Expensive houses & suburban sprawl ‘tearing Belgium apart’

Suburban sprawl is literally tearing Belgium apart, writes Slate’s Matthew Yglesias. “The basic situation is that Belgium is like three countries in one," he writes. "There's French-speaking Wallonia, there's Dutch-speaking Flanders, and then there's Brussels. Brussels is officially bilingual, but it's geographically surrounded by Flanders and yet primarily inhabited by French-dominant individuals. Brussels is also a major international city thanks to the presence of European Union institutions and NATO headquarters here as well as being a big location for lower skilled immigration from developing countries. Since French is a much more widely spoken language than Dutch, new arrivals to Brussels tend to speak French. Which is all well and good, except that the Dutch-speaking nature of the Flemish communities near Brussels is integral to the grand bargain on which Belgium's existence as a nation is predicated. So while in the United States housing scarcity in central cities drives unnecessarily long commutes and unnecessary environmental damage, in Belgium it becomes a cause of profound political crisis since the increasing population of French speaking in rim municipalities around Brussels exacerbates the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde dispute. Obviously it would be pretty flip to just say that Belgian could solve all its intra-communal disputes with more residential high-rises in Brussels, but the extent to which the relative price of housing in Brussels has risen compared to outside Brussels is striking.”