Cities attract people, and big cities attract even more people. This is happening on a large scale all over the world, and in the Netherlands too. In particular, people are moving to the major cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and The Hague. The right to live wherever one wants in principle gives everyone the possibility to move to the big city.

The attractiveness of the city

The big cities in particular have a number of attracting factors, such as the possibility of finding a job, the presence of higher education institutions, cultural amenities, the short distance to these amenities and the many possibilities for interaction. There are also less attractive aspects: the difficulty of finding a place to live and its high price, and the increasing pressure and bustle of the city. Health-related factors such as air pollution currently receive less attention, but they are also less serious than they were thirty years ago thanks to better technology and stricter emission standards.

Amsterdam is growing again

Following the exodus to the growth poles (suburban satellite towns) in the 1960 and 1970s, Amsterdam's population began growing again from the 1990s onwards, with a spurt in growth beginning in 2006. As of in 2015 the city had a population of 827,000, and the forecasts by Statistics Netherlands and the Projectbureau voor het Leefmilieu (project office for the living environment) indicate continuing growth. Every day in 2014 in Amsterdam there were, on average:

The most important growth factors in that year were the birth surplus and the surplus of people moving from other countries, the latter also caused by the increase in the number of asylum seekers.

However, the growth of the housing stock has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The urban housing building programme is seriously lagging behind. In the period 2009-2013 a population increase of 65,926 persons was paralleled by a net increase in the housing stock of 9,355 dwellings.