact that those
with a ‘missing’ response to gender are statistically prone to enter housing largely reserved for
vulnerable people begs the question of whether they fit other profiles in terms of aspects both gaugeable
within the surveys such as ethnicity and income, and ungaugeable, such as actual gender identification.
Where it shows as statistically significant, recently residentially mobile respondents in age groups of
65 years of age or under are always less likely than the reference category of those above 65 years to
move into social housing owned by associations, when measured against the same comparison for the
base outcome and controlling for the other variables. The groups with the lowest propensity to actualise
this housing pathway, versus the reference category and base outcome, are the 36-45 year group in
2011, the 26-35 year-old group in 2013, and the 18-25 year-old group in 2015, versus the reference
category of respondents over 65 years of age. The 46-65 year group does not show as significant versus
the ‘older than 65’ reference category for 2013, which we may interpret as showing that there was no
statistical contrast between people in their late working life and people over 65 in terms of this housing
pathway, when compared to non-social-rent housing pathways. In 2015 it returns at the >90%
confidence level recording a reasonably negative relationship with the dependent variable, versus the
reference category of ‘over 65 years old’ and controlling for the other variables.
44 | P a g e
In education, too, as we go ‘up’ the scale of education, as one’s education level increases, so
does one’s propensity to enter association-owned social housing decrease. One notable change from
2011 to the later surveys is the fading importance of secondary education (VSO, VBO, etc) compared
to university education as a predictor of recent association-social housing as only in 2011 does it have
a coefficient of more than 1.0. That the predictor of having elementary education (compared with
university education) as the highest qualification of the respondent remains so much stronger than
secondary education (versus university education) underlines the change in the sector towards one in
which only those with very small amounts of social and economic capital are appropriate tenants. This
is confirmed by the predictive margins (appendix c, table 9), which record a sharp cleavage between
‘elementary’ and ‘secondary’ education as stand-alone predictors in 2015. The variable of being
currently in full-time education (the variable, ‘student’) is a strong predictor (reference category ‘not in
full-time education’) of social housing entry in 2013, but in 2015 its effect is no longer significant after
income and social security are added. This is borne out by the predictive margins as well, where in 2013
if all recently-moving respondents were full-time students, 46% of them would be moving into
association social housing, whereas the figure is only 27% in 2015. Given the clear split along tenure
lines of the student population and differences in tenure habitus between student and non-student
population, it seems that in 2015, the relationship between studenthood and mobility into association-
owned social housing is better explained by factors of income and/or receipt of social security, as once
they are introduced there is no legible statistical relationship in the regression model.
Although family households make up from a quarter (2011) to 36% (2015) of recent movers
into association-social housing, and though the proportion grows through each survey, once income is
controlled for it is not significant for any of the years, when compared to the reference category of a
non-family household, and compared to the base outcome of movers into non-social housing. This
suggests that being a family household does not make you predisposed to enter association social
housing as compared to non-social housing pathways, and that they are stratified along other lines. In
2011 and 2013 this is true for the dichotomous nominal ‘single-person household’ variable, too, but in
2015 this variable remains just about significant, if weak, showing that in 2015, for the first time in this
study there is some statistical likelihood that single-person households moving to a new home will be
moving into association social housing, as opposed to multi-person households and movers into the
commodified (non-social) sector, and controlling for the other outcomes in the model. The continuous
variable, ‘number of people per household’, is only significant in 2011, where having more people
living in a household decreases the propensity of a respondent having recently moved into social
housing, and the quadratic term suggests that this effect is non-linear and increases in strength as the
household size increases, too. The dichotomous variable for the respondent’s previously home being
45 | P a g e
outside of Amsterdam (within the Netherlands) is only significant for 2013, being notably negative,
possibly suggesting that Amsterdam’s social housing is not a ‘launch pad’ for newcomers into
Amsterdam, though it may provide them with security once they are settled. Another dichotomous
nominal variable ‘new arrival’, which codes for if the respondent has lived in the country for 10 years
or less, also is only significant in 2013 and has a negative coefficient.
Each outcome for the nominal variable ‘previous housing situation’, compared with the
reference category of ‘owner occupation’ (versus that same comparison of housing pathway origins for
movers into non-social-rent housing—the base outcome— and controlling for all the other variables)
is, for every year, a good predictor of a move into association social housing, demonstrating that current
tenure has a strong impact on one’s propensity to make that move. This is not surprising, given the
aforementioned relationships between tenure, socio-economic situation and life-course (de Groot et al
2010; de Groot et al 2011; Hamnett 2015). It also shows the disparity between the likely housing
pathways of owner-occupiers (the reference category) and the rest, but less so with private renters. In
2011, coming from association housing (social-rent, but also free-sector rent) was the best housing
pathway origin predictor, followed fairly far behind by ‘singe room/student housing’, after which
‘other’ housing, ‘friends/family/others’, and in last place, but still a strong predictor, ‘private rental’.
This suggests a large circular flow of residents within association housing in this year. However, in
2013, ‘other’ housing as a former tenure rises two places to become the origin of the most likely tenants
to move into association social housing, swapping third place with ‘association housing’. In 2015 the
‘other’ category is still strong, but is in second place, but is beaten to 1st place by the outcome of having
moved from ‘living with friends, family or others’. This shift of the ‘other’ category might be put down
to the 2011 legislation, which made sure that it was people who were vulnerable and low income—
institutional and precarious tenants and homeless people surely correspond to this—who were
prioritised as entrants to social housing. However, it is likely also partly down to—it certainly isn’t
helped by—the long waiting lists for association social housing, which may leave many people unable
to afford or find secure forms of housing whilst they wait. The rise of the ‘friends, family, or others’
outcome may show that, for 2015, association social housing became a likely first home for first-time
movers, but this category could also be a sign of precarious living too, in the mould of the homeless
people ‘of no fixed address’ who move around acquaintances’ homes. The concomitant fall of
association housing through the years may be down to falling mobility out of that sector, due to factors
discouraging moves out (chiefly waiting lists and falling stocks of social housing to move into). A
recent move from private social housing into association social housing, is the constant least-likely
housing pathway origin (compared with from owner occupation). It seems to increasingly lag behind
the others through the survey-years, its coefficient becoming much closer to 0 and thus indicating the
46 | P a g e
difference between the habitus of private renters and owner-occupiers in their relationship to this
housing pathway is narrowing.
The ‘social security’ outcome for the variable ‘financial assistance’, versus the reference
category of receiving no pension or social assistance, and against the mirror comparison for the base
outcome of recent movers into non-social housing, is a strong and highly significant predictor of a recent
move to association social housing in 2011. From 2013, however, it drops greatly to a coefficient of
below 1.0. Association social housing, while still of importance for them, is by far not the exclusive
tenure of social security benefit claimants.
Individual- and household-levels: Recent movers into privately-owned social-rent homes
Here too, there are great changes in terms of the scores and significance levels when income is
introduced. In 2011, as with recent movers to association-social housing, the significance and
coefficients of the outcome of being Moroccan rises through all the models, suggesting that for this
year, being Moroccan is a stand-alone predictor of entry to the sector. Also, the ‘other non-Western’
category is significant and a positive predictor in 2013 in the first and second models, but becomes
insignificant after income and social security receipt are controlled for, suggesting that, in this year,
‘other non-Westerners’ were stratified along the lines of either or both of those variables, but probably
the former, in terms of their likely housing pathways. Both these ethnic categories are as opposed to the
reference category of being Autochtoon, compared to the base outcome and controlling for the other
variables in the models.
The outcome of being female, versus the reference category of being male and versus the base
outcome, drops to below significance when income is added, as do the dichotomous variables of being
in a family household and being in a single-person household (bearing in mind reference categories, the
base outcome, and controlling for other variables. Having ‘higher general/ vocational’ education,
compared to the reference category of having graduate-level education, ceases to be significant once
income and social assistance are added. This suggests that the effect these predictors seem to have on
our dependent variable here are better explained by income-related factors instead.
For this form of social housing, too, the multinomial models show us that, when other factors
are controlled for, being in the lowest income group is always the best predictor of having recently
moved in (when compared to the reference category of the respondent’s household earning >2x the
modal income, against the parallel comparison for the base outcome of movers into non-social housing),
with the effect decreasing through the categories as income increases, where it is significant. In absolute
47 | P a g e
terms, the lowest income group is not nearly as powerful a predictor as with association-owned social
housing, and in relative terms too (measuring the difference between the coefficient for that outcome
and the next-highest coefficient). Propensity to move into privately-owned social-rent housing, where
significant, descends in an uneven yet linear way when compared with the reference category as
earnings increase. Yet, in 2011 and 2013, the predictive margins show that, when the effects of other
variables are not controlled for, more affluent income groups had slightly higher probabilities of
entering this form of housing than the ‘low income’ group, its broader diversity of incomes (though still
below the upper limit for entry to privately-owned social housing of around €44,000 [Gemeente
Amsterdam n.d.])
In terms of ethnicity, the small numbers of non-Autochtoon ethnicities entering private social
rentals, and the similarities in terms of proportions of Autochtoons moving to ‘non-social-rent housing’
(Autochtoons being the reference category) mean that ethnic comparisons for entry into this form of
housing are insignificant, shown by the lack of significant coefficients for any minority group in the
third models of 2013 and 2015. However, in 2011, ethnic outcomes are as important a source of
predictors as with for association social housing, albeit only for Moroccans. However, as their relative
share disappears from this housing pathway in these surveys, their presence in the coefficients becomes
statistically negligible. Indeed, the predictive margins for 2013 and 2015 show a picture where ‘other
non-Westerners’, Moroccans and Turks have far lower propensities to move into privately-owned social
housing, if their numbers allow them to bring them into statistical significance (cf. Turks in 2013 and
Moroccans in 2015) at all. This result is much stronger in 2015 than 2015, and the predictive margins
for 2011 might lead us to believe that private social housing entrants that year were not economically
stratified at all. The result is that, as far as analysis of the respondents to the WiA surveys can tell us,
private social housing seems to be a sector in which more economically integrated groups (Surinamese/
Antilleans, Western migrants, and Autochtoons) are the only ones exhibiting any group tendency to
enter.
For 2011, no age categories register as significant in the third model, which may be down to
the small number of respondents in the reference category (over 65s). In 2013, only the 26-35 year age
group remains significant after income and social security receipt are introduced, and this shows that
recent movers are less likely to be moving into private social housing if they are in the 36-45 year age
group than if they were over 65. That the private social housing sector is more of an option for younger
age groups is underlined by the predictive margins, where the age group ’18-25’ is always in the top
four categories. Yet, as we can see from the descriptive statistics that 18-35 year-olds make up two
thirds of the recent intake for that year, and that many age outcomes are significant in the second model,
48 | P a g e
we can assume, reading between the lines given to us by these three analyses, much of the relationship
between age and entry to the sector for this year is better explained by other variables, likely university-
level education, controlling for the other variables.
No outcomes of the education level variable are significant in 2013 or 2015, but in 2015 the
category ‘pre-university or vocational education’ scores as highly significant before income is
introduced, suggesting there was a slight tendency for people with an intermediate level of education to
move to this type of housing, but that this tendency was better explained by the habitus of their income
bracket or their receipt of social security. The predictive margins show us that, compared to association-
social housing where the groups with the highest propensity to enter privately-owned social housing
are the progressively lower-qualified groups, the respondents that had recently moved into privately-
owned social housing tended more to the median levels of education, with a spread (albeit somewhat
uneven) across all qualification levels. Returning to the multinomial models, a slight propensity to for
both family and single households being the ones moving to this housing also disappear when income
and social assistance are introduced. Increasing household population has a negative impact on
propensity to have recently moved into private social housing in 2011, but the effect seems to be linear,
as the quadratic term is not significant. In 2013, the coefficient of this variable is considerably negative,
and the quadratic term is significant and shows that the larger the household of the mover, the less likely
they are to be moving to private social housing versus other non-social tenures. There is no statistical
relationship to say that movers into private social housing are any more or less likely to be from the
Netherlands outside of Amsterdam, nor have migrated to the Netherlands in the past ten years, when all
other variables are controlled for.
49 | P a g e
Other Non-Western 1.2392*** 0.8589*** 0.7463*** -0.1775 -0.1836 -0.2365
Western Migrant -0.0774 -0.0129 -0.0916 -0.0583 0.0282 -0.0008
Turkish 1.5517*** 1.1224*** 0.8082* -0.1716 -0.056 -0.256
Moroccan 2.7534*** 2.1995*** 2.0406*** -0.4815 -0.4887 -0.5814
Surinamese/Antillean 1.9123*** 1.2771*** 1.0613*** 0.7759** 0.5567 0.4483
Female 0.2024* 0.1636 0.0163 0.2388 0.2617* 0.1474
missing 0.5735 0.3087 0.291 0.1769 0.1683 0.0334
18-25 -0.235 -1.2910*** -1.0033** 2.6565*** 1.5931** 2.0135***
26-35 -1.5217*** -1.4512*** -0.8792** 1.2153* 0.9908 1.6155**
36-45 -1.1364*** -1.0755*** -0.5743* 0.3269 0.2553 0.8445
46-65 -0.8008*** -0.7981*** -0.6324* 0.4325 0.4392 0.8572
Education level (refcat: university)
elementary 2.1306*** 1.0872*** 0.2937 -0.4517
secondary 1.2715*** 0.6195** 0.6422 0.2277
Pre-university/ vocational 0.6736*** 0.3155* 0.5560*** 0.3264
other/ missing 0.4908* 0.1853 0.0283 -0.1038
student 0.9488*** 0.3273 0.5769** 0.1122
Family household with children 0.8179*** 0.34 -0.2526 -0.4952
Single-person household 1.0712*** 0.4794* 0.8467*** 0.2515
People per household -0.1844 -0.0143 0.0716 0.0783
People per household squared 0.0154 0.0057 -0.0031 -0.0041
Moved from outside Amsterdam -0.0526 0.036 0.2218 0.2695
Previous living situation (refcat:
owner occupancy)
Single room/ student 1.8573*** 1.4801*** 1.2055*** 1.0009**
Lived with familiar(s) 1.6499*** 1.2491*** 0.8330** 0.5869
Private rental 0.6536** 0.6505** 0.4984 0.4899
Association rental 1.6174*** 1.3481*** 0.4609 0.3091
other 2.0341*** 1.4425*** 1.7705*** 1.3992***
Migrated to NL ≤10 years ago 0.0202 0.0438 -0.0317 -0.0411
income)
low income 3.8027*** 2.2296***
EU limit - €43,000 1.4675*** 1.1061***
€43,000- 1.5x modal income 1.3829** -0.062
1.5x - 2x modal 0.7318 0.5967
missing 2.5037*** 1.2945***
No wage from work 0.4240* 0.5248**
Receives financial social assistance 0.6132** 0.2755
_cons -0.5106** -2.4337*** -4.5213*** -3.2786*** -4.4694*** -5.5410***
N 3214 3183 3183 3214 3183 3183
r2_p 0.121 0.2247 0.3109 0.121 0.2247 0.3109
legend: * p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001
50 | P a g e
Although all categories of previous tenure are positive predictors of the dependent variable here
(compared to the reference category of coming from owner occupation, and to the parallel comparison
for the base outcome of a move into non-social-rent housing, and controlling for the other variables),
coming from a single room or student home is the strongest predictor, followed by coming from private
rentals in 2011, in 2013 the ‘other’ category is the strongest predictor followed by ‘living with friends,
family, or others’, and in 2015 it is the ‘other’ category followed by coming from a single room or
student home. This also shows the rise of precarious and institutional housing as an origin of social
housing tenants, and to a similar degree in 2013 to recent association social housing entrants, and in
2015 even more so. In 2011, secondary-level education is the only significant educational predictor
when compared to Although association rental as a previous tenure also scores positively against owner
occupation, it is a much weaker predictor than any of the rest, being in 2011 and 2013 the only tenure
scoring below 1.0. In 2015, the only housing pathway outcomes that remain significant after income
and social security are added are those from ‘other’ forms of tenure, and also ‘single room/student
housing’, only the former of which is above 1.0. We might infer from this that, in 2015, tenants going
to private social housing were likely to be either settling from precarious forms of housing, or moving
into their first home.
Discussion
The results will now be discussed comparatively and in a broader manner, staring with the individual
and household-level regression models, before we move on to the neighbourhood models.
Recent movers to the association-owned social rent sector
The association social sector caters for a very different set of tenants to the (re)commodified part of
Amsterdam’s housing sector. Residualisation, if it had not occurred before, has certainly happened by
now, and in explicitly tying the entry requirements of movers into this tenure to a definition of
vulnerability based on income for the vast majority, and personal circumstances for the rest, then it
seems that it was the point of the 2011 legislation. But the increase in the propensity of low-income
movers to be moving into the association-owned social housing sector from 2013 to 2015 might also be
suggestive of the increasing lack of choice that these people have in terms of where they can move, in
a housing environment where other tenures are increasingly out of reach. Yet this is in line with trends
observed from the 1980s to the 1990s (Schutjens et al 2002) and into the late 2000s (Musterd 2014),
and so the tenant profile after 2011 seems not as much to shift with the legislation as continue along
51 | P a g e
trajectory it was previously on. This suggests that the legislation largely set in stone, or possibly only
somewhat accelerated, changes that had been occurring in the sector for quite some time, even though
entry parameters before 2011 did not exclude those with a modal income. Some changes are still
noteworthy (for instance, with housing pathway and education) but the shift in other places is less
profound than expected.
Many of the changes observed in this study reflect changes observed in other studies, or that
can be gleamed by comparing them. The move towards smaller, non-family households as observed
between Schutjens et al’s (2002) study and Musterd’s (2014) study, the reliance of certain ethno-cultural
groups and the lower-educated on association social housing— these have all continued. Despite the
strict income criteria only coming into force in 2011, there is much continuity with those studies in that
there is still significant propensity for medium-high income groups to enter the sector when compared
with the very richest sector, when one might expect this contrast to be much weaker as they are all
increasingly shut out. These higher-income people may have experienced a rise in wages since they
entered the sector, or might have entered the sector based on other criteria than income. However,
compared with these studies, there are larger gaps between all income categories, showing that, once
all our variables are controlled for, there is evidence that residualisation in the sector is deepening (if
not yet completed, in that there is room for further residualisation: ideal-type residualisation might see
higher-income earners’ disappearance as even disabled, ill (etc) ones might be expected to pay higher
rents). With our models, continuities, followed by divergence—a trackable change, in other words—
in educational attributes of association-social tenants can be seen with Musterd’s (2014) study, with the
elementarily-educated being the most likely group to enter, followed by the secondary school-educated
in 2011, as in his study (ibid), but after 2011 the secondary-educated progressively fall away and decline
greatly in their propensity to enter association-social housing, the increasing difference between even
the secondarily- and elementarily-educated people demonstrating just how residualised the sector is
becoming. Receipt of social security payments also decreases in importance as a predictor, which could
also mirror the decline in cash-based benefits within the Dutch welfare state (Eleveld & van Vliet 2013:
14-21).
The results by ethnicity show that, after 2011 as before, tenure and housing pathway tendency
are very closely wedded to the ethnicity of the individual taking them. The results are very changeable
but the general patterns are that non-Westerners, Moroccans in particular, are likely to move into
association-social housing compared to Autochtoons, and in this regard they stand out amongst the 6
ethnic categories. This is likely down to their lesser economic prospects, and thus their higher likelihood
of matching up to entry criteria, than Autochtoons. Autochtoons and ‘Western migrants’ are not
significantly different from one another in their far higher propensity to take housing pathways into
52 | P a g e
commodified forms of housing in all years. They still (together) make up a slight majority of the
entrants, but are more inclined to head to the other forms of tenure. In this way, it might be said non-
Westerners in general are still inclined towards the association social housing sector.
A certain change that can be tracked from Schutjens’ et al (2002) to Musterd’s (2014) study,
and on to this one, is the divergence from the commodified sector in terms of household size, with
single-person households becoming increasingly likely to move to the association-social sector. This
figure is somewhat of a mismatch with the higher birth-rates and higher average household sizes of
immigrants and non-Western-origin people (Bontje & Latten 2005; Zorlu & Mulder 2008), coupled
with their lower incomes (OIS 2016a: 23) and therefore higher ‘suitability’ for social housing. Of course,
not all association social housing-bound households are non-Western, and the only thing for certain
from the data here is that entrants to this tenure seem to be trending towards smaller households.
Nevertheless, it does appear that a key demographic who are reliant on association social housing (i.e.,
non-Western migrant-background people) could be subject to longer waiting times if they have larger
families, if the available stock continues moving towards single-person households. In any case, larger
households should not be left behind, no matter what the citywide and nationwide trends may be
regarding household size. Analysis of profiles of those on waiting lists is necessary to gauge the scale
of this potential problem, and if it exists at all.
Students are likely to go into association social housing in the city in 2013, and in 2015 before
income is controlled for, suggesting that more affluent students might opt for free-market private rentals
(or, less likely, owner-occupation): perhaps to avoid risking the waiting list and competition, or have
more agency over the location of their home. Yet the influence of students here is not surprising given
the large stock of social housing rented out by associations such as De Key and DUWO in the city. The
large number of student homes constructed in 2015 (AFWC 2016: 39), the endurance of new student
housing in urban plans and housing association projects (e.g., DUWO 2015), and the fact that recent-
mover students are most likely to move into association-social housing (Appendix a) show
‘studenthood’ must be controlled for in future similar studies, both as a control on age (and vice versa)
and to track the importance of its influence on the tenure structure of Amsterdam.
The results for both of the variables ‘new arrival’ and ‘moved from the Netherlands outside
Amsterdam’ suggest that there is no significant difference between association-social and commodified
forms of housing at best (2011 and 2015) and that it is less open to them, at worst (2013): the tenure is
not more open to ‘outsiders’ than commodified forms of housing. The figure for ‘new arrivals’ could
be due to the fact that the in-migrant structure of Amsterdam is tending towards newcomers originating
from more affluent countries (OIS 2016a: 45), and internal migrants probably at least initially tend
towards the non-association sector, their entry to association housing discouraged by the waiting lists.
53 | P a g e
One of the interesting finds of this study is the changing origins of housing pathways into
association-social housing. Entrants are most likely to come from any other form of housing than owner-
occupation. The association-social-to-association-social (circular) pathways fall from 1st to 3rd place
after 2011, but still remains a strong predictor, showing the decline—but by no means fall—of circular
movements of association-social tenants, perhaps mirroring decreased mobility in, and availability of,
the sector. Its replacement with the ‘other’ housing pathway origin category in 1st place in 2013 suggests
the rise, relative to the other tenures, of precarious, institutional, illicit and/or any number of non-
mainstream housing types as a tenure for people on the association social housing waiting list in
Amsterdam. This could be simply a reflection of the vulnerable status of the precariously and
institutionally-housed and homeless, and the eligibility of these often lowly-waged (if waged at all)
groups. But it could also show the lack of accessible and affordable stable housing alternatives for
people who meet the entry criteria, and, in contrast with Hochstenbach & Boterman’s example of these
people looking to the private rental sector (2014), resorting to these ‘other’ tenure types while they
move up on the waiting list. The ‘single room/student house’ and ‘lived with friend/family/others’
outcomes also score highly, and represent tenure types that are often either precarious or occur at the
beginning of a lifetime housing pathway. In 2015 the paramountcy of the outcome of having ‘lived in
a single room or student accommodation’ may be suggestive of the associations’ increasing attention
given to special arrangements for young first-time renters, such as the tijdelijke verhuur/ short-term
contract tenancies that are cheap and available at short notice, if often low-quality (with some utilities
such as hot water sometimes missing) and insecure (with some associations not providing proper
contracts and evicting tenants at short notice). The rise of the ‘other’ pathway origin category potentially
shows association housing to increasingly be an option mitigating personal crisis or away from
exploitative sublet landlords, though, to borrow Schtujens (2002) et al’s phrasing, this ‘haven’ status is
more by default than design, and besides is a haven for increasingly few people, including as a
proportion from many of these vulnerable groups (see graphs, especially 4, 8, and 10).
Recent movers to the privately-owned social-rent sector
It is clear from the results that in many ways, the private social-rent sector resembles the commodified
part of the housing market. It is residualised in terms of income, with movers from the ‘low income’
category scoring the highest. But it seems to be a very different group of lower-income people coming
in to the sector than the association-owned social rent sector. They, for instance, ethnically resemble
those taking the housing pathways into commodified housing: disproportionately
Surinamese/Antillean, Western and Dutch, compared to the proportions by ethnicity of the city as a
54 | P a g e
whole (See Appendix a; cf OIS 2016a: 38). The age profile of these incomers is much younger than
those going into association-owned social housing. The aforementioned fall of secondary education as
a predictor for recent entry into association-owned social housing also occurs with private-owned
social-rentals, and after this, it seems they are much less stratified in terms of educational attainment
than non-social-rent housing or association social-rent housing, if we look at the predictive margins.
The form of housing pathway they have realised with their move into private social housing is still most
likely to be originating from precarious, institutional and alternative housing (the ‘other’ category), and
by 2015 this is the most likely housing origin, and only this and entrants’ high propensity to also come
from a single room or student housing remain significant. With the small n’s and dearth of significant
figures in the multinomial models, there can be less certainty about which variables are most important
when the whole picture is considered. The results that we do get from this, and the predictive margins,
tell us that lower-(not necessarily the lowest) income earners, younger people and those from a range
of educational backgrounds, from more economically integrated-ethnicity backgrounds, are more drawn
to this form of housing.
Conclusion
It is clear that many of the most vulnerable groups: the lower-educated, those from a minority ethnic
background, the old, the unwaged, those coming out of precarious or institutional housing— that people
from these kinds of backgrounds are still reliant on association-owned social housing. Although after
2011 low income becomes the predominant predictor of entry, there is only so much that it can be
untangled from other socio-economic criteria, some of which, most notably for this study ethnicity, is
assigned at birth. That Moroccans in particular can be singled out as being especially dependent on
association-owned social housing is testament to their lack of economic prospects and should be a cause
of concern.
A major change observed in this study after 2011 relates to housing pathways originating from
‘other’ tenure types, corresponding to tenures that are broadly precarious and/or temporary:
homelessness, institutional, alternative and illicit. The rise of these as predictors of entry to association-
owned social housing may be broadly suggestive of a housing landscape where there is a race away
from the middle in terms of accessibility of the major tenure types, and where other tenure types such
as housing guardianship and subletting are filling the void, pulling people who must take the most
55 | P a g e
affordable and accessible option they can find. It may also be a sign of people coming from long-term
illnesses, homelessness and incarceration increasingly relying on social housing. It could be both, but
it is probably not neither of them. It is however, certainly an indicator of the increasing vulnerability of
association social housing tenants. All the while, entrants to the stock of social-rent housing owned by
private entities increasingly resemble the entrants of commodified housing in all but their younger and
lower-waged profile, which suggests that this is more of a launch pad for people starting off in their
productive life, but with more social, cultural and even economic capital to deploy, if not (yet) a decent
income.
There seems to be a mismatch between the increasingly strict regulation of social housing entry
and the end goal of housing deregulation. There is also a mismatch between the reliance of some groups
on social-rent housing (especially that owned by associations) and the continued pressure on the
associations from government for commodification whilst making both social and non-social housing
unattainable. This is akin to encouraging one across the tightrope whilst removing the netting. If the
government wants to encourage ownership and marketisation, this is counter-productive, current policy
will only increase housing precariousness for many and the proliferation of illicit and unstable tenure
types, which could eventually have deep negative socio-economic effects and even further decrease
these groups’ ability to move into commodified housing should they desire it.
This thesis aimed to bring up to date the tenant profile of entrants into social housing and factor
in changes since 2011, at a high level of ethnic and housing pathway disaggregation. In this aim, it
succeeded, but also did not answer a few and instead deepened their intrigue, and generated another
good few new questions. These include: what are the intergenerational dynamics within ethnic groups
regarding housing pathways? What are the tenure strategies of vulnerable and low-income
Amsterdammers on social housing waiting lists? Who exactly are those coming into social housing
from ‘other’ tenure pathways? What is the profile of subletters? How long do different intersectional
groups spend on social housing waiting lists? What explains the different ethnic profiles of association
and private-owned social renters? And, will the decreasing strength of ethnic predictors observed in this
study continue? These topics, and the wider topic of social change within each part of Amsterdam’s
complex tenure landscape are signs of much wider shifts that must be closely monitored in years to
come, starting with the forthcoming Wonen in Amsterdam 2017 data.
56 | P a g e
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Appendix a: descriptive statistics, categorical variables
Table 6: table of descriptive statistics for dependent variable outcomes

2011 2013 2015
%
moves to… Freq. % Cum. Freq. % Cum. Freq. Cum.
…
commodified
housing 1,806 57.87 57.87 2,086 56.32 56.32 2,104 64.17 64.17
… association
social-rent
housing 1,051 33.68 91.54 1,281 34.58 90.9 815 24.86 89.02
… privately-
owned social-
rent housing 264 8.46 100 337 9.1 100 360 10.98 100
Total 3,121 100 3,704 100 3,279 100
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Table 7: Descriptive statistics, explanatory categorical variables

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
Column % Other Other Other
moves Assoc. Pvt. moves Assoc. Pvt. moves Assoc. Pvt.
Social social Social social Social social
Variable rent rent total rent rent total rent rent total
Ethnicities
Autochtoon 1,281 553 200 2,034 1,476 726 244 2,446 1,402 386 254 2,042
62.98 27.19 9.83 100 60.34 29.68 9.98 100 68.66 18.9 12.44 100
70.93 52.62 75.76 65.17 70.76 56.67 72.4 66.04 66.63 47.36 70.56 62.28
Turkish 33 48 0 81 33 42 2 77 27 29 3 59
40.74 59.26 0 100 42.86 54.55 2.6 100 45.76 49.15 5.08 100
1.83 4.57 0 2.6 1.58 3.28 0.59 2.08 1.28 3.56 0.83 1.8
Moroccan 13 90 7 110 30 74 3 107 25 84 2 111

11.82 81.82 6.36 100 28.04 69.16 2.8 100 22.52 75.68 1.8 100
0.72 8.56 2.65 3.52 1.44 5.78 0.89 2.89 1.19 10.31 0.56 3.39
Other Non-Western 101 109 16 226 84 148 21 253 143 114 18 275
44.69 48.23 7.08 100 33.2 58.5 8.3 100 52 41.45 6.55 100
5.59 10.37 6.06 7.24 4.03 11.55 6.23 6.83 6.8 13.99 5 8.39
Western Migrant 311 124 31 466 385 159 52 596 445 101 63 609
66.74 26.61 6.65 100 64.6 26.68 8.72 100 73.07 16.58 10.34 100
17.22 11.8 11.74 14.93 18.46 12.41 15.43 16.09 21.15 12.39 17.5 18.57
64 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
Surinamese/ Antillean 67 127 10 204 78 132 15 225 62 101 20 183

32.84 62.25 4.9 100 34.67 58.67 6.67 100 33.88 55.19 10.93 100
3.71 12.08 3.79 6.54 3.74 10.3 4.45 6.07 2.95 12.39 5.56 5.58
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2,104 815 360 3,279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Gender
M 950 465 90 1,505 1,079 561 143 1,783 1.003 348 128 1.479
63.12 30.9 5.98 100 60.52 31.46 8.02 100 67.82 23.53 8.65 100.00
52.75 44.46 34.22 48.39 51.73 43.79 42.43 48.14 48.57 43.88 35.96 46.02
F 753 518 157 1,428 909 624 181 1,714 1.034 423 224 1.681
52.73 36.27 10.99 100 53.03 36.41 10.56 100 61.51 25.16 13.33 100.00
41.81 49.52 59.7 45.92 43.58 48.71 53.71 46.27 50.07 53.34 62.92 52.30
missing 98 63 16 177 98 96 13 207 28 22 4 54

55.37 35.59 9.04 100 47.34 46.38 6.28 100 51.85 40.74 7.41 100.00
65 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
5.44 6.02 6.08 5.69 4.7 7.49 3.86 5.59 1.36 2.77 1.12 1.68
Total 1,801 1,046 263 3,110 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.065 793 356 3.214
57.91 33.63 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.25 24.67 11.08 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
Age group
18-25 134 212 87 433 199 293 105 597 268 186 165 619
30.95 48.96 20.09 100 33.33 49.08 17.59 100 43.30 30.05 26.66 100.00
7.42 20.17 32.95 13.87 9.54 22.87 31.16 16.12 12.74 22.82 45.83 18.88
26-35 862 257 129 1,248 912 238 125 1,275 983 238 145 1,366
69.07 20.59 10.34 100 71.53 18.67 9.8 100 71.96 17.42 10.61 100.00
47.73 24.45 48.86 39.99 43.72 18.58 37.09 34.42 46.72 29.20 40.28 41.66
36-45 445 164 23 632 415 125 24 564 391 133 22 546
70.41 25.95 3.64 100 73.58 22.16 4.26 100 71.61 24.36 4.03 100.00
24.64 15.6 8.71 20.25 19.89 9.76 7.12 15.23 18.58 16.32 6.11 16.65
46-65 302 274 18 594 424 387 50 861 365 174 24 563
50.84 46.13 3.03 100 49.25 44.95 5.81 100 64.83 30.91 4.26 100.00
66 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
16.72 26.07 6.82 19.03 20.33 30.21 14.84 23.25 17.35 21.35 6.67 17.17
>65 63 144 7 214 136 238 33 407 97 84 4 185

29.44 67.29 3.27 100 33.42 58.48 8.11 100 52.43 45.41 2.16 100.00
3.49 13.7 2.65 6.86 6.52 18.58 9.79 10.99 4.61 10.31 1.11 5.64
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.104 815 360 3,279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
Education level
Elementary 13 148 4 165 33 162 13 208 21 87 3 111
7.88 89.7 2.42 100 15.87 77.88 6.25 100 18.92 78.38 2.70 100.00
0.72 14.08 1.52 5.29 1.58 12.65 3.86 5.62 1.00 10.67 0.83 3.39
Secondary 53 176 11 240 86 230 17 333 68 107 11 186

22.08 73.33 4.58 100 25.83 69.07 5.11 100 36.56 57.53 5.91 100.00
2.93 16.75 4.17 7.69 4.12 17.95 5.04 8.99 3.23 13.13 3.06 5.67
Pre-University, Vocational 238 256 58 552 262 295 60 617 266 217 109 592
43.12 46.38 10.51 100 42.46 47.81 9.72 100 44.93 36.66 18.41 100.00
67 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
13.18 24.36 21.97 17.69 12.56 23.03 17.8 16.66 12.64 26.63 30.28 18.05
University education 1,397 362 174 1,933 1,590 462 228 2,280 1.609 333 220 2.162
72.27 18.73 9 100 69.74 20.26 10 100 74.42 15.40 10.18 100.00
77.35 34.44 65.91 61.94 76.22 36.07 67.66 61.56 76.47 40.86 61.11 65.93
Missing/Other 105 109 17 231 115 132 19 266 140 71 17 228

45.45 47.19 7.36 100 43.23 49.62 7.14 100 61.40 31.14 7.46 100.00
5.81 10.37 6.44 7.4 5.51 10.3 5.64 7.18 6.65 8.71 4.72 6.95
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.104 815 360 3.279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
Currently student 0 asmov psmov Total 0 asmov psmov Total
Not student 1,437 5,444 1,651 8,532 1,339 613 210 2,162
16.84 63.81 19.35 100 61.93 28.35 9.71 100
93.55 94.66 92.7 94.09 93.64 75.21 58.33 82.99
Student 99 307 130 536 91 202 150 443
68 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
18.47 57.28 24.25 100 20.54 45.6 33.86 100
6.45 5.34 7.3 5.91 6.36 24.79 41.67 17.01
Total 1,536 5,751 1,781 9,068 1,430 815 360 2,605

16.94 63.42 19.64 100 54.89 31.29 13.82 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Family household w/
children
Non-family household 1,352 807 229 2,388 1,581 1,070 307 2,958 1.732 659 339 2.73
56.62 33.79 9.59 100 53.45 36.17 10.38 100 63.44 24.14 12.42 100.00
74.86 76.78 86.74 76.51 75.79 83.53 91.1 79.86 82.32 80.86 94.17 83.26
Family household 454 244 35 733 505 211 30 746 372 156 21 549
61.94 33.29 4.77 100 67.69 28.28 4.02 100 67.76 28.42 3.83 100.00
25.14 23.22 13.26 23.49 24.21 16.47 8.9 20.14 17.68 19.14 5.83 16.74
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.104 815 360 3.279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
Single-person household
69 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
single 1,176 439 94 1,709 1,372 465 119 1,956 1.385 328 152 1.865
68.81 25.69 5.5 100 70.14 23.77 6.08 100 74.26 17.59 8.15 100.00
65.12 41.77 35.61 54.76 65.77 36.3 35.31 52.81 65.83 40.25 42.22 56.88
Not single 630 612 170 1,412 714 816 218 1,748 719 487 208 1.414
44.62 43.34 12.04 100 40.85 46.68 12.47 100 50.85 34.44 14.71 100.00
34.88 58.23 64.39 45.24 34.23 63.7 64.69 47.19 34.17 59.75 57.78 43.12
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.104 815 360 3.279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
New arrival (10 years or
less in Netherlands)
no 1,443 842 230 2,515 1,674 1,091 279 3,044 1.595 615 288 2.498
57.38 33.48 9.15 100 54.99 35.84 9.17 100 63.85 24.62 11.53 100.00
79.9 80.11 87.12 80.58 80.25 85.17 82.79 82.18 75.81 75.46 80.00 76.18
yes 363 209 34 606 412 190 58 660 509 200 72 781
59.9 34.49 5.61 100 62.42 28.79 8.79 100 65.17 25.61 9.22 100.00
20.1 19.89 12.88 19.42 19.75 14.83 17.21 17.82 24.19 24.54 20.00 23.82
70 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2.104 815 360 3.279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100.00
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
Moved from NL outside
Amsterdam
No 1,320 822 194 2,336 1,492 1,039 227 2,758 1,433 589 210 2,232
56.51 35.19 8.3 100 54.1 37.67 8.23 100 64.2 26.39 9.41 100
73.09 78.21 73.48 74.85 71.52 81.11 67.36 74.46 68.11 72.27 58.33 68.07
Yes 486 229 70 785 594 242 110 946 671 226 150 1,047
61.91 29.17 8.92 100 62.79 25.58 11.63 100 64.09 21.59 14.33 100
26.91 21.79 26.52 25.15 28.48 18.89 32.64 25.54 31.89 27.73 41.67 31.93
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2,104 815 360 3,279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Previous tenure
single room/ student home 201 136 72 409 245 233 78 556 287 150 118 555
49.14 33.25 17.6 100 44.06 41.91 14.03 100 51.71 27.03 21.26 100
71 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
11.23 13.18 27.48 13.26 11.92 18.65 23.78 15.31 13.73 18.84 33.15 17.11
living w/ friends, family,

etc 178 198 55 431 223 226 83 532 264 182 96 542
41.3 45.94 12.76 100 41.92 42.48 15.6 100 48.71 33.58 17.71 100
9.94 19.19 20.99 13.98 10.85 18.09 25.3 14.65 12.63 22.86 26.97 16.71
private rental 482 122 71 675 597 164 79 840 643 91 60 794
71.41 18.07 10.52 100 71.07 19.52 9.4 100 80.98 11.46 7.56 100
26.93 11.82 27.1 21.89 29.05 13.13 24.09 23.13 30.75 11.43 16.85 24.48
association rental 325 459 30 814 415 492 44 951 347 272 32 651
39.93 56.39 3.69 100 43.64 51.74 4.63 100 53.3 41.78 4.92 100
18.16 44.48 11.45 26.39 20.19 39.39 13.41 26.18 16.59 34.17 8.99 20.07
home owner 529 40 14 583 499 51 20 570 471 43 20 534

90.74 6.86 2.4 100 87.54 8.95 3.51 100 88.2 8.05 3.75 100
29.55 3.88 5.34 18.9 24.28 4.08 6.1 15.69 22.53 5.4 5.62 16.47
other 75 77 20 172 76 83 24 183 79 58 30 167
72 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
43.6 44.77 11.63 100 41.53 45.36 13.11 100 47.31 34.73 17.96 100
4.19 7.46 7.63 5.58 3.7 6.65 7.32 5.04 3.78 7.29 8.43 5.15
Total 1,790 1,032 262 3,084 2,055 1,249 328 3,632 2,091 796 356 3,243
58.04 33.46 8.5 100 56.58 34.39 9.03 100 64.48 24.55 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Income category
low income 83 402 75 560 113 547 102 762 145 387 122 654
14.82 71.79 13.39 100 14.83 71.78 13.39 100 22.17 59.17 18.65 100
4.6 38.25 28.41 17.94 5.42 42.7 30.27 20.57 6.89 47.48 33.89 19.95
low-EU limit/mode 146 177 65 388 175 170 76 421 229 116 67 412
37.63 45.62 16.75 100 41.57 40.38 18.05 100 55.58 28.16 16.26 100
8.08 16.84 24.62 12.43 8.39 13.27 22.55 11.37 10.88 14.23 18.61 12.56
limit/mode – €43,000 or
€43,785 (2013) 175 81 46 302 264 72 38 374 218 32 32 282
57.95 26.82 15.23 100 70.59 19.25 10.16 100 77.3 11.35 11.35 100
73 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
9.69 7.71 17.42 9.68 12.66 5.62 11.28 10.1 10.36 3.93 8.89 8.6
€43,000 or €43,785 (2013)

to 1.5 x modal 155 27 11 193 118 21 15 154 92 12 4 108
80.31 13.99 5.7 100 76.62 13.64 9.74 100 85.19 11.11 3.7 100
8.58 2.57 4.17 6.18 5.66 1.64 4.45 4.16 4.37 1.47 1.11 3.29
1.5 - 2 x mode 201 18 12 231 246 26 12 284 256 17 21 294

87.01 7.79 5.19 100 86.62 9.15 4.23 100 87.07 5.78 7.14 100
11.13 1.71 4.55 7.4 11.79 2.03 3.56 7.67 12.17 2.09 5.83 8.97
> 2x mode 718 20 15 753 825 26 23 874 789 14 27 830

95.35 2.66 1.99 100 94.39 2.97 2.63 100 95.06 1.69 3.25 100
39.76 1.9 5.68 24.13 39.55 2.03 6.82 23.6 37.5 1.72 7.5 25.31
missing 328 326 40 694 345 419 71 835 375 237 87 699
47.26 46.97 5.76 100 41.32 50.18 8.5 100 53.65 33.91 12.45 100
18.16 31.02 15.15 22.24 16.54 32.71 21.07 22.54 17.82 29.08 24.17 21.32
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2,104 815 360 3,279
74 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
No wage, respondent &
partner
no 1,605 554 216 2,375 1,817 636 240 2,693 1,881 457 270 2,608
67.58 23.33 9.09 100 67.47 23.62 8.91 100 72.12 17.52 10.35 100
88.87 52.71 81.82 76.1 87.1 49.65 71.22 72.71 89.4 56.07 75 79.54
yes 201 497 48 746 269 645 97 1,011 223 358 90 671
26.94 66.62 6.43 100 26.61 63.8 9.59 100 33.23 53.35 13.41 100
11.13 47.29 18.18 23.9 12.9 50.35 28.78 27.29 10.6 43.93 25 20.46
Total 1,806 1,051 264 3,121 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2,104 815 360 3,279
57.87 33.68 8.46 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Social security payment

no 4,269 691 238 5,198 1,801 788 272 2,861 1,913 569 328 2,810
82.13 13.29 4.58 100 62.95 27.54 9.51 100 68.08 20.25 11.67 100
56.15 65.75 90.15 58.29 86.34 61.51 80.71 77.24 90.92 69.82 91.11 85.7
75 | P a g e

Key
Freq.
Row % 2011 2013 2015
yes 1,746 265 16 2,027 154 365 41 560 99 195 29 323

86.14 13.07 0.79 100 27.5 65.18 7.32 100 30.65 60.37 8.98 100
22.96 25.21 6.06 22.73 7.38 28.49 12.17 15.12 4.71 23.93 8.06 9.85
Total 7,603 1,051 264 8,918 2,086 1,281 337 3,704 2,104 815 360 3,279
85.25 11.79 2.96 100 56.32 34.58 9.1 100 64.17 24.86 10.98 100
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
76 | P a g e
Appendix b: summary statistics, people per household by

survey year
Table 8: People per household by housing pathway by survey year, recent movers
Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
2011
Commodified Housing Entrants 1,800 2.036111 1.047683 1 7
Association Social Movers 1,048 1.75 1.119635 1 6
Private Social Movers 264 1.477273 0.798915 1 6
2013
Association Social Movers 1,274 1.616954 1.073524 1 13
2015
Association Social Movers 815 1.795092 1.495604 1 17
Appendix c: Predictive Margins
Table 8: predictive margins for respondents recently moving into non-social-rent housing
2011 2013 2015
Variable Margin P>z Margin P>z Margin P>z
ethnicities
Autochtoon 0.604693 0 0.588788 0 0.667233 0
Turkish 0.523336 0 0.470961 0 0.60041 0
Moroccan 0.290195 0 0.416556 0 0.459292 0
Other Non-Western 0.53844 0 0.469687 0 0.606444 0
Western Migrant 0.59373 0 0.59768 0 0.67487 0
Surinamese/ Antillean 0.518565 0 0.515193 0 0.544369 0
gender
M 0.577387 0 0.573003 0 0.650185 0
F 0.573503 0 0.561934 0 0.640662 0
missing 0.614949 0 0.574512 0 0.622766 0
age groups
18-25 0.504872 0 0.565181 0 0.629053 0
26-35 0.604994 0 0.606707 0 0.64936 0
36-45 0.633283 0 0.599018 0 0.656397 0
77 | P a g e
2011 2013 2015
46-65 0.587634 0 0.524594 0 0.661902 0

>65 0.497858 0 0.520693 0 0.607975 0
education level
elementary 0.439747 0 0.475717 0 0.569939 0
secondary 0.449746 0 0.504965 0 0.595624 0
pre-university/ vocational 0.556166 0 0.571302 0 0.617849 0
university 0.619914 0 0.592902 0 0.664483 0
missing 0.544893 0 0.548449 0 0.653407 0
student
no 0.587229 0 0.651693 0
yes 0.461479 0 0.617279 0
family household (w/ children)

no 0.586815 0 0.563701 0 0.646325 0
yes 0.550974 0 0.589235 0 0.638242 0
single-person household
no 0.574874 0 0.581712 0 0.672952 0
yes 0.585742 0 0.552098 0 0.617939 0
Previously from outside

Amsterdam
no 0.578407 0 0.55466 0 0.650434 0
yes 0.587462 0 0.607242 0 0.632093 0
Previous living situation

single room/ student dwelling 0.537676 0 0.510873 0 0.582526 0
living with friends, family,
others 0.57017 0 0.53891 0 0.628678 0
private rental 0.598754 0 0.601976 0 0.687369 0
association rental 0.514657 0 0.537968 0 0.632073 0
owner occupation 0.76429 0 0.74029 0 0.766011 0
other 0.551434 0 0.491895 0 0.556716 0
arrived in NL within last

decade
no 0.57813 0 0.564913 0 0.644387 0
yes 0.593607 0 0.581755 0 0.642956 0
78 | P a g e
2011 2013 2015
income
low income 0.312921 0 0.301589 0 0.367492 0
low-EU limit/mode 0.429341 0 0.472173 0 0.568472 0
EU limit/mode - 43.000 0.549005 0 0.667672 0 0.733888 0
€43,000 - 1.5 x mode 0.728062 0 0.681977 0 0.80908 0
1,5 - 2x mode 0.771139 0 0.770882 0 0.824908 0
> 2x mode 0.855789 0 0.849727 0 0.894554 0
missing 0.577359 0 0.525303 0 0.610144 0
household doesn’t receive

income from work
no 0.59808 0 0.576587 0 0.658815 0
yes 0.527604 0 0.541671 0 0.590533 0
assist
no 0.592764 0 0.579789 0 0.529882 0
yes 0.471366 0 0.526002 0 0.500891 0
79 | P a g e
Table 9: predictive margins for respondents recently moving into association-owned social-rent
housing
2011 2013 2015
ethnicity
Autochtoon 0.307127 0 0.315583 0 0.21511 0
Turkish 0.476664 0 0.489526 0 0.326899 0
Moroccan 0.591261 0 0.531671 0 0.510711 0
Western Migrant 0.323125 0 0.315958 0 0.204643 0
Surinamese/ Antillean 0.419031 0 0.409777 0 0.336946 0
gender
M 0.347373 0 0.340298 0 0.246051 0
F 0.339372 0 0.345475 0 0.243393 0
missing 0.238052 0 0.348793 0 0.279607 0
age groups
18-25 0.358684 0 0.311989 0 0.203591 0
26-35 0.297694 0 0.296048 0 0.232252 0
36-45 0.31693 0 0.345814 0 0.28883 0
46-65 0.369179 0 0.407952 0 0.281535 0
>65 0.456093 0 0.394709 0 0.372454 0
education level
elementary 0.479874 0 0.44071 0 0.379519 0
secondary 0.45756 0 0.434896 0 0.295853 0
university 0.290903 0 0.303068 0 0.226447 0
missing 0.38172 0 0.376064 0 0.251418 0
student
no 0.314852 0 0.235964 0
yes 0.462495 0 0.270748 0
family household
no 0.330776 0 0.345419 0 0.237992 0
yes 0.345256 0 0.334381 0 0.29266 0
no 0.338836 0 0.306459 0 0.218795 0
yes 0.330365 0 0.367248 0 0.26633 0
80 | P a g e
Table 9: predictive margins for respondents recently moving into association-owned social-rent
housing
2011 2013 2015
previously from outside
Amsterdam
no 0.333522 0 0.360008 0 0.246945 0
yes 0.335247 0 0.293976 0 0.242544 0
previous living situation

others 0.341357 0 0.347582 0 0.267315 0
private rental 0.277317 0 0.28325 0 0.200242 0
other 0.355218 0 0.399249 0 0.260563 0

decade
no 0.333615 0 0.347954 0 0.243728 0
yes 0.337729 0 0.317018 0 0.250034 0
income
low income 0.545293 0 0.550589 0 0.464624 0
low-EU limit/mode 0.438464 0 0.375416 0 0.277703 0
EU limit/mode - 43.000 0.308976 0 0.23515 0 0.141363 0
€43,000 - 1.5 x mode 0.213233 0 0.221064 0 0.144921 0
1,5 - 2x mode 0.162017 0 0.176906 0 0.086934 0
> 2x mode 0.110004 0 0.107355 0 0.050707 0
missing 0.357956 0 0.38673 0 0.26844 0

income from work
no 0.315113 0 0.337863 0 0.235744 0
yes 0.387903 0 0.354452 0 0.268818 0
assist
no 0.320934 0 0.329803 0 0.363333 0
yes 0.444362 0 0.384539 0 0.401034 0
81 | P a g e
Table 10: predictive margins for respondents recently moving into privately-owned social-rent
housing
2011 2013 2015
variable Margin P>z Margin P>z Margin P>z
ethnicity
Autochtoon 0.08818 0 0.09563 0 0.117657 0
Turkish 1.39E-07 0.998 0.039513 0.146 0.072692 0.062
Moroccan 0.118544 0.004 0.051774 0.071 0.029996 0.149
Western Migrant 0.083145 0 0.086363 0 0.120488 0
Surinamese/ Antillean 0.062403 0.001 0.07503 0 0.118685 0
gender
M 0.07524 0 0.086699 0 0.103765 0
F 0.087125 0 0.09259 0 0.115945 0
missing 0.147 0 0.076694 0 0.097627 0.025
age groups
18-25 0.136444 0 0.12283 0 0.167356 0
26-35 0.097312 0 0.097246 0 0.118388 0
36-45 0.049787 0 0.055169 0 0.054774 0
46-65 0.043187 0 0.067454 0 0.056564 0
>65 0.046049 0.014 0.084598 0 0.019571 0.055
education level
elementary 0.080379 0.033 0.083574 0.001 0.050542 0.137
secondary 0.092695 0 0.060139 0 0.108523 0
university 0.089184 0 0.10403 0 0.10907 0
missing 0.073387 0.001 0.075488 0 0.095175 0
student
no 0.09792 0 0.112343 0
yes 0.076026 0 0.111973 0
family household (w/ children)

no 0.082409 0 0.09088 0 0.115684 0
yes 0.10377 0 0.076385 0 0.069098 0
82 | P a g e
housing
2011 2013 2015
no 0.08629 0 0.111829 0 0.108254 0
yes 0.083893 0 0.080654 0 0.115732 0
previously from outside

Amsterdam
no 0.088072 0 0.085332 0 0.102622 0
yes 0.077291 0 0.098783 0 0.125362 0
previous living situation

others 0.088473 0 0.113508 0 0.104007 0
private rental 0.123929 0 0.114774 0 0.112389 0
other 0.093348 0 0.108856 0 0.182722 0

decade
no 0.088255 0 0.087133 0 0.111886 0
yes 0.068664 0 0.101228 0 0.10701 0
income
low income 0.141786 0 0.147823 0 0.167884 0
low-EU limit/mode 0.132195 0 0.152412 0 0.153825 0
EU limit/mode –
€43,000/€43,785 0.142018 0 0.097178 0 0.124749 0
€43,000/€43,785- 1.5 x mode 0.058704 0.001 0.096959 0 0.045999 0.035
1,5 - 2x mode 0.066844 0 0.052213 0 0.088158 0
> 2x mode 0.034207 0 0.042918 0 0.054739 0
missing 0.064685 0 0.087968 0 0.121417 0

income from work
no 0.086807 0 0.085551 0 0.105441 0
yes 0.084494 0 0.103877 0 0.14065 0
assist
no 0.086301 0 0.090407 0 0.100045 0
83 | P a g e
housing
2011 2013 2015
yes 0.084272 0 0.089459 0 0.093328 0
84 | P a g e

2017 Masters Thesis Crispin Pownall Profile of Entrants To Amsterdam Social Housing

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2017 Masters Thesis Crispin Pownall Profile of Entrants To Amsterdam Social Housing

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Crispin Terry Pownall 11250496

Precarious and marginal? A profile of

Crispin Terry Pownall

Supervisor: Dr. Aslan Zorlu

21st August 2016

Amsterdam’s social housing: holding the door open .......................................................................... 5

Thesis structure ................................................................................................................................... 7

Conceptual framework ........................................................................................................................ 8

Philosophical justification: the right to a just city? ......................................................................... 8

Using one’s assets: Bourdieu’s conceptions of ‘capital’ ................................................................. 9

Graduated citizenship and housing residualisation ....................................................................... 12

Housing pathways and careers .......................................................................................................... 13

The history of Dutch social housing ................................................................................................. 14

1901-1980s: the slow birth of decommodified housing ................................................................ 14

1990s-2017: zenith and decline— the bottleneck tightens ........................................................... 15

Residential mobility, tenure and urban restructuring in Amsterdam ................................................ 16

The tenure landscape of Amsterdam ............................................................................................. 18

Research design .................................................................................................................................... 19

Research questions ............................................................................................................................ 19

Research area .................................................................................................................................... 19

Research design ................................................................................................................................ 20

Data: OIS’ Wonen in Amsterdam ..................................................................................................... 21

Limitations of the data .................................................................................................................. 21

Variables and operationalisation ....................................................................................................... 23

Dependent variable ....................................................................................................................... 24

Explanatory individual and household-level variables ................................................................. 24

Descriptive statistics ......................................................................................................................... 27

Multinomial logistic regressions ....................................................................................................... 36

Fit of models ................................................................................................................................. 36

Multicollinearity of socio-economic variables.............................................................................. 36

Predictive margins ........................................................................................................................ 37

How to read the models ................................................................................................................ 39

The models .................................................................................................................................... 39

Recent movers to the association-owned social rent sector .......................................................... 51

Recent movers to the privately-owned social-rent sector ............................................................. 54

Appendix a: descriptive statistics, categorical variables ....................................................................... 63

Appendix b: summary statistics, people per household by survey year ............................................... 77

Appendix c: Predictive Margins ........................................................................................................... 77

Using one’s assets: Bourdieu’s conceptions of ‘capital’

To adequately describe the current tenure-related behaviours and tendencies of Amsterdam’s

Inter-group disparities of social capital can be seen to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, in that

Graduated citizenship and housing residualisation

Housing pathways and careers

The history of Dutch social housing

symptoms of residualisation. Stratification of housing habitus along socio-cultural lines deepened

1990s-2017: zenith and decline— the bottleneck tightens

Residential mobility, tenure and urban restructuring in Amsterdam

The tenure landscape of Amsterdam

Data: OIS’ Wonen in Amsterdam

Limitations of the data

Variables and operationalisation

Dependent variable: a recent move into either private-owned or association-owned

Explanatory individual and household-level variables

VII: respondent’s household is a single-person household. Dichotomous nominal variable controlling

Multinomial logistic regressions

Multicollinearity of socio-economic variables

How to read the models

Individual- and household-levels: Recent movers into association-owned social-rent homes

Individual- and household-levels: Recent movers into privately-owned social-rent homes

Recent movers to the association-owned social rent sector

Recent movers to the privately-owned social-rent sector

AFWC (2015). Wonen in de Regio Amsterdam 2015. At: