Exception or Turning Point? Amsterdam Halts Fines for Homeless People
- Justine Kozlovska & Lena Brinkmann
- Jun 20
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 20
Last week, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema announced in a letter to the city council that the municipality will no longer issue fines to people sleeping on the streets. This takes effect immediately. According to Halsema, the 170 euro fines only add financial strain to those already facing homelessness and do little to support long-term solutions.
The decision marks a change from formal municipal policies that have, in effect, treated homelessness as a public order issue – a nuisance to be managed, often through penalties. As the first Dutch city to permanently abolish these fines, Amsterdam’s case prompts an important question: Is this a meaningful step toward systematic nationwide change or simply an isolated exception?
Criminalizing Homelessness
In the Netherlands, around 9.000 people are officially recorded by Statistic Netherlands as homeless – a figure that likely displays only a third of reality. Estimates suggest the actual number is closer to 30,000. People sleeping in cars, informal shelters, or staying temporarily with friends often fall outside the statistics: much of homelessness remains invisible.
Homeless people aged 18 to 65
Source: Statistics Netherlands, missing data for 2019
The city council of Amsterdam had already called for an end to fining homeless individuals back in 2019. Although the proposal was approved at the time, the official ban outlined in the General Local Regulations (APV) remained in place. In practice, however, enforcement softened over time. Since 2021, authorities have shifted toward a more selective approach, issuing fines only in disruptive cases, such as sleeping in building entrances, and only after an initial warning. But still, even three years later, reports showed a significant increase in the number of fines issued – 287 in the first eleven months of 2024 alone.
This increase has sparked discussions in many Dutch municipalities. While the Netherlands does not technically criminalise homelessness, it punishes acts that convey homeless behavior, such as sleeping on the street, begging, and residing in certain areas. The fines are issued to combat nuisance and limit rough sleeping.
Examples of efforts to limit rough sleeping across The Netherlands
Dion Kramer, Assistant Professor at the Department of Transnational Legal Studies at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, specialising in EU integration law, says that these efforts to punish acts that convey homeless behaviour are aimed at upholding an aesthetic image of the city, where poor people simply do not belong. “I think from that perspective onwards, fining these people is an affront to their basic dignity, human dignity. And also in violation of their human rights to private life,” he told The Glass Room. “You cannot sleep in a public space. You cannot ask other people for assistance. But these people don't have another place to go to.”
Different Municipalities, Different Approaches
Each municipality sets its own policies on how to respond to people living in public spaces. These local decisions, laid out in Algemene Plaatselijke Verordeningen (APV’s), or General Local Ordinances, can make the difference between receiving support or facing punishment. In one city, someone sleeping rough might be referred to a shelter while in another, they could be fined or asked to move along.
Dutch municipalities claim that fining people who experience homelessness is aimed at drawing people away from the streets. But, according to Moreno van Hulst, a field worker with 20 years of experience, working at Stichting GOUD, an organisation representing homeless people in Utrecht, the fines can further complicate people’s situation even when they secure a place to stay. “People on the street have no address. So, there's no place for the fines to go,” he says to The Glass Room. “Once they have an address and they can live somewhere, the first thing they find on their doormats is the fines. So, they start their new life with thousands of euros in debt.”
However, the municipalities often fail to provide safe spaces for those individuals to go to. Utrecht continues to fine people for sleeping outside, even when shelters are full. The city presents itself as a ‘Mensenrechtenstad’ (a ‘Human Rights City’), but van Hulst sees a contradiction, also stating that the municipality itself is responsible for providing enough shelters in the first place. “And then they do this, right? I mean, if you think that is your name, that’s your function as a human rights city, then you should lead by example.” Stichting GOUD wrote a letter to the Utrecht municipality beginning of June, urging them to end the fining of homeless people sleeping on the street. The municipality has not yet responded.
He sees a broader national trend: more cities are beginning to reconsider how they respond to homelessness. Besides Amsterdam, cities like Almere and Leiden have also stopped issuing such fines for the rest of the year, and the municipality of Rotterdam has expressed concern regarding the fines.
Initiatives, 2030 Plan and Estimations
In 2021, EU countries signed the Lisbon Declaration, aiming to end homelessness by 2030. The Netherlands followed two years later with a National Action Plan, built around the “Housing First” model: the idea that stable housing is the foundation for tackling other issues like mental health or addiction. The plan is backed by a broad coalition of actors – from national and local governments to housing corporations, NGOs and researchers – with “Housing First” initiatives currently active across nearly one hundred municipalities.
Those working closely with the issue doubt the goal is achievable. “It is completely unrealistic to end homelessness by 2030,” Kramer says. “With the number of people experiencing homelessness rising, it really requires fundamental restructuring of how we organise our economy, our housing system.”
Some see symbolic value in the plan. “I love the ambition of it. Absolutely. I'm not sure if it's realistic, but I think we should focus on the ambition and work as hard as we can towards seeing what happens,” van Hulst from Stichting Goud says. He sees the shortage of accessible housing as the core reason for an increase in homelessness in the Netherlands. For him, the next urgent step is straightforward: “I wouldn't say just build more houses for homeless people, build more houses, period.”
Others, like Kramer, warn that building more houses alone will not fix the root problem. “It can never be a solution alone,” he says. “You also have to think about how to distribute the extra housing that's being built. If a wealthy part of society can own two or three extra homes, you’re not solving homelessness.”
Kramer points to the need for deeper structural changes – including taxation on large homes, restrictions on second residences, and a rethinking of eviction practices. “If we take the right to housing and human dignity seriously, aren’t there other rights that should balance out against the right of a homeowner to take back their property again?”
His comments open up a broader question: Is homelessness proof that the current system is not working, or simply a reflection of what it was built to do? On this, Kramer says: “You can only say homelessness is a structural failure if you assume our economic system is supposed to lead to socially just outcomes. But I’m not sure that’s how most people think about it.”
At the same time, more and more people are beginning to question that very assumption, something Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema cited as one of the reasons for ending the fines. Although Robbin van Pelt, the mayor’s spokesperson, told The Glass Room that this decision is not intended to set a precedent for other municipalities, experts and NGOs view it as an important step towards a broader movement. “The more cities do this, the more this national tendency becomes obvious and harder to ignore,” says van Hulst.
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