Grim Brussels train station is ‘gold mine’ of economic potential, says transport boss

BRUSSELS — The crime-riddled Brussels Midi train station has long had a reputation as being among the worst places in the Belgian capital.
But the local elections this weekend could supercharge plans to revive the area, a top transport official told POLITICO.
Patrice Couchard, director of stations at Belgium’s national railway company, SNCB, said that the run-down station and its surrounding area could be a golden opportunity for both the city and private developers — if there’s enough political will.
“Midi is indeed a challenge, but … it’s actually also a gold mine in terms of opportunities,” he told POLITICO.
“We have already had some informal discussions with the people who are basically in charge of forming the next government,” he added. “We are, of course, waiting for the next government in Brussels and the new city councils to go into a more formal process. But we have already sent some messages.”
Around 200,000 commuters pass through the station every day, he pointed out, with the number of international passengers expected to double in the next 15 years as Midi connects Brussels to the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands. “It’s a really very efficient and powerful transportation machine,” he said.
For real estate developers and big businesses hunting for office space, the allure of setting up shop at Belgium’s busy gateway to Europe would be obvious — if not for the area’s myriad social and administrative problems.
“People look at Brussels Midi with, I would say, hungry eyes,” Couchard said. “But they are not ready to put money on the table right now.” 
With around 3,000 recorded crimes per year, the area is a hotbed of petty criminality, and has also seen a spate of stabbings and shootings.
Attempts to improve it have been bogged down in red tape due to the transport hub sitting at the intersection of three municipalities of the metropolitan area of Brussels — Saint-Gilles, Anderlecht and the City of Brussels.
Even the federal government has a piece of the pie, launching an action plan to improve Midi last year that so far has achieved little.
The cornerstone of the plan was the opening of a police station at Midi. It was scheduled to start operating last month, but is now expected to open in November, Couchard said, and will not run 24 hours a day.
Also behind schedule is the regional government’s urban framework for Midi, which Couchard said has been in the works for five years. Without it, would-be real estate investors cannot have any certainty on the area’s development potential.
“Although there is a lot of opportunity, nobody dares to come in and invest because the urban framework is not clear,” Couchard said.
Ultimately, the result of so many layers of government is no obvious, single point of contact. “If we want to know who’s in charge of cleaning a street or taking care of homeless people, we need to knock on a lot of doors,” he said.
With the local elections on Sunday, Couchard added he hoped a fresh political class will mean “the whole neighborhood can basically leave the freezer and start moving again.”
The Socialist Party (PS) is the largest political force in Saint-Gilles, Anderlecht and the City of Brussels, with PS mayors leading all three councils. Polls show PS tracking behind the Reformist Movement (MR) Brussels-wide, though only narrowly.
SNCB has already made “incremental” improvements to the station to prepare for the influx of passengers, such as renovating escalators, Couchard said. But the centerpiece of its long-term vision is to move SNCB’s headquarters into a different building in the area and transform its prior offices into housing, offices and retail.
“We want to basically invest a lot in the building to renovate it. It will also help us to improve the station itself because the building and the stations are integrated,” he said.
Yet the plan has met resistance from private parties, including community groups, which all have different ideas about how the neighborhoods around the station should be developed, Couchard added.
“Some stakeholders have been living here for a while and they don’t want to see additional square meters or more buildings. They want to see more parks, more green,” he said. 
Ultimate responsibility for seeing the plan through lies with the regional government to “come up with a vision” that aligns all of the different stakeholders. “So my advice would be: Try harder,” he said.
The fate of the train station and the surrounding neighborhood are inextricably linked, he added. One would not be able to thrive or develop without the other.
“I’ve been working here for seven years, and I haven’t seen a single important investment in real estate around the station,” he said. 
“If you look at Brussels Nord, there are lots of things happening there, at Brussels Central also. If I look up all the big stations, the neighborhoods around the station are changing. Here it’s frozen, and that’s not okay,” he added.
Couchard pointed to another railway success story: Leuven, which is about 30 kilometers east of Brussels.
“I think it’s a good example of a station which has been transformed, but not only the station, but also the old neighborhood,” he said. 
Reviving Midi in much the same way is “perfectly possible,” Couchard said. “But we really ask … the regional level to take some kind of leadership.”
Despite his grand ambitions for Midi, Couchard said the station’s situation in the present day was getting desperate. He said SNCB badly needed “more resources” and more funding to cope with its challenges.
“So that’s a very short-term need,” he said. “We need this, I would say, tomorrow. This is something very urgent.”