Heerlen municipality prioritizes housing projects with greatest impact
After years of shrinkage, the municipality of Heerlen is now confidently moving toward growth. With the ambition to add as many as 7,000 new homes to the city before 2050, Heerlen is choosing a course with guts, vision and ambition. We are doing this by prioritizing housing projects that contribute most to our housing ambition.
Clear ambition, smart choices
Given the many housing projects being requested, the municipality is forced to opt for a prioritization process. This helps to work with focus, pace and quality to create a municipality where people want to live, work and play. This prioritization is necessary to realize the housing ambition and prioritize the most promising projects. "The dynamics in spatial development in our city are clearly noticeable. Therefore, we have ensured that capacity and expectations match. For this, we are expanding our official capacity. Now we can give impetus to the most impactful projects. The acceleration in building will be visible and felt everywhere: in numbers as well as in the quality of developments for stronger neighborhoods and districts," said Marco Peters, Alderman Spatial Development.
Together with initiators and developers, clear, result-oriented agreements are made that contribute to our growth ambition. Alderman Wonen, Casper Gelderblom: "With this prioritization we will enable the construction of 5,659 homes until 2040. A big step towards our ambition to grow to a city of 100,000 inhabitants by 2050. In doing so, we spread housing construction and cherish our greenery, so that we strengthen the neighborhoods throughout Heerlen. Social and sustainable development, in other words!"
An attractive, growing city
To enable the right projects in the right places, less beautiful parts of the city are being addressed. A pleasant living environment is created for the inhabitants of Heerlen and we are working on a center that will become the heart of the entire city. Living, working, recreation and education will come together. Jordy Clemens, Alderman Center Development: "The center of Heerlen is the economic heart of Parkstad and the place where we will be leading the way in education, greening, culture and housing in the coming years. Here we are building according to our core values of quality, identity and experimentation. Thus Heerlen center contributes to the growth ambition of the city and the entire region with housing and associated facilities.
By setting priorities, we have actually also decided that we will not pick up a number of spatial initiatives (yet). With this prioritization, the temporary stop on new housing initiatives is lifted. In this way, the municipality is keeping open the possibility of taking up new initiatives in the future that could make a major contribution to our ambition.