A spider infestation, dust everywhere and a bad smell – that’s what awaited Arief Rahadian (25, Cultural Anthropology) when he arrived at his flat which he rents from the university’s Housing Office. He’s not the only one; international students pay high rents but get little for their money.



Rahadian arrived in The Hague from Indonesia last August. “Compared to where I come from, it’s much better here”, he stresses with a smile. “But I’m still traumatised by what I found.”



He pays 575 Euros a month for a converted shipping container on Stamkartstraat; it was far from clean on his arrival. It smelt bad and then he discovered a spider’s nest. “I was cleaning the room and I saw one spider drop first, and then I noticed more and more”, he recalls. “I noticed some white stuff on my curtains and poked it with a broom. It fell on the ground and exploded into tiny spiders that crawled everywhere. I’d only seen things like that in YouTube videos.”



Back in December, Sven Günther (26, Psychology) complained in Mare about the Housing Office and DUWO, the rent, communication and repairs that took a long time to fix. He and 23 other international students live on Oranjelaan in Oegstgeest. “After the article, they promised communications would improve but when I asked for a breakdown of the rent, DUWO told me to ask Housing and Housing said ask DUWO”, Günther explains. He wanted a breakdown because he had already discovered that DUWO had miscalculated the square metres on which they based the basic rent. Although DUWO adjusted the rent, Günther wanted to know exactly what happened to the money for service charges (about half the rent).



Dutch students who rent directly from DUWO can check the breakdowns online but at the Housing Office, international students sign for an overall price, so they don’t know exactly what they are paying for.

It’s not easy to find out who decides the rents. “Suitably complicated”, says Hans Pluim, DUWO’s branch director. “The university rents a number of flats from us which they then let to international students.”



The Housing Office may raise the rent they pay to DUWO. For instance, Housing may demand a few Euros extra per month for administrative costs, so students are not sure who to ask about the rent.



DUWO recently sent Günther the file he wanted: each student pays between twenty and fifty Euros a month for furniture and about ten Euros a month for a final clean. “Much of the furniture is old and worn; I bought a new mattress because a spring jutted out of mine. In January, new tenants arrived but the rooms had not been cleaned”, Günther says.



His house mate, Mhairi Mackenzie Everitt (20, Law) and one of the new occupants, shows Mare photographs of what she found. There are huge damp patches and dirt marks under the sink, the pipes are flaking and the walls are cracked or yellow.



“The room was really filthy”, Mackenzie Everitt adds. She pays 395 Euros for a nine-square-metre room – in Oegstgeest. “I complained about the filth and after some time the cleaners came and made a half-hearted attempt to clean it. In the end, I cleaned it myself.”



According to Pluim, the rooms are cleaned before new tenants move in. “But I can’t promise that nothing ever goes wrong. If it does, the tenants can file a complaint.”



A tour of other international-student accommodation reveals that cleaning – not just the final cleaning – seems to be a structural problem, as the rent paid by many international students includes regular cleaning too.



Students in the Kaarsenmakersstraat complex are extremely annoyed about it and have been complaining about the poor cleaning since the beginning of this academic year, says Onur Tayranoğlu (20, Arts, Media and Society). Finally, after the first term, DUWO switched cleaning companies, but there are still problems.



