Floating Homes

When a heavy storm hit day by day, resides of the floating community of schoonschip in Amsterdam had little doubt they could ride it out. They tied up their bikes and outdoor benches, checked in with neighbors to ensure everyone had enough food and water, and hunkered down as their neighborhood slid up and down its steel foundational pillars, rising along with the water and descending to its original position after the rain subsided.

“We feel safer in a storm because we are floating,” says siti Bolen, a Dutch television producer who moved into Schoonschip two years ago . “I think its kind of strange that building on water is not a priority worldwide.”

As sea levels rise and supercharged storms cause waters to swell, floating neighborhoods offer an experiment in flood defense that could allow coastal communities to better withstand climate change. In the land scarce but densely populated Netherlands, demand for such homes is growing. And, as more people look to build on the water there, officials are working to update zoning laws to make the construction of floating homes easier.

“The municipality wants to expand the concept of floating because it is multifunctional use of space for housing, and because the sustainable way is the way forward,” says Nienke van Renssen, an Amsterdam city councilor from the Greenleft party.

A floating house can be constructed on any shoreline and is able to cope with rising seas or rain induced floods by remaining atop the waters surface. Unlike houseboats, which can easily be unmoored and relocated, floating homes are fixed to the shore, often resting on steel poles, and are usually connected to the local sewer system and power grid. They are structurally similar to houses built on land, but instead of a basement, they have a concrete hull that acts as a counterweight, allowing them to remain stable in the water. In the Netherlands, they are often prefabricated, square shaped, three-storey townhouses built offsite with conventional materials such as timber, steel and glass. For cities facing worsening floods and a shortage of land for housing, floating homes are one potential blueprint to expand urban housing in the age of climate change.

In the Netherlands, a country which is largely build on reclaimed land and a third of which remains below sea level, the idea is not so far-fetched. In Amsterdam, which has almost 3,000 officially registered traditional houseboats across its canals, hundreds of people have moved into floating homes in previously neglected neighborhoods.

To help protect cities against climate change, in 2006 the Dutch government undertook its “Room for the river” programme, which strategically allows certain areas to flood during periods of heavy rain, a paradigm shift that seeks to embrace, rather than resist, rising water levels. Olthuis says the housing shortage in the Netherlands could fuel demand for floating homes, including in “Room for the River” areas where floods will be, at least for a portion of the years, part of the landscape. Experts says that relieving the Dutch housing shortage will require the construction of one million new homes over the next 10 years. Floating homes could help relieve pressure on the shortage of land available for development.

Floating homes pose numerous challenges, however. Severe wind and rain, or even the passing of large cruise ships, can makes the building rock. Siti Boelen, the Schoonschip resident, says that when she first moved in, stormy weather made her think twice before venturing up to her third floor kitchen, where she felt the movement the most. “You feel it in your stomach,” she says, adding that she has since gotten used to the feeling.

But the benefits may outweigh the costs. Rutger de Graaf, The cofounder and director of Blue21, says that the growing number of disastrous, unprecedented storms around the world spurred both city planners and residents to look to the water for solutions. Floating developments, he says, could have saved lives and billions of dollars in damage last summer, when deadly floods hit Germany Belgium, killing at least 222 people.

“If there are floods, its expected that many people will move to higher ground. But the alternative is to stay close to coastal cities and explore expansion onto the water “ says De Graaf.

“If you consider that in the second half of the century, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by sea level rise, we need to start now to increase the scale of floating development.”