The dutch administration subsidizes rents on many homes in a very unfair and inefficient way. See the previous story. It does so indirectly via so called house building corporations.

One of these institutions had a brilliant idea. They wanted to improve one of their neighborhoods/suburbs so they bought an old cruise ship, the SS-Rotterdam, and started to restore it. The ship has been transformed to a hotel, theater and conference facility. I don't understand how that would solve the problems with the people renting their houses. I guess the area would become more interesting for shops and companies and gradually that would improve the quality of the inhabitants of their houses. Of course this reasoning is questionable, and I don't think it is a good way of spending taxpayers money. The transformation of the ship into a hotel is probably unfair competition for existing, privately owned, hotels in Rotterdam.

They thought it would only take a couple of millions to do the restoration job. Unfortunately they were wrong: asbestos was found in the old ship and the actual costs were around 200 000000 euro, exceeding the budget 7 times.