Community Land Trust of Brussels
Description
" Due to different and very complex factors, many areas of the region of Brussels, in the last decades, have undergone massive gentrification processes, all this resulting in a tough housing emergency and in the urban displacement of thousands of families. The traditional public housing programs enacted by the city and by the region, especially after the shortage of resources due to the economic crisis, were not sufficient to face the problem. At the beginning of 2008 activists, associations engaged in the housing sector and many citizens started a participatory project aimed at importing in Belgium the American institution of the community land trust. The process resulted in the implementation, in 2012, of the first community land trust enacted in continental Europe. The Community Land Trust of Brussels is today a reality. The city can now count on this very efficient model of social housing, which innovative legal and economic features put together the participatory and democratic stewardship of land with a very sophisticated mechanism of home-ownership. This latter, allows the same subsidy to remain attached to the home, this way promoting, through one single initial investment, potential permanent affordable housing for many generations of families in need." (https://generative-commons.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/policy-brief_last-version-post-round-table.pdf)