Brussels           It’s Tuesday, it must be Brussels in this endless six-country road trip over the last month, not counting time in the Adirondacks on upstate New York.  This time it’s with my colleague Craig Robbins, ACORN’s field coordinator, who also flew overnight; he from Philly and me from Dulles.  We’re here to work with one of our new affiliates, WUUNE, in Brussels, an emerging tenants’ union, as well as associated organizations in Wallonia in the French-speaking half of the country.

I had met with our head organizer early in the year, passing through between France and the Netherlands.  I had become intrigued by his description of a relatively new program for tenants that had received the imprimatur of the courts in the country.  In brief, there is now an index of criteria that describes the features of an apartment unit that would need to correctly correlate to the rent charged by the landlord.  All good so far.  In Brussels, if a tenant finds that there is a mismatch, and they are paying more than the criteria warrants, then there is a procedure for them to file a complaint to resolve this issue, if the differential is more than 20% to the landlord’s side of the ledger.  If they succeed with the complaint through a commission or justice of the peace, then they can get a refund of the difference on their lease both retroactively and for the rest of the lease.

On first blush, then, I had thought this sounded like the perfect mass intake and minimum standards campaign.  Subsequent conversations, revealed hidden obstacles that the quick conversation had not clarified.  Spending the afternoon and much of the morning, dissecting the process, we found that there indeed was a campaign here, but it was as likely going to need to be about reforming the process with the commission, which seemed stacked in practice towards the landlords.

Much of this program seemed to have also been drawn from something similar in France.  The huge advantage in Paris, where since 2023 more than 3500 have won rental adjustments and refunds, was that there wasn’t a commission in the mix.  It was not a complaint-driven process, where all the work and risks are put on the tenant.  For all new leases, there was a review process now that aligned the rent to the apartment size and features, so the fix was quick and automatic.

There are certainly some tenants with the help and advocacy of ACORN that could navigate the system, but likely they are the exceptions, not the rule.  The campaign here is still going to need to be a mass effort, but it will need to be changing the deal to make it fair to tenants.