ethnic concentration Fig. 1.4 Growth and concentration of non-Western migrants in the Netherlands in 2007 and 2025 (van den Broek et al., 2008)
Ethnic concentration As we saw before the largest groups of migrants are very strongly concentrated in the big cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. In 1992, 57 percent of Surinamese, 48 percent of Moroccans, 37 percent of Turks and 31 percent of Antilleans lived in these cities. The existing concentrations of migrants are strengthened through new migrants which are strongly directed to the big cities. In 1997, 63 percent of Surinamese migrants, 53 percent of Moroccan migrants, 45 percent of Turkish migrants and 41 percent of Antillean migrants arrived in the four big cities. Thus the orientation of new migrants in the four big cities is higher than that of the ethnic minority groups already living there (Bolt et al., 2002).
Areas of concentration Migrants constitute a large (and growing) part of the urban population in the Netherlands as I showed before. A large number of these migrants live in post-war neighbourhoods (van Bruggen, 2000). The main cause of this is the housing offer in these neighbourhoods. A great number of the houses in these postwar neighbourhoods are in the social rent sector, which is by far the main housing provider for new migrants and also for their offspring (Lindner, 2002). Post-war housing estates have drawn a lot of attention since the late eighties because of the problems in many of these neighbourhoods such as poor quality housing, decay of the living environment and social problems. But not only the post-war housing areas are the areas that are facing concentration of the migrant population. In the 1990s the Dutch government realised that increasingly fewer households were able to pursue their housing careers within their own neighbourhood. This particularly took place in the residential areas with an overrepresentation of affordable (social) rent housing. These were noticeably areas that were originally built in the second half of the nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth century and the aforementioned early post-war period (1945-1960). The amount of owner occupied housing in these areas was very limited and the quality of the housing stock was quite poor. This low quality and homogeneous housing stock led to an acceleration of the departure of the well-to-do households. Subsequently their place was taken over by low-income households in many cases. With this the socio-economic profile of the residents in these areas became increasingly homogeneous over time (van Beckhoven and van Kempen, 2003).