line with what literature has shown entrepreneurial strategies in outsourcing to the private sector (Pillai et al., 2021).
One could argue that universities in Amsterdam take a role as marginal mediators for
‘emergency' housing. Their capabilities of accommodating the rising number of incoming international students had decreased and, particularly from September 2021, taken on more precarious forms, when students had to be housed in 'shelters' like shared tents or bunk rooms of hostels. This has led to a situation where universities might be obligated to reduce the number of international students or stop the expansion of English-language degrees, as the municipality of Amsterdam hinted at already in interviews in 2021. This ultimately points to the entrepreneurial behavior of universities at large, who prioritize non-Dutch student enrollment, and to the larger housing market crisis, as production (from housing associations) is unable to keep up with the enormous demand and flat sharing, in general, is being tightly regulated.
6.2 National housing regimes influence urban rental conditions
The comparison between Amsterdam and Brussels has revealed that local rental markets can showcase significant differences in regulation and access because of the dynamics between national housing regimes and municipal restrictions or reproductions of neoliberal policies.
As a nation of homeowners, Belgium has focused its housing policy exclusively on homeownership promotion and subsidies (De Decker, 2008). Even in Brussels, where homeownership rates are lower, a dualist market (Kemeny, 2001) is evident and social housing is reserved for the most disadvantaged. The rental market in Brussels, historically unregulated, has not undergone any structural liberalization that would have changed the way tenure is regulated. The first instance of 'divergence' has been through the regionalization of housing policies in Belgium, where the Brussels Capital Region introduced new tenure laws as a local response to the increasing number of temporary international workers and students in the city. Therefore, for the BCR it remains to be seen whether the inherently 'free' rental market will showcase similar affordability issues as in Amsterdam or whether the unregulated nature and complexities of the Brussels planning system have worked to prevent some of the financialized dynamics for shared housing that are present in Amsterdam.
In the Netherlands, on the other hand, housing associations traditionally were strongly involved in production activity, and renting within this unitary system was a widely available and protected household tenure. With the introduction of the rental-point system, which pushed the rental stock into the unregulated sector, short-term leases, and government incentives for financialized real estate production, Amsterdam spiraled into a housing crisis, which triggered a range of municipal regulations that re-regulated the overheated rental market. At least in the transition phase, where new regulations are being implemented, shared housing has emerged as the 'loser.' In attempts to restore 'livability' for family and one household's homes, stricter requirements for shared housing were introduced, and individual contracts meant to protect renters (temporarily) put many tenants in semi-illegal housing situations.
Purpose-built student accommodation in this research has been positioned as part of the production of housing precarity in the rental market of Amsterdam. For once, as Kemeny et al. (2005) argued, a rental policy that segment and compartmentalize the rental market works in favor of homeownership or, in this case, supports financialized housing production. For Amsterdam, I have showcased that targeted housing developments such as PBSA have contributed to a dualization in the student housing market. This finding brings a new dimension to scholarship on the socio-spatially and economically exclusive geographies of PBSA (Reynolds, 2019; Hubbard, 2009) by arguing that accessibility and rental security have been the principal distinguishing factors for students' housing choices.
6.3 Housing pathways are chaotic and reflect tenants’ needs for coping strategies The interview findings of non-European students reflected precarity in their housing experiences. The two pathways national-network-assisted pathway and chaotic pathway, fall in line with previous research on young people's housing pathways in Amsterdam (Hochstenbach & Boterman, 2015), Aigner's (2019) study on migrant housing access in Vienna, and research on international student housing in Utrecht (Fang & Van Liempt 2020).
Firstly, the findings confirmed the importance of social and cultural capital for non-European students, who cannot rely on family support and have used their social networks as starting bases for their house hunt and bridging periods of otherwise homelessness.
Networks among native Dutch people have also proven to be essential access points for landlord contact, and native networks among Vietnamese and Chinese students can be
seen as planned choices of this group in accessing alternative housing options where formal contracts are traded for trusted landlords within their community.
Secondly, the non-European students in my sample have not only shown diverse experiences among this group but diversity within one housing pathway itself. Frequently students experienced a mix of linear and chaotic pathways, which showed characteristics of progressive-, reproductive chaotic, and inverse pathways (Hochstenbach & Boterman, 2015; Fang & Van Liempt, 2020), paired with periods of couch-surfing and 'stable' one-year contracts towards the end. While students did showcase planned behavior and voluntary movements to upgrade their housing situation, they had to move more frequently than they wanted.
This research has also bridged literature on housing pathways with tenants' coping strategies, which has helped demonstrate renters' precariousness through one-time strategies and sequential pathway outcomes. Moving frequently, for example, is a feature of chaotic pathways, as it is a strategy of tenants' agency in choosing to move instead of remaining in place or minimizing complaints (Waldron 2022). 'Moving out' in this study has also gained a new spatial perspective, as I have demonstrated that students have moved to other Dutch towns to find affordable or accessible housing within competitive and unaffordable housing markets like Amsterdam. In some cases, this reinforced the spatial reach of chaotic pathways, as Ford et al. (2002) described. Especially in the Netherlands, where transport for non-Dutch students presents another significant financial hurdle, non-European students have little choice but to 'remaining in the city.' I have gone beyond Fang and Van Liempt’s (2020) study by showcasing variations in housing pathways as being influenced by structural conditions of urban rental policies and regulations. While the lack of institutional support is echoed in Amsterdam, different forms of university provision in Brussels provided students with the option of returning to university housing and finding a stable living place outside of the PRS. More than discrimination based on their ethnicity, which was not found, students reported barriers in even making contact and being invited for house viewings, which may have been accelerated by the Covid19 pandemic, as everything moved online. With competition and selective behaviors in social media platforms increasing, initial contact became one of the major reported hurdles. Additionally, it has shown that non-European students face most
Lastly, if anything, the interview findings within this sample have underlined that students are only a highly mobile group due to structural problems, in trying to change their (informal) living conditions when necessary, or because of short-term contracts, unreasonable rent increases, eviction and more. Non-European students avoided moving as soon as they found a relatively stable and acceptable accommodation. In most cases, therefore, movements and chaotic pathways were precisely "a consequence of temporary contracts, high competition and (…) bad luck" (Fang & Van Liempt, 2020, p.13)
6.4 Research Limitations
As this research was small-scale in nature and largely exploratory, a few limitations are worth discussing. Firstly, regarding the comparison of the two case study cities, the availability of secondary literature and materials such as reports and policy documents differed, with more information being found for Amsterdam. For once, there have been many articles on the rental market in Amsterdam, on the position of students or young adults, and on housing policy changes that have been traced explicitly. For Brussels, finding academic articles was very limited, as most research looked at Belgium as a whole or tackled homeownership. Especially lacking was data on the rental market in the last ten years. In this sense, I hope to have contributed theoretically and empirically through a current view of the Brussels rental market through the lens of student housing. I also believe that while there are discrepancies in the amount of material, this only goes to reinforce the difference between the two cities: whereas the rental system in Brussels has maintained its unregulated nature and there has been only limited research on residential financialization, Amsterdam's housing system has gone through drastic changes and the impact of changing regulations has been well documented in the literature. Student housing has only been addressed in the last years in Brussels, while it has taken a more urgent matter in Amsterdam, prompting the availability of yearly Kences reports and covenants on this topic. However, quantitative data on the precise number of non-European students or their housing conditions were hard to come by for both cities, which also justified the qualitative approach in selecting a smaller sample for in-depth housing experiences.
Secondly, the qualitative data collected through my interviews is limited, and, in a group as diverse as international students, findings are hard to generalize. I do believe that pressing issues such as affordability, availability, and access to housing, frequent (involuntary) movements, power imbalances, and home-lessness are common issues that
are prone to become more prominent, especially in Brussels, should institutional support not be able to hold up with incoming students and renting continues to be such a lucrative activity. Specific pathways or strategies may be unique to the interviewed students but also showcase the variety of experiences within this group.
Thirdly, I have hinted at the emergence of a dualized rental market in Amsterdam and want to underline that structural reasons (PBSA supportive regulations) and student preferences exist separately. I also do not want to claim that because non-European students rent PBSA, this sector is always more accessible or better regulated than the PSR.
Again, this dualization might be only temporary if no new stock is added and this segment becomes hard to access. More likely, students will have different conditions within the rental market, or divergences between international students in shared housing and Dutch students in rooms from housing associations will become more pronounced.
Lastly, the focus on precarious pathways or housing outcomes is not to say that all student housing is precarious, as limited linear pathways for students were found in my research sample. However, what hope to have demonstrated in this thesis, is that there is a structural problem in current urban rental markets that normalizes temporary tenure, a lack of tenant protections, and makes it hard for people to simply even access accommodation. Studying students, especially non-European students has been an excellent lens for understanding pressing issues in urban rental markets. This research and the concept of rental housing precarity are useful because, contrary to other groups in the rental market, students are bound to rent in the private rental market and, as has been shown, are among the first to experience the effects of changing regulations and housing policies. So, while 'the' student pathway and housing experience is hard to capture, their experiences gave me a good understanding of rental market dynamics, signs of neoliberalism, and current governmental priorities shaping cities.