I moved houses two weeks ago. And getting a new apartment in a country with a housing shortage when you’re a self-employed immigrant with two kids, two cats, and a dog is a real situation.

You might be like: “but Grover, didn’t you just move to the Netherlands? Why are you moving again?”

Well, it turns out that I moved to the Netherlands literally 1 year ago! And getting an apartment when you are outside the country with a foreign income requires a lot of compromise, including on price and timing, so our lease in the Netherlands for a townhome started June 1st.1 To secure our house from outside the country — which is a key step in securing a DAFT Visa (the type of US-person-only Visa I came here on)— requires you to have housing to secure the Visa. It’s a bit of a catch 22, and so we hired Marga, whose whole business is doing the in-between searching and negotiating with local landlords to rent to immigrants. She got us a place right away, which felt like a godsend given some of the horror stories and the whole “no thank you” vibes doled out by most landlords when they hear we have two cats and a dog. We paid top of our price range for the place. It was close-ish to our kids’ school and apparently in a “posh” neighborhood, as Dutch ppl liked to tell me. It was a looker at first glance: very cute, old brick, glass ceiling skylight in the kitchen, tall, spiral staircases, you get the gist. Most importantly, it made all the rest of the emigration pieces fall into place.

While the place was adequate for our needs and a soft place to land, it was expensive by Dutch standards and unideally priced by American standards. We could hear our neighbors laughing, talking, crying, fighting, and everyone watched each other come and go like Petunia Dursely. This social tightness has its merits but it also had uptight lesbians who never once welcomed our queer ass to the block, 2 instead they left mean, sometimes threatening notes in our mail slot complaining about our dog.

Add to that: in the fall, the sewage began backing up into our laundry room, the showers started flooding, the house smelled like sewage regularly. Reader: it was disgusting. The landlord eventually hired someone to pump under the house every month, but it was a short-term solution: the entire sewage line under the house needs ripped out and replaced. He was gonna do it while we traveled this summer.

We preferred to frantically search for another place, now that we had Dutch income3, and try to get out before our home became a construction site blanketed in sewage detritus. And we were successful through an oddly cross-cultural combination of corporate-uber-adherence to Dutch regulations about fairness in housing + being doggedly persistent and annoying.

The regels (the rules) of housing

Every Dutch lease (as in, the two I have signed) includes the full housing law of the Affordable Rent Act, including a preamble from the (at the time) Queen herself. In this law, it clearly lists out who is responsible for fixing and cleaning what. You change your lightbulbs inside our house, Landlord changes the lightbulbs alongside the shared hallways of an apartment. Mice inside your house? Your problem. Rats outside your house? Landlord’s problem. It also assigns a rent-cap to every rental type except the highest end housing like the one we got. Which is probably why it was available to us.

The result of this isn’t perfect tenant rights for everyone — that’s apparent just walking around and having the power of observation at building quality. We can’t afford to buy here, and we didn’t want to stay in hot-sewage-brick-house. So in our frantic research and conversations, we learned that big apartment leasing corporations are pretty strict about their process for viewing and letting because they don’t want to run afoul of the law, and they don’t even ASK about pets. Or kids. Or our immigration status. And often own the newly built apartments that line the roads leading up to the train station.

Sign me up.

So here’s the thing I didn’t know about Dutch infrastructure before I came: the things that work well, work really well. Bike lanes! Best in the world. Waste disposal! Be still my heart. Websites? Not so much. I find most websites in the Netherlands work about 30% in before something fundamental falls down. And by falls down I mean something like the button to click into a 2nd or 3rd action in the site doesn’t work, or it’s supposed to integrate with another page but it simply does not. But one thing that reliably doesn’t work all the time is translation. Often Dutch websites have an English translation button in the right hand side that you can toggle. I feel relief when I see it, despite now having a basic working grasp of Dutch at A1-ish level. But what’s translated is usually just the main text on the main page. Want to click a button? Get out your phone. Error message? Screen shot that fast!

Persistence & views

Searching for a home with large Dutch-based multinational housing conglomerates is a real maze of regulations + TMI. Despite not screening based on pets, it seems every Dutch anything, including a global apartment company, wants to know if I’m man or woman—they rarely offer the nonbinary option, which is possible in the Netherlands, though some companies do include it in the dropdown—my marital status, my social security number, my current zipcode, income, etc. It’s not a chill first step to wade through with multiple corporations. These companies require you to fill in all the information before you can see up-to-date listings and sign up to view them. Unlike the US, there’s not really a public open-house for house buying or large apartments. But, in order to apply for an apartment or a home, you must view it first. They will not let you simply make a “I’ll take it as is!” offer from afar, which is how I have secured many an apartment without much problem. So, you click, you watch, you wait.

We recently met with some new friends in their apartment and it was ooh-la-la just what we wanted. So, when we saw an apartment come up in the building a few weeks later, we lept at it. I filled out the “contact the relator” information and I asked our friends if they had a contact at the company. They did, but it was a circular dead-end, because equality + also probably “efficiency” aka, not paying a person for that role when there’s a housing shortage so it’s not difficult to fill apartments.

Thing is, though, every step led to this one webpage. The page where you had to put in your financial information and zipcode and gender and everything except if you had a lover, a kid, or a pet. And I filled that form out no less than 20 times in four different browsers and clicked submit only to have it blink once and seemingly go nowhere. No new auto-reply triggered. No confirmation screen. Over a week, I tried calling (and was redirected back to the form) and all other kinds of vigilant antics. In one phone call, we got word that the viewing date was scheduled for the first week in June, so we knew it wasn’t yet filled but also that we weren’t on that list. So we tried again. And again. And eventually I was convinced the button led to nowhere, so I copied the link and took a screenshot and right-clicked a button that would show me the back-end-code of the button and lo-and-behold, it was in fact a button to nowhere.

With this data in hand, I was finally able to convince a person on the phone that we really wanted to sign up for the viewing, but simply couldn’t, and they needed to contact IT. They then sent us sideways and backwards through a maze of inter-company email addresses, and eventually, miraculously, we were on the list for the viewing. Now, I think if the button had worked, we would have been with at least ten other families, if not more, looking to view this corner three bedroom over the station. But, the button-that-wasn’t had us viewing with one other couple. It was exactly like our friend’s apartment, only two floors up so sky-high views, and we emailed them from the sidewalk saying we wanted it. The process from there on out was relatively quick and painless.

We moved in two weeks later—thankfully, right before the heat wave hit—and our house has never been more peaceful. The rent is notably less. The building is three years old so everything works. The materials are sturdy and well built—we aren’t knicking walls that turn to chalk on first touch. Our dog is so high up in the sky she has no nemesis dogs to bark at as they walk by. We have no quaint spiral stairs on which we must haul laundry and tired bodies and cups of two-day-old tea from our kids’ bedrooms. Our cats come and go on the balcony that we could leave open when we leave the house. We watch the trains come and go from the station and I think of my dad who died more than twenty years ago, a kind, model-railroad-club guy who would slow up just to watch trains pass at the crossing.

You shouldn’t have to know how to research the code lurking behind website buttons to get an apartment. But, I’m glad we have this one.

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​1 If you’re like “damn that sounds expensive” — yep! There’s different kinds of risks in the world and we chose this short-term expensive one (which was followed by almost immediately palpable savings in healthcare costs), and know that being able to choose so is rooted in the privilege of having something to lose.

​2 If you are a Dyke Nederlander reading this can you confirm this is also considered bad behavior here? I truly CAN NOT IMAGINE a queer person moving onto my block and not welcoming them. “We made it! We’re alive! We live near each other! Let’s thrive!” TBH I’m team “welcome to the neighborhood” welcome cookies no matter your gender or sexuality, but understand not everyone’s with me. But a fellow traveler moves in five doors down?! Say hello man! Before the grumpy note!

​3 If you’re in the weeds of DAFT or other emigration research, when I say “now that we have Dutch income” I mean that: instead of the system we moved here on via which my partner’s income was from a US-based employer and my income was from our US—based LLC business, we established a NL business as part of the DAFT Visa. We now have a Netherlands-based consulting and publishing business and we both work for it now; we can do this because we started the BV version (as opposed to the ZZP, which in the US is a freelance DBA single-person business version). We pay more taxes as a BV vs a ZZP, but we get ‘legitimacy’ and can hire ourselves so we have regular income for future mortgages, apartment applications etc. Our financial world is now shifted to the Netherlands and EU, mostly away from the US.

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If you’re considering leaving the US (even if flashes of “what if” or “I couldn’t!” cross your mind occasionally) my wife Nova and I wrote a book just for you.