Towards a paradigm shift in the residential appeal policy of the Brussels-Capital Region
Notes de la rédaction
This is the press release related to the article from Hannah Berns, Gilles Van Hamme, Emmanuelle Lenel and Christine Schaut, published on 10 October 2022. Read the article.
The issue of the “outflow” of the middle classes to the outskirts has been at the heart of political concerns since the Brussels-Capital Region was formed in 1989. The very strong consistency of this concern on the part of the Brussels authorities is rooted in the Region's funding mechanism, 70 % of which was initially based on personal income tax. Various measures have therefore been put in place over the past three decades to try to counteract the outflow of the households concerned. The 172nd issue of Brussels Studies affirms and explains the failure of policies to keep the middle classes in Brussels. It was written by researchers from Université libre de Bruxelles and Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles (Hannah Berns and Gilles Van Hamme, geographers at ULB; sociologists Emmanuelle Lenel, USL-B and Christine Schaut, ULB/USL-B).
Through a comprehensive analysis combining quantitative and qualitative data, the first part closely examines the migration between Brussels and its outskirts, as well as the reasons for part of these movements. In light of this, the authors develop the hypothesis that the failure of residential appeal and establishment policies is, among other things, due to a shortcoming in terms of both targets and means. By preferentially targeting “middle class” households with children (without defining the boundaries), the Brussels Region seeks to retain a category which is actually unlikely to stay. Furthermore, it favours access to ownership as a means of anchoring them in the region in the long term. This mechanism denies the reality of the city as a place of residential transition.
In the second part, two approaches for reorienting the regional residential appeal policy are presented: i.e. to consider the city as a place of transition in the life cycle rather than of residential stabilisation, and to focus on household profiles whose residential needs and expectations are more in line with dense urban environments.
With successive state reforms, the proportion of regional revenue based on personal income tax has fallen sharply to less than 30 % (except for the very atypical period of the health crisis). An upward shift in the social composition of the population would therefore not alter regional revenue drastically, given the declining weight of personal income tax, the limited differences between income categories with respect to this tax, and the (future) reform of the national solidarity mechanism, which will result in a tax gain as the population increases. The fiscal motivation behind the policy of the last thirty years has thus largely lost its relevance. The authors therefore suggest that regional appeal policies should be reoriented, according to three principles which emerge from their study: to take temporary residential needs into consideration; to stop focusing primarily on couples with children (especially those whose socioeconomic profile indicates that they are tempted by the green outskirts); and to focus more on the rental sector, which is better able to meet the great diversity of residential needs in a city like Brussels.
References
Berns, H., Van Hamme, G., Lenel, E. and Schaut, C., “Towards a paradigm shift in the residential appeal policy of the Brussels-Capital Region”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 172, 10 October 2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/6223
Contact
Tatiana Debroux, Editor in chief:
tdebroux[at]brusselsstudies.be