The purpose of this study is to show how local authorities (municipalities) deal with their community real estate. The study is an annually recurring research: every year since 2008 (except for 2013), Dutch municipalities have been asked to complete a questionnaire about how they manage their real estate. With these results it is possible to perform quantitative analyses on both trends and the current situation. The questionnaire responses have led to the following conclusions: (1) Half of the municipalities has a policy but takes few risk measures, (2) Withdrawing local government, (3) Management and operations most outsourced tasks, (4) Obstacles remain unchanged, (5) Cost reduction most relevant policy theme since 2009, (6) Relevance of some policy themes depends on municipality size, (7) More real estate is offered, smaller percentage is sold, 8) More FTEs for real estate management, especially executive tasks and (9) Conscious focus on quality. Dutch municipalities tune their new developments of the municipal real estate policy to the results of the Barometer for Municipal Community Real Estate. This leads to a further development of professionalism of the municipal real estate portfolios. The contribution to science is showing patterns of community real estate management at Dutch municipalities. A longitudinal study of this size on this subject is unique in The Netherlands.
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This paper explores how residents of Helmond Brandevoort, a neotraditional neighbourhood in the Netherlands, socially construct a 'classed' place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries which were explored here by analysing residents’ narratives. Two prominent types of narratives were found: their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicized aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. In the neighbourhood explored, the way of boundary drawing based on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged.
Like many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Statistics Netherlands to make changes in its fieldwork strategy. Since mid-March 2020, there have been limited opportunities to conduct face-to-face interviews. Therefore, from September 2020, CAPI sampled people are offered the opportunity to respond by telephone. For this purpose, face-to-face interviewers are instructed to persuade the potential respondent at the doorway. When people refuse a face-to-face interview, interviewers ask for a telephone number and try to make an appointment to conduct the interview by telephone. The aim of our study was to investigate the effects of conducting the interview by telephone instead of face-to-face on important survey outcome variables. We were particularly interested in whether differences are due to selection effects or caused by mode-specific measurement errors. Because we did not have the time or capacity to set up a controlled experiment, we performed regression analyses to decompensate the differences between selection effects and mode-specific measurement errors. We used data of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Housing Survey (WoON). Our analysis showed that there were differences in important target variables, for both LFS and WoON. These differences were, however, mainly caused by selection effects – which can be taken into account for during weighting – and were less likely to be caused by mode specific measurement errors. Although there are important limitations and caveats, these findings are supportive to further implement this field strategy.
