It is well accepted that the maze of offices in Brussels hosting the various institutions of the European Union is a pretty soulless part of the city.
This area of the Belgian capital is dead quiet at weekends, as so few people live there. Bars that are packed on a Thursday evening when EU officials, politicians’ assistants, lobbyists, journalists and others meet up for post-work drinks see no footfall on a Saturday night. The EU quarter turns into a ghost town during the holidays over August and around Christmas, with cafes and restaurants closing for weeks.
Now there is a new plan to breathe some life into this corner of the city, which has for years been defined by its labyrinth of tall, grey office buildings.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm that proposes laws and oversees trade and foreign policy, struck a deal in April to sell 23 office buildings to the Belgian state, which plans to redevelop them. At least 30 per cent of the office space has been earmarked for new uses such as housing.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to introduce housing into the neighbourhood, so there will be life after hours,” said Kristiaan Borret, bouwmeester (master builder) of Brussels.
Historically this role was to act as the architect of the city or region, on behalf of the local or state authority. Now the independent position advises and promotes good urban development and city planning.
Brussels, unlike other capital cities including Dublin, has a strong record of redeveloping unwanted older office buildings into housing. “We have many offices, and many offices are vacant, so there is no other choice for the developer, they have to do something,” Borret says.
“There is the opportunity of a lot of empty space, the Covid crisis was a gift for an urban planner like me. There was already a shift moving to homeworking before Covid, it has been accelerated,” he adds.
The pivot after the pandemic to having a mix of remote and in-office working meant a lot of companies wanted to downsize to smaller spaces. As a result large office buildings were becoming vacant, with less demand from new tenants to lease the property.
Many of these empty office blocks were located outside of the city centre, making them ideal for housing. “In general we can see thanks to the office crisis and the office shrinkage that a lot of office buildings become available for housing in the green periphery,” Borret says.
The preference of city planners is for these buildings to be “converted”, rather than demolished and rebuilt. That has seen developers and architects get creative in how they turn what was an office floor into apartments. One of the common problems is the lack of natural light in the middle of the buildings. “In many cases office floors are larger, deeper. There is a kind of leftover [space] which is dark in the middle, which you can’t use for rooms,” Borret says.
What many office-to-housing projects have done is use this space as an extra storage room beside the stairs or elevators, where the apartment owner or tenant can safely keep their bicycle. The excess floor space also allows for some of the spare footage around the exterior of the building to be turned into balconies.
“We can see that many apartments that are being installed in office buildings in fact have extra space, like a storage room, or they have a very large balcony on the front ... because the surface is there, the concrete is there,” Borret says. This would not be the case in new-build apartment blocks, where every inch is “optimised” by developers, he said. Converting offices is also more environmentally friendly, as the existing concrete is reused, Borret points outs.
The phenomenon of office-to-housing conversion was generally confined to bigger, stand-alone buildings, rather than vacant space on the floors above a shop. It was more complicated to convert the top two, three or four storeys in a building where the ground floor was still going to be used for retail, partly as it was rare all the floors would become vacant at the same time.
A dive into planning applications for large housing projects in the city in recent years found 40 per cent were on the sites of former office buildings, Borret says. “That means it’s a major source of housing production in Brussels,” he says. There was hardly any “empty” land in Brussels to build from scratch on, he adds.
Pierre Lemaire, who works in the strategy department of Perspective, an agency in the Brussels regional authority who advises on planning, says the city has a tradition of converting buildings to housing that dates back decades.
There’s a misconception that the city has huge numbers of vacant buildings that could be turned into housing, he says. “We analysed the situation of the vacancy rate in Brussels in 2023. We have roughly 13 million square metres of office in Brussels, among which roughly one million square metres is empty.”
When officials examined these properties, they found that only about a fifth of them were fully vacant and suitable to be converted into housing. “You have a lot of offices which have 5, 10, 15 per cent of the building vacant, but this is obviously not a sufficient amount to truly consider conversion,” Lemaire says.
“Conversion in comparison to new-build, you are always confronted with unexpected surprises during construction, that’s always planned for in the budget, we know such things will happen.
“A lot of real-estate developers are very much in favour of demolition and reconstruction, because they are then not confronted with surprises and it allows them to completely change the building,” he says. “Our attitude today is you should maintain the structure of the building ... It turns into much lighter construction sites which is better for the neighbours.”
Office buildings constructed during the 1950s and 1960s in the belt outside Brussels city centre are today less attractive for workers. “Those owners often have no other choice but to convert,” Lemaire says.
Usually to make the numbers work a property needs to be in a neighbourhood where housing is in demand and office space is less desirable, Lemaire points out. “So we can see in all the southeast of Brussels, the nice municipalities, the ones with higher real-estate value, those are the ones where conversion into housing is feasible.”
As office space in the EU quarter still commands a premium price, the prospect of getting a developer to take on a housing conversion project there is less likely. That’s what has made urban planners excited about the commission’s decision to sell several buildings in the area to the Belgian state.
The change will not affect the commission’s imposing Berlaymont head office, where European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the 26 other European commissioners and thousands of staff are based. The sale of 23 nearby office buildings it owns is an attempt by the commission to reduce its office footprint by a quarter, consolidating space as part of its green climate transition agenda.
Borret hopes the conversion of some of the EU office buildings into housing will make the area a more attractive place to live, which might convince private developers to follow suit with further apartment redevelopments. “It’s a start,” he says.
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