You have ideas for all sorts of types of housing. What would you do about the shortage of student rooms?
“Too few houses have been built for young people in the last few years, so I would start by building for our young people. I believe that student accommodation should only be built on campus. The city has given more than enough help with student housing to TU Delft, and it is TU Delft’s turn now. We also need to make it easier for the people of Delft to rent rooms to students. I often speak to people who say that they would like to have a student in their home, even if it is only for the couple of hundred euro that they pay.”
TU Delft would then have to cooperate. How will you convince TU Delft?
“They have plenty of room on campus, but TU Delft is not really aware of the impact that students have on residential neighbourhoods. I would like to talk to them for half an hour. I would say ‘listen, Executive Board, we are done with students in residential neighbourhoods. And when they realise that they need to build more on campus, the Municipality should cooperate. If TU Delft would say that it wants to build six blocks of flats, the Municipality should ensure that they get the permits they need quickly.”
‘People think that I hate students, but that is not true’
Many of the election programmes centre around the growth of TU Delft. How do you envision the future of TU Delft?
“People think that I hate students, but that is not true. There are good ones of course, but there are also students that throw full bags of rubbish out of their windows and onto the street. I talk to a lot of people in Delft, and they say that they feel terrorised by the behaviour of the students in their street. TU Delft may certainly grow, but it should then first come up with a good plan defining how it will manage that growth and prevent problems.”
Tell us one thing that you managed to do for students or young people last year.
“We supported a motion (in Dutch) to raise the student grant for students with disabilities. It was EUR 150 and will soon be EUR 300.”
If you had a big pot of money, what would you spend it on?
“On senior citizens. Our party supports appointing an Alderman for senior citizens. Senior citizens are a forgotten group. They are lonely and sit alone in their homes. That pot of money can go to someone who takes them out of their homes, drops by and listens to them.”
- For this interview series, the editors of Delta approached all participating Delft political parties by email, sms, phone, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. Despite repeated contact attempts, we did not succeed in scheduling interviews with Bij1Delft, Onafhankelijk Delft and Volt. Read the election programmes of all participating political parties in Delft via this link (in Dutch).
Comments are closed.