The mailman checks if you're still alive

Do we care about the people we build for?

Let me start with a question that sounds ridiculous. Do we care about the people we build for?

Of course, you say. We build for them. 900,000 homes by 2030. Housing deals with all twelve provinces. A minister with a mandate. Newspapers full of permits, nitrogen rulings, locations, construction pace.

Fine. Then let's count. Not the doors. What's behind them.

1.8 million Dutch people are severely lonely. That is the government's own number, in its own national action programme. Nearly half of all adults, 46 percent, feel lonely. As of early 2024, 3.3 million people live alone, almost 1 in 5 residents. Severe loneliness is most common among people living alone and single-parent households.

Read those last two sentences back to back. The fastest-growing group, the one this entire construction programme is designed for, is exactly the group where loneliness concentrates. We identified the loneliest housing profile in the country. And then drew 900,000 units around it.

The young people, because we house them too. 23 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds feel severely lonely. In student housing, 22 to 29 percent are severely lonely. One in five vocational students had suicidal thoughts in the past year. One in five. That is no longer a statistic. That is a floor of every student complex in this country.

You may know the one-liner that loneliness is as deadly as fifteen cigarettes a day. Fact-checkers have rightly shot holes in it, so you won't get it from me. You get what survives scrutiny, and it is worse than the one-liner. Loneliness and social isolation raise the risk of premature death by 26 to 29 percent. The risk of heart disease by 29 percent. Of a stroke by 32 percent. In older people, loneliness is associated with a 50 percent higher risk of dementia. Lonely people are satisfied with their lives in 50 percent of cases. The non-lonely in 88.

If a building material had these numbers, it would be banned by morning.

Now the part where it gets genuinely uncomfortable. Follow the money.

For its national loneliness programme, the Dutch government allocated an extra 10 million euros per year, on top of roughly 5 million structural. Fifteen million a year. For 1.8 million severely lonely people. That is roughly eight euros per person per year. Two coffees.

In the same period, the housing minister announced, in a single press release, a construction kickstart of at least 250 million euros, plus 300 million for modular homes. One press release: 550 million. Thirty-seven years of loneliness budget, on a Friday afternoon, for the boxes. The people behind the doors won't see that amount in a full term of government.

This is not an austerity story. It is a priorities story. Everything countable on the outside of a home gets hundreds of millions. Everything that happens inside gets a public awareness campaign. "A small gesture can make the difference."

And the best example of how we've solved this comes from the action programme itself, and I am not making this up. One of the flagship initiatives of the national loneliness strategy is a partnership in which mail carriers pass on "something's not right" signals to social workers.

Sit with that for a moment. We build residential towers of thirty floors, filled with studios for people living alone, with a boarded-up ground floor and a corridor where nobody crosses paths. And our detection system for whether that's going well is the mailman. A sector that moves hundreds of millions per transaction has outsourced the detection of human damage to someone who happens to walk by with a parcel.

The corridor that stays empty was drawn. By someone. The ground floor that went to the highest bidder and then went dark was a decision. Made on a Tuesday. The gallery flat where you only ever see your neighbours as silhouettes behind frosted glass is not a natural phenomenon. We call the outcome a lack of social cohesion, as if it were weather. It is not weather. These are design decisions, made by people who will never live there, paid for by parties who are gone before the first resident turns the key.

And here is the bitter crown on top. The loneliness we measure today sits in the existing housing stock. The 900,000 new homes, two-thirds of them affordable and aimed at precisely the households with the highest risk, are still to come. We are standing at the start of the largest construction programme in decades, and nothing in that programme, not one housing deal, not one performance agreement, not one standard, sets a single requirement for what happens to the resident after handover. There is a parking standard. There is no encounter standard. There is an energy performance calculation for the building. There is nothing for the energy of the people inside it.

We measure the insulation of the walls and not the isolation of the people.

So I ask the ridiculous question again, now that the numbers are on the table. 1.8 million severely lonely people. Eight euros per person per year. 550 million in a single press release, for the boxes. The mailman as the safety net. And 900,000 new chances to repeat all of it exactly as before.

Do we care about the people we build for?

I hope that question sounds less ridiculous than it did nineteen paragraphs ago.

Jeroen Janssen designs, develops and speaks about experience in buildings. Amsterdam.