By Cadence Chua and Esmée Zuiker
For many years, there have been complaints about the DUWO dorms on Carolina Macgillavrylaan: insufficient heating, a lack of hot water, too few or faulty washing machines, broken elevators, and more. Students feel that their problems are not being taken seriously and that concrete action rarely follows. Recently, some students have started organising for a more coordinated, collective response. The Herring spoke to them as well as other parties involved in handling issues in the dorms.
Overview of parties involved
The Residents’ Committee (RC): Most student housing complexes managed by DUWO have an RC elected by residents. According to the DUWO website, the RC meets with DUWO to discuss issues such as “service costs, nuisance and maintenance of the student complex”, and these meetings are held at least three times a year. The heating, hot water, elevator breakdown, and other issues fall under topics related to the upkeep of the buildings.
ASVA: The ASVA student union represents all higher education students in Amsterdam, primarily focusing on issues relating to education and housing. They provide legal aid and housing advice, help to organise demonstrations, and also contact media outlets regarding problems students report facing.
AUC staff: The AUC non-academic staff consists of those working in the Services & Communications team, which, among other topics, oversees housing matters. Specifically, the team meets regularly with DUWO to discuss issues AUC students have brought to AUC’s attention, including the provision of utilities like hot water.
AUC students: Apart from filling in repair request forms to DUWO and letting AUC know of these occurrences, some students have begun looking at alternative ways to solve problems for good, including a rent strike prompted by the prolonged lack of hot water and heating.
Actions Undertaken
The Herring spoke to one such student, Sam Kothuis, a third-year Humanities major, who coordinated a now-aborted rent strike. Currently, he is exploring legal methods for students to seek financial compensation for the lack of hot water and heating, among other problems. Kothuis says that he has been in touch with DUWO and has been pursuing various means to push for further action from DUWO since his first year. “I think in last year’s yearbook, I was voted most likely to sue DUWO,” he laughs. “That’s pretty comprehensive of my role.”
In the past, Kothuis started a petition with around 200 to 300 signees, but says there was no action taken by DUWO. He claims that he even tried to start legal proceedings, but to no avail. He then attempted to organise a rent strike, which he “still think[s] would be great”. However, after consulting with ASVA, he is now pivoting to a more legal strategy – approaching Woon!, a non-profit organisation that assists residents throughout the Netherlands with advice on dealing with landlords and building issues.
As for Woon!, Kothuis states that “it’s complicated”. He explains that he received an email response from the non-profit, saying that they heard the water and heating issues would be fixed with a new pump. “I’ve heard [these problems] will be fixed about 100 times now. I’m not convinced.” Woon! has advised Kothuis to start a logbook with all the repair requests, which is why he is currently asking AUC students to send him screenshots of that in the WhatsApp group chats. He hopes that “when [Woon!] sees the whole list of things, they’ll take more action. They did mention that we have a good chance of being [eligible] to get the money back.”
When asked about collaborating with other organisations like the RC and other AUC students, Kothuis also mentions his “annoyance” with the RC of the AUC dorms, saying, “I bet they’re doing their best, but they’re not doing anything. They communicate very little with us. They’ve obviously never stuck DUWO the finger.” Kothuis cites this as the main reason he prefers to organise independently. For AUC students, he highlights the importance of sending in repair requests to DUWO. He says that his “pet peeve” is when people in the AUC group chats ask if anyone has hot water, “and then four people will go, ‘no’, and that’s it, that’s the whole conversation”. He also expresses his wish to continue with the rent strike if communication with Woon! does not work out. “I just wish people would be a bit more radical,” Kothuis says.
Regarding why he has continued to find solutions to the issues in the building, the Humanities student says that he is actually one of the least affected by them. He mentions that his unit does not experience hot water issues. He does not use the washing machines, which frequently break down, as his mother lives nearby. As for heating, “I just put on a sweater,” he says. “None of these issues affects me. I’m doing this for the whole group, because I just got so frustrated with everybody getting fucked over.”
The Herring also spoke to Nikki Eng, simultaneously the head of the Residents’ Committee for the tall and short buildings (non-AUC) and head of the housing committee, a new semi-autonomous ASVA committee. Eng, a first-year Global Arts, Culture and Politics UvA student, says that her role in ASVA is to facilitate communication between the main ASVA and the students. She explains that the housing committee is a “new committee aimed as a place for students to create campaigns and petitions to solve tenancy and housing issues in Amsterdam”. She feels strongly about her role as she wants to help students voice out their frustrations against DUWO in a productive manner.
Eng is also in communications with Kothuis, and says that ASVA advised Kothuis to change his strategy from a rent strike to contacting Woon!, as “rent strikes are a very big thing and have many legal issues that happen [as a result], […] it is too dangerous to actually get students to do a rent strike”. They hence decided to go through Woon! to ask for compensation from DUWO and get them to expedite solutions to building issues. “Hopefully, we can make this a less aggressive manner of going against DUWO,” she states.
The UvA student also highlights that in early January, news outlets, including Het Parool and AT5, covered the lack of hot water and heating issues in the Carolina Macgillavrylaan dorm buildings. “This was brought to the attention of the different political parties as it was around the election season,” Eng says, explaining that Volt, a political party, then reached out to her and offered to help tenants through the municipal council. However, she mentions that the municipality takes a long time to get anything done, and that “it’s an open topic for us right now, if there’s an issue, we can still go back to [them]”.
Despite the lack of progress on some fronts, Eng believes that efforts made by the non-AUC RC have paid off. “Under DUWO regulations now, their policy has changed to say that having no hot water and heating is considered an emergency issue and they will immediately contact an engineer and get someone down to the building,” she says. She claims this is in contrast to the old DUWO policy, where only gas leakages, power outages, and social safety issues were classified as emergencies.
However, she is still concerned about students paying for the hot water and heating services without getting them adequately. She says that certain residents have received notice letters regarding a high amount of energy used, as they have an extra heater. “But seriously, if you don’t give us heating or hot water, how do you expect a student to live in this country in winter? […] It’s unacceptable.”
To get a perspective on the role AUC plays in such matters, The Herring spoke with Marcus Smit, head of AUC’s Services & Communications Department. Smit explains that AUC serves as a “mediator” between students and DUWO. However, he says that they can also “put their fist down” if needed. Since they have direct lines with DUWO management, he explains that they can flag things, but that “at the same time, we cannot flag everything”.
Smit explains he feels the way students often go about the issues in the dorms is unproductive. As a result, he says that from what they’ve told him, DUWO has mostly been unaware of the ongoing complaints. When he talks to DUWO about issues that students communicate with him, “they would say either we’re working on it’ or ‘it’s fixed’, and nobody was aware of complaints”. This was confirmed through meeting minutes between the Student Council and the Dean, where he said that it seems that DUWO does not recognise the hot water issues as a permanent problem, and instead only takes temporary actions.
To solve this, echoing Kothuis, Smit says that when a problem arises, students should first of all immediately send in a repair request. “I’m sure that they will use [it]. They analyse the data and also see what comes up a lot. […] And you have proof that you’ve made the goal for repair,” he states. He mentions that students have the responsibility to report it themselves first, but the next step would then be to thoroughly document the issues – the room number and the times when the issues happened. Then, if students feel like DUWO doesn’t sufficiently respond to them, they, the RC, or “whoever wants to be a case manager” can bring this documentation to Smit. “If we can deliver the overview to DUWO, then we have a case,” he sums up.
Smit mentions that he has a biweekly meeting with DUWO’s social manager, during which he could bring these issues up. “I would be really happy to support [AUC students], and if we have, for example, a list of people who have issues with hot water, we could check with DUWO if it has been fixed.” He states that if DUWO says yes, then together they could reach out to all the people who are on the list and ask them to confirm. “Then there’s some structure to it,” he explains.
Reflecting on the action undertaken by students concerning the hot water, he explains that getting financial compensation is a different goal than that from AUC, which is mainly “getting things fixed”. “If the incentive is to get money back, then I don’t think that AUC is your party to contact, because we cannot decide on that,” he says. He explains that the relation between DUWO and students remains a legal contract between that of a landlord and its tenants. “I am totally happy to advise or to read what is being done, also to make sure that this doesn’t spiral into really negative PR for no reason,” he points out, emphasising that he would not want prospective students to be deterred from moving here.
In general, Smit wants to emphasise that he understands that “things break down” because it is complicated for a big organisation that deals with a lot of buildings. Additionally, he says there have also been positive accounts of issues that have been worked out through collaboration with DUWO. Finally, he explains how he thinks it could be useful to distinguish between bigger and smaller issues and make a list of the “need to have and nice to have”.
On 23 April, DUWO sent out a general email to all residents explaining the issues regarding the hot water and what they are doing to resolve them. They state that the building’s hot water is supplied by central heat pumps that warm water stored in buffer tanks, which should automatically be reheated based on temperature sensors, heat demand, and preset temperature limits.
Currently, however, they say this automatic control is not working properly, causing residents to sometimes experience little or no hot water. They say specialists are investigating possible causes and actively monitoring the installation to stabilise buffer tank temperatures, restore the automatic response of the heat pumps, and prevent recurrence.
Recently, they say that a circuit board and a sensor were replaced, and a technical advisor visited to assess capacity and performance. Chemical cleaning of the buffer tanks should have taken place on 30 April and 1 May, and additional heat pump maintenance will occur within the next five weeks, with dates to be communicated. They request residents to keep reporting all issues via the DUWO app or Vastgoed Service so building managers can ensure that problems are followed up on quickly.
As of the date of publication of this article, DUWO has not responded to additional requests for comments.
The Herring 