Private ownership of land in and around the cities is not common in the Netherlands. The ground is leased from the local government. When the lease is up, the owner (usually local government) has the right to refuse to renew the lease, and automatically gains ownership of any property you have built on it. They may offer to lease the land to you again, or lease it to someone else and sell your property at current market value, or they may force you to tear down anything built on it at your own expense.
I looked up the English term for this system, "Emphyteusis". The fact that I've never heard of it before indicates that it's probably not a common concept.
That sounds similar to the freehold/leasehold system that exists in the UK. In this the owner of a piece of property can sell a leasehold, which is the right to exclusive use for a set period of time (nowadays it is usually 999 years for residential property, but 99 years used to be common). At the end of the leasehold ownership rights revert to the freeholder. This was very convenient for landed nobility, who could re-sell the same land every couple of generations. The Duke of Westminster did very well out of it.
The right of a leaseholder to force sale of the freehold to themselves was introduced a few years ago, so this system will slowly fade.
> Private ownership of land in and around the cities is not common in the Netherlands.
This is only partially correct. Private land ownership exists (and is the dominant form) in many cities in NL, but there are a few prominent ones where 'erfpacht' (still) exists. In quite a few cases the annual fee can be bought out for a lump sum for a couple of decades or even for ever.
It looks like most of the 20 or 30 largest cities have such a system, even if most have plans to phase it out, that will be a process of decades.
The lease is normally bought for a period of 20 to 40 years. When that period is up though, the county can and sometimes will refuse to renew the lease if they can sell the ground for a higher price to someone else, or if they want to change the zoning of the area. Home owners don't always consider this risk, they just buy the property, along with the lease, from the previous owner.
This isn't a great tragedy if the ground happens to be a sports field or a petting zoo, but not so long ago there was a tragic case of a man who lost his home because the county refused to renew the lease. The county decided to split the property, partitioned his home and sold half of it to someone else. His ex wife was allowed to rent the other half of the property from the new owner of the lease.
This case was in the news, because after losing a lawsuit and a series of appeals, the man lost the house he had bought, with a mortgage largely paid off, and all he had to show for it was a bill for removing improvements he had built in the yard. After exhausting all legal options, he decided to undo the partitioning of his former home with a sledge hammer, which landed him in the papers (and probably in jail) as the crazy ex husband with the sledge hammer.
As far as I can tell (from trying to parse Dutch legalese), the owner of the land, county Soest in this case, gained ownership of everything built on the property when the lease was nullified. The way mortgages work in this country, the man with the sledgehammer would still be responsible for repaying the loan in full, even though he was no longer in possession of the collateral.
If I had known or fully grasped all this years earlier, I would never have bought a house!
I looked up the English term for this system, "Emphyteusis". The fact that I've never heard of it before indicates that it's probably not a common concept.