Student housing company SSH&’s brand new studio apartments in the Winkelsteeg neighbourhood will go on the market next week. But there is a twist: the first chances are reserved for groups of friends.

The new building will be called Urban and will be located at NDW21: Nieuwe Dukenburgseweg 21, the site near the Winkelsteeg, the area of Nijmegen’s newest neighbourhood. Along with housing corporations Talis, Portaal, and Woonwaarts, SSH& is busy constructing 500 living spaces, across seven buildings.

SSH& has created 79 studio apartments; they are each 20 square meters and will cost 450 euros per month (basic rent). Students can move in starting in early April.

Friend groups

However, they will have to make it through a selection process. SSH& will start its lineup with fifteen studios close to each other, for example in the same hall or on the same floor. Those apartments will be rented to five groups of three friends.

These groups will be selected by lottery, a system SSH& has employed since 2020. Before then, rooms were assigned based on waiting time: people who were on the waiting list for a longer time had a better chance of being assigned a room. The new system of room division is supposed to be fairer.

‘We often see that our tenants live very separate lives; we want to prevent that from happening here’

But why start with friend groups? ‘It is to pre-emptively create a sense of community’, as stated by Tim Cools, SSH&’s advisor of strategy and living. ‘In other buildings with studio apartments and a lack of public spaces, we often see that our tenants live very separate lives; we want to prevent that from happening here.’

The idea is that friends already interact with each other and will thus likely involve other residents in the building –and the neighbourhood. After winning the lottery, they will have to write a joint motivational letter and come to an intake interview to make sure that said friend group is up to the task. If they match, then the students can rent.

Intake interview

This is not a unique concept: other housing corporations also employ those letters and interviews, for the same reasons as SSH&. ‘Living here takes a pioneering spirit, because the neighbourhood is in the middle of nowhere’, Woonwaarts’ Antoine Pekel commented earlier. ‘Residents need to be willing to live together and look after one another.’

But will the idea work? Only time will tell. Cools: ‘That intake interview is something of a trust exercise. We won’t check within a month if the residents are actually socialising.’

The ‘friends’ apartments are available for rent starting today (Wednesday, February 21^st). The other studio apartments won’t become available until these have been spoken for. The others will also be assigned by lottery but won’t require a motivational letter. However, they will still be invited for a talk with the neighbourhood supervisor, to understand the tenant’s motivation for living there.

This article was published earlier in De Gelderlander.

Translated by Jasper Pesch