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Johan Leman, 22 March 2022

A study by CurieuzenAir finds that there is a correlation between deprived neighbourhoods and air pollution in Brussels. How to remediate? Policymakers tend to link sanitation to gentrification (to reduce deprivation) and to interventions to improve air quality. There is a great risk in doing so. One needs the help of the real estate sector to implement gentrification. This can lead to two undesirable consequences:

1.   Some families who want to stay are de facto forced to live in even smaller dwellings, because the habitable spaces for less well-off people are decreasing, otherwise they have to move out.

2.   The gentrification itself, pushed by real estate interests, consists in part of flats that are seen as investments for people who do not live there and, in fact, are often marketed as such by the real estate sector. In the meantime, clean-up of the air quality often takes much longer.

What is now happening in the Brussels canal zone is that young families can no longer buy a house there. They then look for a house in the region of Aalst and the like, and are confronted with the fact that there too, you quickly have to pay more than 300,000 euros to buy a house. In the Canal Zone itself, the rent for a flat with children easily exceeds 1,300 euros/month.

What is actually happening is that the real estate sector is building new buildings faster than authorities can clean up the air pollution. In fact, a good policy would be to phase the process differently. First, the air quality should be completely cleaned up, and only then should it be possible to build, for example, residential towers.

The power of the real estate sector, however, is such that the phasing is the other way around: first, erect buildings… and then, one day, the air quality will be cleaned up.

It is time to change this. This would benefit the credibility of politics.

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