#82: Brussels is trying to kill you

And it doesn't look like anyone is coming to save you

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!

Happy New Year to all my subscribers, new and old. For the first month of 2025, I’m taking a look in a series of articles I’ve informally titled “The State of You”, about the state of Brussels. The literal state of the place. Consider this me entering my crank era.

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On the grounds of my children’s school, right near the metal entrance gate, there is a tree planted on a thin grass verge. It’s an undersized thing, this tree, a weedy trunk about two metres tall tied to a wooden support. It’s barren at the moment, but the last time I passed it someone had placed a plastic poppy where the upper part of the trunk bifurcates. Next to the tree is a small sign, which explains that the tree was planted in honour of Toqa, a former student. On a Sunday in early December 2021, Toqa’s parents found her unresponsive in the family bathroom. They rushed her to the nearest hospital but Toqa never regained consciousness and died the following Monday. Toqa had just turned 10.

Toqa’s cause of death was quickly established as carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, the second child to die from it that winter. In the interim years the hospitalisations and the deaths have continued. The statistics are grim. In 2024 there were 109 reported hospitalisations of CO poisoning in Brussels, and four deaths; the city accounts for roughly one-fifth of all CO-related deaths in Belgium. There’s rarely a week that goes by without Bruzz or La Derniere Heure reporting on a family being evacuated from their home because of exposure to CO, or people being found dead in their homes by firemen alerted to their absence by worried neighbours.

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Last week I read an article about a man in his 40s from Ixelles, who was hospitalised after the emergency services found him unconscious while trying to heat up his bathwater with a charcoal fire. Burning coal and wood is a familiar wintry smell in Brussels. Walking home from school one day last month, N remarked that the air smelled like barbecue, and wondered where it was coming from. We talked until we got home about why that was. It was cheaper, I told her, for some people to heat their homes by burning wood or coal in their fireplace than to pay for natural gas central heating.

I didn’t mention people like that man in Ixelles who tried to use a barbecue to have a bath, or other people who set up fire baskets and braziers in their living rooms because they can’t afford anything else, or because the house they’ve found themselves living in isn’t fit for human habitation. And that our neighbours who have to resort to this are not just putting themselves at risk of CO poisoning but of setting their homes on fire too. Because if we’ve entered into the CO-poisoning danger zone this winter, we’re also in house fire season too. Again, to read the local papers is to get the impression that Brussels’ ageing housing stock is just tinder waiting to ignite. Sometimes it’s because someone has started a fire where they shouldn’t but more often it’s because of faulty wiring or a bust boiler that’s not been serviced in years, in a house where the landlord hasn’t thought it important enough to install smoke detectors.

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It’s lifted now, but since the beginning of the year, the whole of Brussels has been enveloped in a dirty grey that’s hung over the place like a collective New Year’s hangover we can’t seem to shake off. It’s unpleasant and annoying, though it doesn’t contain within it vengeful ghouls or interdimensional monsters. Instead, its danger is more subtle and insidious, absorbing the noxious fumes and toxic particulates pumped out by the city’s traffic that’s not lethal like CO but will poison your lungs and scratch your throat, knock a few years off the end of your life and leave Brussels’ poorer, older, and more vulnerable citizens at risk of chronic pulmonary discomfort.

My phone told me on multiple days last week as the temperature dropped below freezing, that the air quality in Brussels was “horrible”, not that I needed to be told, and the city’s environment agency monitoring stations measured extremely elevated levels of air pollution across the city, but focused on the arme sikkel of neighbourhoods that crowd the canal. The station with the highest reading was the one closest to us, between our house and the children’s school, and coming home on my bike up the Gentsesteenweg one evening after work I could taste the fog right in the back of my throat.

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To read these stories and to live in this city is to sometimes feel that death is lurking around every corner, that you’re a minor character in one of the early (good) entries in the Final Destination film series. Maybe it will be quick and silent like CO poisoning; maybe spectacular and horrific like a house fire. Maybe you’ll get caught in the crossfire of a gang feud, or be mowed down by an inattentive driver. Or it might be something slow and chronic and painful that gets you, black mould seeping from your walls and under your skin and into your lungs, not quite getting you straight away but wiping off a decade or two from the end of your life.

So much of this is preventable. People are dying of CO poisoning and lighting fires in their bathrooms because much of Brussels’ housing stock across a large swathe of the city is in a parlous condition, owned more often than not by huisjesmelkers - slumlords, literally “house milkers” - more interested in stuffing in as many tenants as they can into a property to worry about certifications and fire safety. If certifications and checks do take place, they are often inadequate and easily negotiated away, if you can find a malleable surveyor who will sign off shoddy electrical wiring without too many qualms.

People have no choice but to live in these overcrowded and illegal rentals because they can’t afford to move, because despite Brussels being one of the richest regions in Europe and the economic engine of Belgium, it is also home to some of the country’s worst poverty. The air over Brussels is thick with carcinogens because of the city’s protracted, messy, and essentially insufficient efforts to limit transport emissions. Some of these are discrete issues, others interconnected, but collectively they paint a picture of a city barely capable of ensuring - either through its own provision, or through market regulation - basic living conditions for its residents.

The causes are not dissimilar to the ones that result in our streets being litter-strewn; but whereas slovenly rubbish collection is mostly an aesthetic concern, this is life and death stuff, disproportionately affecting those least equipped to protect themselves. Some of them are structural; Belgium’s federalised system means that while Brussels may be a “rich” region, it is a poor city because taxes are levied where people live not where they work, and the majority of commuters to Brussels live over the border in Flanders.

But to throw our hands up and say, there’s no money to fix the housing problem, or crack down on bad landlords, or finally fix the city’s addiction to cars, is to let the people in charge off too easily. Especially when some of the worst offenders are the city’s municipal housing authorities, who can’t protect their own tenants from squalid public housing. The city’s buildings are in a dreadful condition, because there is either no money or no will to improve them. Toqa and others like her are the victims of a sclerotic system riddled with waste and clientelism, and managed by unambitious, timid politicians whose guiding political philosophy - across the political spectrum - sometimes appears to be “we’d like to do something, but we don’t want to upset anyone, so we really can’t do anything”. Which I know isn’t wholly fair. The city built 700 new social housing units in recent years, and more are on their way. Others have a clear-eyed view on what needs to be done to make the air we breathe less toxic, but the system and entrenched interests are slow to move.

But it also feels as if the scale of the challenges the city currently faces, the polycrisis we’ve been experiencing for the past several years - on housing, drugs, the climate, public sanitation, institutional reform, economic growth, poverty, youth unemployment - has left the many, many people we elect to run the place exhausted, paralysed and unable to act. Government isn’t a cure-all, and Brussels’ regional government certainly can’t - and shouldn’t have to - deal with these issues on its own. But it would be good if we actually had one at all. The dog days of the previous regime were hardly inspiring as party machinations fatally undermined its ability to speak and work with one voice; and we’ve been waiting 227 days since the election for a successor, and we appear as far away as ever from getting one. All the while, the city slowly bleeds out, families like Toqa’s will be confronted with the awful tragedy of a preventable death, and we’ll continue to breathe air that is slowly strangling us.

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On the Friday after Toqa’s death, the school held a memorial service with her classmates, and the other teachers and pupils from the school. It was during this ceremony, out on one of the stony playgrounds, that the tree was planted. The children came home shook from the experience, as you might expect, unused to seeing their teachers in an emotionally vulnerable state. Unused as they were to see their teachers and the other authority figures at the school in tears. For weeks afterwards I’d find N playing with her toys and humming to herself the little verse her and the other children had been taught to sing at the memorial, about Toqa’s departure to a better place.

At the beginning of this month I read an article about a woman found dead in her apartment. Her neighbours had reported her missing after they hadn’t seen her in two days. Firemen had to break down the door of her apartment to get in. They found her unresponsive on the floor of her living room, not far from an old gas heater. The article reported the firemen as saying the heater - old and faulty - was the cause of her death.