There may not be an actual student housing crisis in Maastricht, but when a housing corporation deliberately leaves rooms unoccupied, it does raise questions. What is going on in the complex on Herdenkingsplein, on the little street that leads to Brusselsestraat, the Maastricht chapter of the CDA asked the mayor and councillors last May. Councillor Johan Pas enquired with Servatius. Referring to the housing corporation in his answer, he said that this was an exceptional case. For a long time, residents of the complex were allowed to propose new residents, which, Servatius said, means the complex now houses “more than fifty students from eight different student associations”, who cause “significant disturbance” with loud parties and the like.
According to the housing corporation, the solution lies in a greater mix of tenants. In order to achieve that, Servatius has stopped accepting new proposals, rooms are left unoccupied until all the residents of a particular hallway have moved out. “We are choosing habitability over student associations who want to use our property as a club house.”
Uninhabitable
The surrounding residents wrote a letter to the council in which they say they are delighted with the measures. Their neighbours – “Frat boys. A whole building full of them,” said the letter – have made the alleyway leading to the square “uninhabitable for a few years now”.
What about talking to the students, or calling on community officers or even the police? That didn’t make a difference, Marcel and Antonie de Beaumont, a married couple who signed the letter, told Observant. They have lived opposite the housing complex for years and until about 2020, there were no real issues. A party every now and then wasn’t a problem – “we are not anti-student, we were students once, too” – and if there were noise complaints, then the students would generally quite happily accept being spoken to about it.
Soundproof glass
That all changed with the pandemic, they said: when student clubs were closed, parties moved to the flats and never really left. “It is now a problem three or four times a week. The community officers and the police show up regularly, hand out a few fines. That puts a stop to it for a little while.” The noise in the narrow street doesn’t stop during the day, either; those who wish to work from home or read a book are forced to keep their windows closed. The Beaumonts, along with one of their neighbours, had their windows replaced with soundproof glass. “That cost a lot of money.”
And the students? Two of them, busy loading a car parked outside the housing complex, were curt when questioned about the noise. It’s possible, they said, but not on their floor, the fourth, where they have been living for about 18 months. Any noise from that floor would blow over the other houses. They believe there is a different motivation behind Servatius’s measure: money. The housing corporation is more interested in renting to internationals, who, according to the two, have more money than Dutch students. According to Servatius, there is no such thing: “We rent according to the housing valuation system. That does not differentiate between tenants.”