Fair Ground Brussels - a real estate cooperative with social purppose
Fair Ground Brussels is a real estate cooperative with a social purpose. Its mission is to create affordable and sustainable spaces for housing and activities of collective interest. The ambition is to develop real estate projects in a non-speculative way and to transform land into a common good, forever.
Regional
Belgium
Brussels (region)
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2023-01-31
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Fair Ground Brussels Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Coline Last name of representative: Van der Vorst Gender: Female Nationality: Belgium Function: Coordinator Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 121 rue Verheyden Town: Brussels Postal code: 1070 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 472 10 04 48 E-mail:coline.vandervorst@fairground.brussels Website:https://fairground.brussels
Fair Ground Brussels (FGB) is a real estate cooperative with a social purpose. Its goal is to make Brussels a city where everyone has a right to live.
A city where housing and a healthy environment is guaranteed for everyone ; a city where developing projects, whether they are social, associative or cultural, is made possible.
A city where the inhabitants are decision-makers, respected stakeholders, regardless of their social and economic category, gender or origin.
A mixed city, where various social categories coexist within the different neighborhoods and buildings. Neighborhoods and buildings that integrate ecological issues, territorial cohesion and social inclusion, in order to reduce social, gender-based or racial inequalities.
A city where access to affordable housing and space for economic, social and cultural projects is guaranteed in the long term.
Fair Ground Brussels's ambition is to transform the land into a common good and take it permanently off the speculative market. In order to achieve this, Fair Ground Brussels uses the “Community Land Trust” model based on separation of land and buildings (dismemberment). In our case, the cooperative remains the owner of the land, with the social purpose to lock it up forever. Fair Ground Brussels then makes the brick available to initiatives that make sense for the city and have difficulty finding places: housing for a vulnerable public, the social economy, associations, etc.
housing
Anti-speculative
Community
Social Economy
Sustainability
FGB aims to make the city more resilient by making it affordable in the long term (not to say "forever"). Indeed, our project is based on the common observation of all large European cities: the constant increase of housing and land prices. The latter leads to a growing gap between household income and the budget to be allocated to housing, as well as the prices of commercial spaces and the means of associative and social economy actors. It is therefore imperative to stop this real estate prices increase to avoid having disadvantaged populations be driven out of our cities.
Our main goal in terms of sustainability is to extract our properties from the speculative market by, inter alia, controlling the price in case of resale. This has been achieved through the five projects we have already acquired, representing 18 apartments (housing 45 low-income people) and 2 associative premises.
Our cooperative is exemplary in this context because the financial accessibility of its properties is its core reason defined by statutes. Fair Ground is therefore statutorily prevented from speculating on the value of its acquisitions. As mentioned above, we are able to this by
- retaining ownership of the land, as a community land, on which the buildings are located,
- limiting resale conditions of the buildings located on the cooperative lands
On top of this social approach of sustainability, Fair Ground Brussels is also very concerned with environmental sustainability, and the quality of construction and renovation of its buildings. For example, we are about to launch some rehabilitation works in four apartments we acquired in 2022, for which we emphasize the use of ecological materials, like cork and hemp for thermal insulation. We also have an important concern about the energetic performance of our buildings, to reduce environmental impact and ensure affordability of energy bills to our tenants. We, therefore, plan to install photovoltaic panels and heat pumps for example.
Our action isn’t limited to real estate operations, but we aim to influence the type of city we live in, and to raise the experience of living in Brussels for its inhabitants. Building community dynamics at the heart of what we do. This is reflected in the way we design spatial distribution in our projects. We try, as much as possible, to develop mixed-use places containing both housing and spaces for activity and social cohesion. We want to re-think the function of housing, our spaces are not only intended to house people, but also to offer them a springboard for social emancipation.
A good example of this action is the Calico project (CAre and LIving Community), we we are partners with a few other public and associative institutions, including the CLTB, the Région Bruxelles Capitale or the European Union. Amongst the 34 in total, Fair Ground Brussels owns 10 apartments for a group of precarious or isolated women. The group is guided by the feminist association Angela D, which pays particular attention to gender issues in housing. These ten dwellings are part of a larger dynamic, since CALICO hosts as well a community space hosting various social activities, a collective garden, a shared apartment and a birth center. Indeed, the emphasis is placed on the mix of publics and the dynamic of intergenerational cohesion. The overall project is a very good example showing what can be achieved through the mechanism of dismemberment.
Our project "Arc en Ciel", is an associative space we rent to the association "Vie Féminine", organizing activities for women of the district. This space is located on the ground floor of a building housing low-income families who have become owners via the CLT model. The multi-purpose room is also available to the inhabitants of the building for the organization of events, meetings and neighborhood activities. Once again the emphasis is on the complementarity of the uses, the anchoring in the neighborhood and the creation of a social link.
Inclusion is one of the main objectives of FGB, as our mission is to make the city affordable to everyone, forever. This objective is achieved in several ways:
- Enabling disadvantaged people to find housing on the rental market: all of our rental housing are allocated through a Social Real Estate Agency (AIS). These AIS exclusively rent to people meeting social housing criteria. In doing so, we allow vulnerable profiles to access quality housing.
- Enabling the most vulnerable profiles to find housing and accompany them towards emancipation.
- Enabling low-income people to access property: using the mechanism of dismemberment.
Through these different mechanisms, we ensure accessibility of our properties for profiles that would never be able to become owners on the current acquisition market.
More particularly, we work closely with the homeless sector and allocate some of our housing to this type of public. For example, as mentioned above, in one of our projects ("Serkeyn"), the apartments that will be renovated in 2023 will then be allocated to homeless households. We will work with our partner (the Cellule Capteur et Création de logements, an intra-sectoral cell in the Brussels region), which will accompany the households.
FGB also aims to propose a new societal model by offering accessible premises to initiatives that shape the city of tomorrow: social economy, circular economy, social cohesion, art & culture... We develop affordable spaces on the long term for meaningful projects for a more resilient city. Our project Revision is dedicated to host one of these actors.
Finally, our governance is open to all. First, we offer shares starting at 25€, so that financial means are not an obstacle to participation in the project.But, moreover, our cooperative model makes no distinction between "small" and "large" investors, the amount of share subscribed has no influence on the voting rights, given our principle of one person - one vote.
In general, Fair Ground Brussels is a project benefiting to all citizens of Brussels, as it makes their city perpetually more financially accessible and sustainable. More specifically, the project focuses on the most disadvantaged and usually excluded from the real estate world by giving them access to affordable housing.
For some, Fair Ground Brussels’impact is materialized by the opportunity to benefit from goods or services of social and solidarity economy because they are produced in affordable spaces developed by Fair Ground Brussels. Indeed, the impact of the cost of real estate in the production chain of a good or service should not be underestimated. By providing affordable spaces, Fair Ground Brussels has an impact on the citizen as the final beneficiary/consumer.
Fair Ground Brussels is a citizen cooperative, in which everyone can participate and access the governance by investing whatever their financial means (shares starting from 25€). The inhabitants and occupants of our homes are also invited to participate in this governance via a specific type of share.
Moreover, Fair Ground Brussels is developing a “cooperative life and community”, through the organization of events for its cooperator, to inform them on the progress of the cooperative, but also to poll them on the various strategic decisions. More widely, the cooperative organizes events open to all, such as conferences or film screenings, aiming to open the question of the right to decent housing for all and to create exchange and debate.
Fair Ground Brussels is born from the combination of different actors willing to bring a common answer to the housing crisis. The cooperative was created by fifteen Brussels Associations - coming from the housing rights, homelessness, social real estate, ethical finance or temporary occupation sectors - all aware of the challenges to meet to maintain the city's accessibility in the long term. For the past years, these structures participated in the writing of the statutes, the elaboration of the financial plan, and, for those who wished to do so, joined the first board of directors that was managing the cooperative until March 2022, when the first employee was hired. Each association on the board of directors has seconded workers who bring experience, skills, and a network that are essential to FGB's growth. The reputation of FGB's founders has had specific added value on our ability to find investors, raise funds and communicate about our project.
The Brussels Region has also played an active role in setting up the project by investing €320,000 in the cooperative, through various channels, and supporting the emergence of our model. We are in regular contact with the regional ministerial cabinets in charge of housing and social economy.
Finally, but most importantly, the citizens of Brussels are also involved at different levels in the project. First we raise awareness about the problem of land speculation and invite them to become cooperators and thus invest in a more sustainable city. Second, through the cooperative we invite them to financially support an initiative which aims to reappropriate the city, for the common good. Finally, they can become actors and decision-makers in the cooperative thanks to the governance of the project.
In both conceptualization and implementation of the project, different disciplines and skills have been mobilized. To set up the project, we brought together associations with solid skills in the real estate sector, some with decades of experience, each approaching the question from a different angle. Other structures have brought know-how on the notion of community management of space (Communa asbl). Others are more competent in the support of target audiences, such as homeless persons (L'ilot, Les Petits Riens). Other project's founders brought expertise in the financial and legal aspects of real estate projects (CTLB, Credal, Rénovassistance).
The "mix" of all these skills is the main strength of Fair Ground. Indeed, one of the great added values of the project lies in the complementarity of sophisticated legal arrangements (dismemberment of land and building, via emphyteusis, leasing via social real estate agencies) and a plurality of financial instruments (bonds, loans, shares of cooperators, subsidies...) which allow, in fine, to ensure the affordability of the premises for ever.
Other expertises are added to these, like the experience of rental management (Logement pour Tous), or more thematic actors like for the questions of gender and housing (Angela D).
Besides, some of the founding structures have proposed an organizational framework governance model for the cooperative. Bringing together under the same umbrella such a large number of associative actors is an undeniable challenge in terms of internal functioning. Each association having its own modus operandi, we had to reconcile these different approaches to make Fair Ground a structure with its own corporate culture and its proper functioning principles. It is all together that we’ve build the cooperative and took up the challenges. This is how, beyond its concrete actions, Fair Ground Brussels plays a federative role in the sector.
Fair Ground Brussels was created two years ago, in December 2020. Since its foundation, the cooperative has raised more than 2 million euros (divided between cooperator shares, bond issues, subordinated loans, bank loans...). A first communication campaign was launched during spring 2022 to make our activity visible to the general public and reach citizen cooperators. We now have 165 cooperators.
The cooperative owns five properties representing 18 apartments (housing 45 low-income people, including a dozen women in the feminist habitat managed by Angela D in the Calico project, and soon 4 households from the very precarious/homelessness) and 2 associative spaces for a total of about 2000m². The first associative premise is occupied by "Vie féminine" (see above). The second should host a reception center for homeless youth (under 26 years old), after renovations (discussions are still ongoing).
We are currently negotiating the acquisition of three adjoining buildings to set up a larger project that will include a homeless women's shelter, shared offices dedicated to the social economy, and a dozen low-income housing units.
Each of the above-mentioned spaces contributes to the structural change of the city, as they are forever removed from the speculative market. These few projects constitute the first "proof of concept". These first steps were to demonstrate the feasibility of our model, to raise awareness about real estate speculation, and to promote a new vision of the city. Our ambition now is to replicate this model on a larger scale, by bringing a maximum of land under the Fair Ground dome, without necessarily carrying all the projects ourselves (see "replicability" below).
The mainstream real estate sector today considers property acquisition primarily as a financial investment, generating the highest possible value. How the property will be used, who will benefit from it, what impact the project will have on its neighborhood and the city, is for now secondary, as long as exists an investment return. Meanwhile, the absence of legislation to regulate this practice encourages its uncontrolled multiplication. The real estate market is thus mostly diverted from its main function: offering spaces to meet the basic need of housing.
This is the first innovation of our project, this is why FGB proposes to reverse this paradigm. Compared to the vast majority of real estate projects, FGB is innovative in its very essence - its mission is to transform real estate into a common good, in the perpetual service of the general interest.
The way FGBachieves this is also an innovation by itself, using two mechanisms we consider highly complementary:
- First, the ‘community land trust model’, based on the dismemberment of the land and buildings
- Second, the perpetual ownership of the land, allowing us to control the resale price of the property forever.
This double mechanism, which is intrinsically anti-speculation, allows low-income populations to access property.
Also using the cooperative model, offers various possibilities to capture different types of financial resources (cooperator shares, bond issues,etc) and places ownership in the hands of a collective and not of individuals.
Finally, compared to the traditional social real estate sector, FGB distinguished itself by a long-term commitment to the pursuit of a social purpose. Many current real estate projects incorporate a social component that is limited in space (a certain number of square meters of the building dedicated to social housing) or in time (a certain number of years after renovation). FGB's approach is intended to be perpetual, as defined by the statutes.
Different innovative approaches and methodologies are at the heart of the Fair Ground Brussels project, and they reflect on various aspects of our project as our governance, our vision of the city, our vision of housing or our work towards social cohesion.
As far as our internal functioning is concerned, we tend to implement shared governance at all levels. We have a hybrid board of directors, composed of a representative of each founding association constituting the core of Fair Ground. On the operational side, we are developing an approach based on holacracy and shared governance. The cooperative is divided into different autonomous poles, each responsible for a specific field of competence (development, financing, communication, structure...).
For the conceptualization of our spaces, we strive to reserve a place for community dynamics, whether through a multi-purpose space open to residents to organize activities, or the development of shared spaces, as in the Calico and Arc-en-ciel projects developed above. Also, we favor a mix of uses by combining as much as possible, within the same building, spaces dedicated to social economy projects, associative projects, and housing. We are convinced that this mix of uses benefits all occupants and neighborhoods.
On socio-economic integration, our housing projects are developed in partnership with social real estate agencies (Agences immobilières sociales) and social support associations. Indeed, we consider that reintegration through housing does not only require the provision of a space to live in, but also an adapted psycho-social support. The proximity of meeting, cohesion and activity spaces within our premises is an additional component that allows us to reinforce the emancipation of our residents through their housing.
The replicability of our model is central to our mission. Indeed, the FGB project only makes sense when it reaches sufficient scale. Our general objective is to progressively take the city(ies) out of the speculative market and this can only be reached with a high replicability of our method and our tools, otherwise the project would be limited to a marginal alternative.
This replicability is expressed, in our opinion, in two ways:
- Making the FGB "legal model” a tool available to people, projects or collectives wishing to develop a real estate project with a social and non-speculation dynamic. The real estate project does not necessarily have to be carried by Fair Ground Brussels. In this case, FGB would act as a platform holding the land and offering the guarantee of a social project in the long term. In this way, we increase our social and non-speculative real estate stock by offering those who wish the legal structure and the necessary expertise.
- Sharing and spreading our model with national and international partners who pursue the same goal.
The DNA of Fair Ground Brussels is our methodology of separating building and soil. It has a dual purpose: to offer a purchase price below the market and to control the resale price of the buildings forever. This method can easily be replicated and is already widespread in many cities (sometimes with variations in the legal tool used, or in the nature of the owner of the land - in some cases the public authorities -). As a matter of fact, FGB itself was born out of the replicability of this model, which originally came from the Community Land Trust. FGB has simply coupled it with the legal form of the cooperative in order to be able to capture citizen funds and has opened the field of possibilities towards functionalities other than housing.
The major European cities all suffer from a common problem: the increase in housing and land prices, leading to a growing gap between household income and the budget allocated to housing, as well as the price of commercial spaces and the means of associative and social economy actors.
The 2008’s crisis, the economic recession following and the abundance of capital have strengthened estate assets as financial safe havens. They are increasingly perceived and used as investment and speculation solutions.
This dynamic is in contradiction with the fundamental right to housing and habitat. It has aggravated social exclusion of an increasingly important part of society, especially the most vulnerable (single-parent families, racialized people, women, etc.). In the same way, the so-called "weak" functions (spaces of social cohesion, places dedicated to the general interest,...), as well as low-income people, are pushed away from their city and forced to relocate to the periphery, the city thus progressively becoming a space reserved for the elites and the profit sector.
This situation is particularly exacerbated in Brussels, where only 40% of the inhabitants own their home, and 50% of tenants live below the poverty line. 50% of Brussels' population is eligible for social housing, while the waiting lists to benefit from one include 48,000 households and extend over 20 years, while we count over 4000 homeless persons in the capital.
Fair Ground Brussels responds to this global problem by proposing a local solution: to create sustainable and affordable housing thanks to investments from citizens and ethical investors.
