The Brussels municipality of Berchem-Sainte-Agathe is introducing a new tax for owners who have divided their homes into several smaller units without a building permit.
Anyone who wants to divide a large house or apartment into several smaller apartments currently needs a building permit, but not all property owners are paying attention to this. This means that many houses actually have more units than they appear to have on paper. In many cases, however, the division dates back many years, when different regulations applied.
Now, Berchem-Sainte-Agathe wants to put a stop to this practice and is introducing a new tax for owners who divide a house without a permit, RTBF reports. They will now have to pay €1,000 per unit per fiscal quarter.
"If we go through the usual channels, have a report drawn up and submitted to the Public Prosecutor's Office, those files are simply filed," mayor Christian Lamouline (Les Engagés) told Bruzz.
"With this tax, we want to encourage owners to contact the urban planning department. In many cases, this division can be regularised through a planning permit. We then check whether the new situation is of sufficient quality: are all the necessary facilities present, is there enough space?"
Other municipalities to follow?
The municipal council has already identified 80 homes where the situation on paper differs from the actual situation; neighbourhood inspectors check how many doorbells there are and how many people officially reside at a single address.
"This information is then compared with the data from the urban planning department," Lamouline said. "We have now contacted 80 owners who have not regularised their situation, but the number of owners who are not complying with the regulations is likely much higher."
On the other side of the city, the new tax is already finding support in the municipality of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. Mayor Benoit Cerexhe (Les Engagés), who is also the chair of the Brussels Conference of Mayors, is considering introducing a similar system.
He also referred to the bottleneck at the Public Prosecutor's Office, which has other issues to contend with. "Other municipalities may follow Berchem's example. I suspect we will discuss this at the next Conference of Mayors."
With policies differing between municipalities (and sometimes even between councillors in the same municipality), there is currently a great deal of legal uncertainty regarding building permits in the Brussels-Capital Region in these situations.
