Amsterdam is to create "Scum villages" where nuisance（讨厌的人） neighbors and anti-social tenants（房客，居住者） will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans（有篷的车辆） or containers with "minimal services" under constant police supervision.

 

The capital of Netherlands already has a special hit squad⁵ of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders⁶ for a compulsory⁷ six month course in how to behave.

 

Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction⁸ and homelessness.

 

Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behavior every year. He complained that long-term harassment⁹ often leads to law abiding¹⁰ tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbors, being driven out.

 

"This is the world turned upside down," the mayor said at the weekend.

 

The project also involves setting up a special hotline and system for victims to report their problems to the authorities.

 

The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed¹¹ "scum villages" because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent¹² troublemakers¹³.

 

"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighborhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together."

 

Whilst denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum", a spokesman for the city mayor stressed that the special residential¹⁴ units would aim to enforce good behavior.

 

"The aim is not to reward people who behave badly with a new five-room home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent（威慑，妨碍物）," he said.

 

The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam's famous tolerance¹⁵ for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behavior that falls short of criminality.

 

There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping¹⁶ container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.

 

Under the new policy, from January next year, victims will no longer have to move to escape their tormentors（使苦恼的东西）, who will be moved to the new units.

 

A team of district "harassment directors" have already been appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of nuisance tenants.

 

The Dutch Parool newspaper observed that the policy was not a new one. In the 19th century, troublemakers were moved to special villages in Drenthe and Overijssel outside Amsterdam. The villages were rarely successful, becoming sink estates for the lawless.

 

"We have learned from the past," said the mayor's spokesman. "A neighborhood can deal with one problem family but if there are more the situation escalates¹⁷."

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