Way back in the 70's and the 80's, the historic canal belt was home to a wider variety of characters.
The squatters and heroin addicts are now gone, artists have generally moved farther out, and many of the rattier buildings have been renovated into apartments available on airbnb.

The most expensive Real Estate in the Netherlands is on the Kaisergracht. Herrengracht and Prinsengracht are close behind. OZA and OZV trail significantly. It has been hard to get investment in renovation of those buildings because of the RLD. I think 1012 is meant to increase investment, property values, and tax basis.

There are only so many picturesque canals in Amsterdam. Investment, particularly foreign investment, in those properties is where they see a future payday. There just isn't foreign demand for Overtoom, Oude West or the Docklands. And nothing retards foreign investment like crime and vice.

I don't know if the property taxes will offset lost tourist revenue. I'm sure the RLD will survive, but it might ultimately do so in the SIngel or the Pijp. Or survive in the Wallen in a smaller, tidier package. Just my 2 cents.

I can think of dozens of Amsterdam businesses that I enjoyed that have closed in the past decade. I can say the same thing about Chicago, Miami, Paris, Munich, Innsbruck....
I still like the general vibe of Amsterdam, and I think it is mostly intact despite some cleaning up. I do enjoy walking in less vomit and dog shit, the two greatest improvements in the last 20 years

I would love to live in Amsterdam. On a canal. Just not OZA.

Weasel

This is what I suspect. That it's an attempted money-grab (and likely that there are certain more conservative types throwing in their support for ideological reasons).

The problem, though, is that as I said before, the way they're going about it makes no sense at all. They leave Bethlemsteeg and I believe the windows around the oudekerk intact, forcing potential mongerers to pass through the Sint Annen area anyway (not to mention the fact that Warmoestraat, just a street over, is fairly raucous in its own right). They move the police precinct away and cut the budget for police in De Wallen. They force bars and coffee shops to close early, so there are packs of drunk, bored idiots roaming the district en masse. They give drug pushers a customer base by cutting accessibility to drugs by shutting down coffee shops and forcing them to close earlier.

The things they're doing will not facilitate change in the area, it'll just make the sexyland area into a deserted stretch of no man's land that mongerers and drunks have to stumble through. As an investor, I wouldn't be putting my money into that area. It's an obvious money pit.

This is the area of the RLD as defined in the "RLD walking tour" linked on the Ignatz homepage:



This makes quite a compact area of the city. From a mongering perspective it would be great if there were windows all down Oudezijds Voorburgwal in this area, linking OzA and the windows in the Sexyland area in a sea of girls. From the city council's point of view, OzV is a bit of an uneasy mixture of people trying to live in the historic canal houses, Bulldog coffee shops, a beautiful and historic church, and red light windows right next door to it.

I can see the logic of thoroughly gentrifying OzV and concentrating all the windows along OzA and side-streets, making one canal closer in vibe to Keizersgracht and the other a compact tourist-spectacle of red light windows. If they could balance window closures with re-openings I could live with it. In this scenario I think they would be better off changing the layout of the buildings and alleys in the sexyland area, possibly removing Tromp to enlarge the buildings either side. If you are going to fuck with the area you might as well do it properly, but the current project is a bit half-hearted and makes Sexyland into a bit of a "dead area" as mentioned previously. A run-down half-empty RLD surrounded by vacant buildings, dismal lifeless "fashion" windows, an amusement arcade, a hangover information centre, more souvenir stores and cheap food outlets.........it's not a great improvement. Follow some "normal" tourists around here and they don't seem very impressed. If the council genuinely have a good commercially viable plan in place for the Sexyland area, why can't they get any private funding to buy up the windows? In London I doubt they would fuck around like this, if they bought up buildings in Soho it would be converted into expensive flats or whatever within a few months.

The council just need to be careful that they don't kill the vibe of the area as a whole, for example Warmoesstraat has a great lively atmosphere with just the right balance of fun and seediness - I can't see the point of, say, stopping Hunter's selling weed. "Normal" tourists do expect to be able to visit the RLD and have something there worth seeing, even if its just to tick it off in a guide book. I do occasionally get asked by very respectable couples where the red light district is, and I sometimes worry that in the future my answer will be "you just walked through it, or what's left of it".

The reason why they can't get private funding is because anyone who knows the business of real estate at all knows it's a bad investment. Like I said, I'm in the industry and I wouldn't give them my money (unless, of course, they were willing to give me a brothel license and let me run windows out of my properties). The businesses that are already there are already complaining about feeling cheated, despite getting these properties at massively reduced rates. They're not doing any business and many are closing within weeks. The last few times I was there, many of the former windows were simply vacant.

Unless the city council is able to do something to segregate the sexyland area from the rest of De Wallen, this won't change. They have OZA on one side, and Bethlemsteeg and Warmoestraat on the other, and they think somehow, sexyland is going to become this quaint little oasis of gentrification in the middle of all the sin/fun? It's not going to happen. If, as you said, they expanded the buildings in the area and turned them into maybe high-end condos or something, that might be one thing, but that's going to be difficult as well, because, as I understand it, many of those buildings are protected historical landmarks, so they're sort of stuck with the facades and footprints that they have now. I'm just really not sure what else you could do with those buildings.

The fact of the matter is; very simply, you have an area that's been famous throughout the world for a particular thing for hundreds of years. It's going to take a very concerted, well-planned effort to even attempt to change it, and that's not what's being done. What's being done is a half-assed attempt, cut short by lack of funds, executed by incompetent bureaucrats.

The Wallen is one of the oldest and historically most significant parts of Amsterdam.
I believe the oldest building in Amsterdam is on Warmostraat.
The laws regarding the renovation of these old buildings are almost impossible to follow.
National historic structure rules, state rules, city rules, and extra special rules for the Canal Belt.
On top of that, they sit on wooden pilings set in wet ground.
Any new owner is faced with massive structural repairs, rewiring, replumbing...
and you absolutely cannot change the facade.
The city cannot allow these structures to fall into disrepair, but they make it damn hard to get anyone to consider the challenge of keeping them up.
On the other hand, think what might have happend if Amsterdam had reasonable rules regarding renovation and urban renewal. That neighborhood would have been leveled and turned into condos decades ago.
Gridlock is a part of any good Dutch plan!

Exactly. If you invest in one of these properties, you're going to have to use it more or less as-is. You'll be able to make some modifications to the interior, but you'd be very limited in what you could do. It would also take a significant amount of time, money, and labor to refurbish these spaces. Basically, these properties are massive money pits.

Now, my specialty is commercial. That's what we do, we own commercial buildings here in Toronto. These properties are very risky from a commercial standpoint because any business you put there will be very high-risk. We're already seeing businesses struggling to succeed, and you'd also face challenges in making the spaces business-friendly, depending on what you need to do. For example, converting one of these spaces to a restaurant could be problematic because being able to install a range hood without altering the property in a way that would violate the law could be very difficult. This means that if you buy these properties and spend the money to fix them up, they may wind up sitting vacant half the time, which means that you, as a landlord, are not collecting rent, and are paying taxes and various maintenance expenses on these properties. Again, money pit.

From a residential standpoint, the spaces are perhaps a little easier to work with. You could convert them to condos or apartments without too much difficulty, but then the question becomes whether you'll be able to ask premium prices for residences located essentially in the middle of a red light district. Looking at current real-estate prices in Amsterdam online, the answer to that question seems to be no. Prices for residential properties in the Wallen area seem to be on average about 30% lower than in other comparable areas (ie. canal-side in the city centre). Now, of course, the goal of 1012 is to change this, but as I've outlined, that isn't going to happen. All that will happen is you'll get more apartments available in the Wallen area at the same prices we see now, if not lower. So investors are looking at paying premium prices for properties they won't be able to get a premium return on.

It's really no wonder that it's difficult to find investors.