Housing stuff

So we have been looking for a new place to live. This is nothing new, we started looking about 3 years ago, when my boyfriend moved into the one-person-household house that I lived in, effectively converting it to a 2-person-and-2-cats-household house.
There is not enough room.
I know there might be enough room if I did not have about 200 books and we didn't need two desks in the living room, but as we're not willing to throw either out, moving is the only option. Up until then, we've got a small (and very moist) basement full of stuff, piles of papers everywhere, a wardrobe closet filled with photographs, cameras, and other non-clothing stuff, and we have to hang the laundry in the middle of the living room, as there is no spare room or space for a dryer.
This works fine, most of the time, but sometimes one of us gets really annoyed (usually when we're trying to stuff another pile of papers or books or camera things on top of another big pile) and goes on the web to Search for Our New Home.

Now we have 3 options:
- Renting at a social housing agency. This is what we are doing now. There is a website you have to subscribe to, and then you get one point for each month you're subscribed, and when you have about 100 points, you can get a house. This sounds ludicrous, and it is, but it is really true. Only the very small houses (like this one) or the really crappy ones (like this one) or the ones in unsafe neighbourhoods (like this one) go for something around 50 points, but for most of them you have to be subscribed for about 8 years. Safe to say, we have not been subscribed that long, so this is quite a long shot. Also, the housing agencies are selling off a lot of their ex-rentals, so there are less houses available while the demand has gone up. Ironically, by the time we will actually qualify to rent one, our income will exceed the 34,000 Euros it can be maximum, so we won't be allowed to. So, on to option 2:
- Renting. This is just plain old renting a house, which is not rent-controlled and for which you won't get any subsidies (not that we're getting them now, but hey). There are many, many houses on offer in Groningen at the moment. Most of them have been on offer for a while. The city is tearing down some of the older boroughs and replacing them with new ones consisting of both rentals and houses you can actually buy. These are very fancy, and there is a lot on offer, but demand is quite low. However, all of them want you to have a yearly income of at least 30,000, some of them shooting up to 48,000. Needless to say, we are not making that amount of money. Also, if I were making that amount of money, I would not rent a 2-room apartment on the edge of town, I would actually buy a house. Which is the third option:
- Buying. Yes, that is not going to happen any time soon. Houses are expensive, nobody is willing to give anybody a mortgage at the moment, so everything is stuck. Also, for the same money you get a small, badly insulated, 2-room house in Groningen, you can actually get a 5-bedroom house with a garden in some of the smaller villages around here. So I'd rather go for that option. If I had any money, which I don't, or anybody to lend me the money, which they won't, so this is a no go.

So it looks like we're stuck here. Until we make enough money to get into a rental, at which point we will probably buy something, because buying is cheap and if you make enough money people will give you a loan.

And in a way, we're exemplar for the whole housing situation in the Netherlands; nobody can sell their house because those who want to buy it can't get a mortgage, those people stay stuck in the (older) rentals, thus making the companies ask ludicrous amounts of rent and income statements to make sure they make money, thus keeping us stuck in the social housing, thus keeping students stuck in their students' rooms. Added to that is that houses have been overrated in the past decades, and now the prices are going back to normal levels, a lot of people are losing money. And people have been getting mortgages which exceed the actual value of their house, and now they can't pay it back, and all is going down the drain.

In a sense, we're lucky here. We don't have a house, or obligations, or debts. We can just sit it out and wait for the prices to drop so we can immediately buy a house and skip the whole non-social housing rent phase. But in the meantime, we have a very small house, and money to spend, and we would like to get the system moving by helping out. But I don't see that happening any time soon...