Amsterdam news roundup | Sept-Oct 2019

 Here’s a local news roundup for Amsterdam …

The Amsterdam city council is taking measures to combat discrimination in the housing market | Het Parool reports that in the coming six months, the municipality wishes to use mystery guests and gain insight into how often people are discriminated against when they want to rent a home.

A suspect has been arrested for the recent murder of criminal lawyer, Derk Wiersum. A car believed to have been used in the murder, a white Opel Combo with a counterfeit license plate, VN-927-V, has also been found, as reported by Het Parool newspaper. Police are looking for people who have seen the car driving or parked in Amsterdam or Almere. The police believe there will be more arrests. Derk Wiersum was the lawyer of Nabil B., a crown witness in the Marengo trial against the fugitive criminal Ridouan Taghi.

The new leasehold system for property owners in Amsterdam has become so backlogged that Amsterdam’s leaseholders have to wait ‘several years’ before they can transfer | According to Het Parool newspaper. In just two years, only 951 people in Amsterdam have switched to the new system. That is a fraction of the 26,500 applications that have been submitted. Many people in Amsterdam have been waiting for months for a response from the municipality. Amsterdam has around 200,000 leaseholders so it’s expected that the situation will get worse and may take several years to complete.

The Amsterdam Museum will no longer use the term Golden Age. As reported by RTL Nieuws, curator Tom van der Mole has said the use of the term ignores “the many negative sides of the seventeenth century such as poverty, war, forced labor and human trafficking”. The museum will also change the title of its permanent exhibition in the Hermitage Museum.

ATC Sloterplas, a tennis club in Sloterplas in Amsterdam West is under threat, and fears for its survival due to property development in the area. As reported by Het Parool newspaper, new homes are to be built on the land the club occupies and their space will be cut in half. New plans show that there will now be indoor courts on the ground floor, with another level of outdoor courts on top. The tennis courts will be surrounded by high-rise buildings with apartments, in contrast to their current leafy surroundings. The club says they were not consulted on the new plans.

The Amsterdam ‘afval crisis’ may not be resolved until the end of the year | AEB, the waste incineration organisation was a department of the municipality until it was privatised in 2014, but since then it has struggled to stand on its own feet and has often caused unexpected problems for Amsterdam’s waste management. According to Het Parool newspaper, the municipality will take until the end of 2019 to explore whether cooperation between AEB and the co-operative waste incineration, HVC, is possible and feasible, and what costs this entails. In the meantime, options to sell AEB to commercial parties will be put on hold. The city of Amsterdam is still the sole shareholder of AEB, which has been in big trouble since July 2019. Whatever happens next, it’s expected that it will cost the city a lot of money.

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Sources: Het Parool / AT5 / NLtimes.nl / Dutchnews.nl.