Amsterdam has approximately around 3000 economic homeless people. At the same time there is a lot of vacancy in the city. The idea is to combine these two givens and make use of this vacancy by making it available for economic homeless people. 

In some cases vacant real estate is already managed by an independent organization that offers the service to temporarily manage empty buildings and find a (short-term) purpose; these organizations are so-called vacancy managers. Vacancy managers offer a total package of services for the management of vacant properties. Ranging from finding appropriate users, maintaining the building, taking care of finances to making sure the property is delivered to the owner when they have plans with the building. The types of buildings are diverse: from dwellings to offices and from shops to warehouses.

 

Commercial parties do this for money, but we want to do it to combat economic homelessness. To avoid taking away vacant spaces from others in need, e.g students, we focus on new ways to reach property owners that are not yet in the picture of other vacancy managers. In our research, the group of private real estate owners turned out to be most interesting to focus on. They are hard to reach, but here you can read how we tried to raise their awareness to the problem.