Dam Daily w/ Chris | 2 Jan

First Friday Dam Daily of the year … local news, Amsterdam chat, and Chris’ 🎶 music picks.

Listen back to the show on the mixcloud player above. Also rerun on our radio station 17-19h, Friday.

Show notes

Headlines:

• Vondelkerk may return to its former glory, restoration experts believe. Onno Meerstadt who is the boss at Stadsherstel thinks we could be talking months, not years for the restoration work – so all good news – but it will depend on the money made available!
• Two teenagers shot dead in Nieuw West last night.
• New Year’s dip happened in Sloterplas … Young and old. General opinion: It’s very cold…

Last year in 2025, all kind of things going on in the city, and around it too.

• We had huge roadworks on the A10 all summer long and even a request from the authorities to use cars less. Also all new brommers or mopeds, now have to be emission free….I think that means they have to be electric.
• If you were buying a house last year, you may well have struggled to find something you could afford. Again, like the year before, so many homes were sold way above the asking price: over three quarters of all homes went for more than they were originally listed for (75.3%). We got bigger as well. When I arrived here in 1997 people talked of a city of about 750,000 people. Today we’re at 864,000.
• And it was a party year of course too with Amsterdam celebrating its 750 year anniversary, all culminating in a big party on some very very hot tarmac on the A10 Ring. And as always, there were all the big festivals and events like A.D.E. taking over the city in October and huge acts such as Black Coffee appearing at Ziggo Dome this year. Sail of course too attracting huge numbers, having been cancelled 5 years ago due to the Covid pandemic.
• If you want some crime statistics, last year there were just under 100 murders in the Netherlands and 10 of those were in Amsterdam. So while that might seem high (10% of all murders happening here) it’s half what it was last year and it still only works out at less than one a month. Technically it works out at just over half a victim per 100,000 inhabitants at if you compare that across Europe, we have one of the lowest murder rates anywhere. 79% of the murders were committed by people born here to parents also born here… basically that says only a fifth of the crimes were committed by people who, or whose parents recently immigrated. NL Times has an article with all the stats if you want to delve into them further. nltimes.nl

Show notes from @willisonthewireless, 2 January 2026

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🎧 2-minute news roundup

As well as Dam Daily radio show and the news clips shared on the station throughout the day, we also produce a 2-minute audio bulletin of local news, produced as a micro-podcast and shared on all podcast platforms, for listening to short news items on demand. Listen back here and/or follow on your preferred podcast platform.