Belgium’s Housing Crisis: Evictions and a 326,000-Wait List
Belgium is confronting a housing crisis that grows larger with each passing month, with affordable homes increasingly out of reach for hundreds of thousands of residents and eviction notices arriving daily in Brussels and Wallonia.
According to RTBF, the public broadcaster whose coverage frames the issue around daily life, several dozen people receive an eviction notice every day across Brussels and Wallonia — a “housing crisis whose figures keep swelling.” New monitoring data and industry barometers published this year suggest the problem is structural rather than temporary.
A Shortage That Runs Deep
The clearest measure of the crisis is the queue for social housing. As L’Ilot, a Belgian association that campaigns against housing exclusion, documents, more than 326,000 people are waiting for a social home in Belgium — including more than 52,000 households in Brussels and 98,000 people in Wallonia. Social housing accounts for only about 7 percent of the housing stock in Brussels and 6.5 percent in Wallonia, with very low turnover — meaning the queue barely moves.
That scarcity has consequences. As L’Ilot notes, the gap between supply and demand leaves those pushed out of the private market facing waits of five, ten, or even fifteen years for a social home.
The association put the situation bluntly: in 2026, the right to decent housing — enshrined in Article 23 of the Belgian Constitution — “remains far from effective for a large part of the population.”
Evictions: The Visible Tip
Official data now quantify what has long been anecdotal. Between July 2023 and June 2024, out of roughly 300,000 tenants in the Brussels region, 3,007 eviction cases were handled by 16 local welfare centres (CPAS) — nearly one in 100 renting households, or about eight Brussels households receiving an eviction notice every day.
The figures come from the first Monitoring of judicial rental evictions, published by the Brussels planning agency perspective.brussels in May 2026. The agency found strong disparities between municipalities and concluded that income alone does not explain evictions: household structure, rental pressure, and local aid mechanisms all play significant roles. Single-parent households — in which women are overrepresented — were especially linked to the caseload.
Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns prevention. When a CPAS manages to make contact with a tenant facing eviction, a solution is found in 55 percent of cases, either keeping the person in their home or rehousing them. Where no contact is established, that figure drops to 24 percent.
Those numbers understate the problem. Beyond the official count, “hidden” evictions escape the statistics entirely, pushing vulnerable households into emergency shelters, temporary stays with relatives, or onto the street.
Why the Market Keeps Tightening
Rents have continued to climb. According to the Federia rental barometer for the first half of 2026, the average rent in Brussels now exceeds 1,400 euros, while median rent stands at 1,250 euros. In Wallonia, the average is 910 euros — roughly 35 percent cheaper than Brussels. Rents rose 1.5 percent in Brussels and 1.7 percent in Wallonia over the period.
The squeeze is sharpest at the bottom of the market. In 2025, several thousand leases disappeared from the Belgian rental market, intensifying an already entrenched shortage. The Brussels median rent rose 4.2 percent that year to 1,250 euros, a sign that the cheapest properties are vanishing fastest.
Sector analysts place much of the blame on supply. Nearly 76 percent of landlords are small private investors owning between one and four properties, and industry actors argue that increasingly binding regulation, urbanism procedures, and a lack of renovation support have discouraged these owners from staying in the market.
“On the surface, the market gives the impression of stabilizing, but structurally, all the warning lights are red,” Charlotte De Thaye, general director of the Federia real-estate federation, said in comments reported by La DH.
Not everyone reads the market so grimly. Piet Derriks, chief executive of the property portal Immoweb, told RTL Info that the transaction market is “doing well, even very well,” with volumes up more than 16 percent on 2024. He also noted that Belgian purchasing power, while declining, remains higher than that of neighbouring countries — a couple can afford about 105 square metres, against 60 to 80 elsewhere. That more optimistic framing offers a counterpoint to the dominant crisis narrative, though it speaks to the buying market rather than to renters at the lower end.
A Regional Patchwork of Responses
Belgium’s response has been fragmented along regional lines. In Brussels, the regional government released more than 100 million euros for housing policy tools in July 2026, as reported by L’Avenir and Belga. The package includes 61 million euros for the regional housing society (SLRB), 16.2 million for the urban-renewal agency citydev.brussels, and 9.88 million for 13 municipalities and CPAS to socialize the rents of 2,330 households. Housing Secretary of State Karine Lalieux has said a reform of rent socialization is expected in 2027.
Flanders has taken a longer view. The regional government plans to create more than 50,000 social housing units by 2042, acknowledging in a statement carried by La Libre and Belga that “we face a major housing crisis.” At the federal level, meanwhile, the government has focused on measures against energy and fuel price rises rather than housing production directly.
Housing advocates argue that piecemeal measures will not be enough. L’Ilot has called for a broader change of direction — more social housing construction, rent regulation, and strengthened eviction prevention — to close the gap between the constitutional promise of decent housing and its daily reality.
What to Watch
The coming months will test whether the new monitoring data translate into policy. The Brussels rent-socialization reform expected in 2027 will be a key indicator, as will progress toward Flanders’ 2042 target — a horizon far beyond the wait facing families on the list today. In the meantime, the arithmetic remains stark: demand continues to outstrip supply, and the figures, as RTBF put it, keep swelling.