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Abstract

This article explores the processes enabling shared housing for students and young professionals as a strategic housing segment for the regeneration of post-industrial cities. It analyses the development of purpose-built student accommodation and related forms of high-density shared housing, as well as co-living, in university cities along the Walloon industrial axis (Belgium). Using desk research and expert interviews, the article examines how specific types of shared housing for young adults align with the strategic interests of municipalities and the market in post-industrial contexts. It further shows how a flexible, fragmented regulatory framework contributes to balancing those interests and power relationships in establishing a shared housing market. In these post-industrial cities facing concerns about competitiveness, purpose-built student accommodation and co-living respond to municipalities’ interests in attracting and anchoring young professionals – seen as economic levers – as well as regenerating deprived city centres and former industrial areas. Local companies and international investors strategically meet public interests by delivering professionally managed shared housing, branded as high quality and affordable for the target demographic. While flexible regional planning and housing frameworks facilitate these developments, the lack of local enforcement hampers their effective regulation. Notably, municipalities may also be opposed to shared housing due to single-family housing subdivision. The article’s conclusion section discusses the relationship between public and private interests, the underpinning discourses and their possible implications. It further points to the potential for specific actors and strategic instruments to help local governments better steer shared housing development and address the risks.

Keywords

Actors’ interests post-industrial cities shared housing strategic planning urban regeneration young adults

Introduction

In various urban contexts, real estate actors have increasingly developed rental products with a certain extent of space sharing. These products have been presented as responses to the difficulties faced by students and young professionals trying to enter the housing market, as well as the challenges for cities in attracting and retaining these target groups. Cities with higher education institutions (HEIs) and job opportunities in knowledge-intensive sectors are attractive to young adults (Moos, 2016); however, these people are frequently unable to access either homeownership or affordable rental housing in urban environments (Ronald et al., 2023). Although sharing accommodation has been seen as a choice driven by changing lifestyles and the appeal of living with like-minded others, this practice may be the only option to cope with unaffordable housing markets for those in more precarious situations (Druta et al., 2021).

Among the shared housing ‘solutions’ specifically developed for students and/or young professionals, the rise of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) – combining a high density of studios with shared spaces – has become an established market segment in North American cities (Revington and August, 2020). The expansion of this market towards young professionals has been observed in several places, for example, in Amsterdam (Uyttebrouck et al., 2020). Co-living, comprising professionally managed furnished rooms in shared apartments and homes, is another form of institutionalised dwelling-sharing that has rapidly grown in large cities worldwide, such as New York and San Francisco (Bergan et al., 2020), Brussels (Casier, 2023) and Amsterdam (Ronald et al., 2023).

The emergence of these products in smaller, post-industrial cities with issues of residential and economic attractiveness is more rarely observed. Scholars have shown that attracting students is key to the regeneration of such cities (Heslop et al., 2023), as well as a process enhancing youth-driven forms of gentrification (e.g. Moos, 2016). However, less is known about real estate actors’ interests in developing shared housing for students and young working adults in these places in particular. There is a need to better understand how such types of market-driven shared housing align with the regeneration strategies of cities, and how local government support interacts with the regulatory framework. Hence, this article poses the questions: What are market actors and municipalities’ interests in (and strategies for) the development of shared housing for young adults in post-industrial cities under regeneration, and how does the regulatory framework contribute to facilitating or constraining such developments? Using four post-industrial Walloon (Belgium) cities hosting HEIs as case studies (Liège, Namur, Charleroi and Mons), the issues are investigated through the perceptions of investors and municipal civil servants, and their interactions with strategic and regulatory planning instruments. The purpose is to understand what enables market-driven shared housing as a strategic housing segment in post-industrial places struggling with their residential and economic attractiveness in a context of growing competitiveness at regional and international levels.

The next section provides a theoretical background of the emergence of institutionalised shared housing for young adults as a means of regeneration in post-industrial contexts under accelerated rental housing financialisation. It then presents the study context and the empirical material before delving into the analysis of municipalities’ and market strategic interests in specific shared housing forms and target demographics, and how those interact with the regulatory framework at different power levels. The conclusion section discusses the relationship between these interests, as well as the challenges for local governments in steering such developments, and addressing the possible implications in post-industrial cities.

Shared housing for young adults as regeneration means in post-industrial cities: theoretical background

Competitiveness issues for cities and entrepreneurial support for specific housing types

In the context of accelerated globalisation and advanced capitalism, cities have increasingly followed creative-class and spatial-economic discourses, leading them to compete with each other to attract highly skilled workers in knowledge-intensive sectors (Uyttebrouck et al., 2021a). In particular, post-industrial cities have used housing development strategically as an instrument for urban regeneration and attractiveness (Uyttebrouck et al., 2021b). Local government support has been essential to the development of specific housing types in strategic locations. This has taken place through the provision of resources and incentives, or more entrepreneurial behaviour consisting of envisioning risks and investing in new areas or projects (Taşan-Kok, 2010).

Shared housing for students and young professionals may align with local government strategies to densify and attract young (international) people to regeneration areas with still few urban amenities to foster spatial-economic development (e.g. Easthope and Randolph, 2009). In particular, PBSA has been enabled by the combination of several actors, policies and strategies in secondary cities that rely on the development of a knowledge economy (Heslop et al., 2023), consider international students as drivers of urban renewal (Mulhearn and Franco, 2018) and need to increase their housing supply. Co-living has been further politically supported in cities willing to ‘diversify’ the typologies of housing supply (e.g. in Swedish cities: Grundström et al., 2024). Similarly, the growth of short-term rental accommodation has been facilitated by state-led ad hoc frameworks and state entrepreneurialism (Jover and Cocola-Gant, 2023). New types of rental housing have been facilitated by incentives for institutional landlords (e.g. in the Build-To-Rent sector in the United Kingdom: Stirling et al., 2023) and dominant representations of these market segments as ‘antidotes’ to ‘various housing crises’ and ideal tenures for ‘renters by choice’ (Nethercote, 2022). In many contexts, states have thus been complicit in the shift to finance-led accumulation (Kadi et al., 2025).

State-led regulation has been instrumental in this process (Christophers, 2013). Local states may use regulatory governance to balance social, political and economic forces, and steer outcomes within market-based processes (Clegg and Farstad, 2021; Ormerod and MacLeod, 2019). For shared housing, this can be achieved through policy and regulation adaptations or relaxation (Uyttebrouck et al., 2020), although the latter cannot solely explain the expansion of new types of rental housing, such as PBSA (Pendall et al., 2024). Current evidence of such adaptations mainly comes from the United Kingdom, where research has underlined the role of tax incentives (Brill and Durrant, 2021), ‘local authority joint ventures’ (e.g. Goulding et al., 2023) and planning deregulation through land-use conversion (Chng et al., 2023). While land-use and planning regulations have been strengthened against the expansion of short-term rentals and their effects on the long-term housing stock (Colomb and Moreira de Souza, 2023), the market-driven development of shared housing might have somewhat taken advantage of (purposely) flexible regulatory frameworks.

Shared housing ‘solutions’ catering to students and young professionals, seen as attractiveness levers

Young adults are a diverse group with specific needs. Students come to cities to complete higher education and may stay to launch their careers. They become ‘young professionals’ (aged 20–34) or highly educated mobile workers in the creative and knowledge economies, who enter the housing and labour markets (Bergan et al., 2020; Heath and Kenyon, 2001). Both cohorts are attracted to cities where they find amenities and social interaction opportunities beyond HEIs and knowledge-intensive jobs, but face challenging housing conditions. Young adults have been designated as ‘generation rent’, to emphasise their tendency to live in the private-rented sector (PRS) for ever-longer periods under changing situations in terms of accessing (marginalised) social-rental housing and homeownership, despite strong variations in their housing conditions beyond ‘tenure, class and context’ (Hoolachan et al., 2017; Howard, 2024; Howard et al., 2024).

Young adults’ inclination to share accommodation in order to afford well-located neighbourhoods with amenities (Preece et al., 2021) and cope with unaffordable housing markets has also led scholars to designate them as ‘generation share’ (Maalsen, 2020). House sharing has further grown under increasingly fragmented ‘household careers’ and heterogeneous life courses (Ronald et al., 2023). Nevertheless, although wealthier households may choose to share spaces and facilities to ease daily life and obtain a ‘sense of togetherness’, for many others, sharing is the only option and ‘a solution to a problem it cannot solve’ (Grundström et al., 2024: 17). In particular, sharing housing in configurations with little private space (Verhetsel et al., 2017) or with strangers can threaten tenure and ontological security (Howard, 2024), and adversely affect well-being (Harris and Nowicki, 2020). Despite these challenges, the glamorised perceptions of young, mobile professionals have contributed to the provision of flexible and shared housing ‘solutions’, exploiting their disrupted life courses, yet pretending to meet their needs and preferences (Bergan et al., 2020; Druta and Ronald, 2020; Parkinson et al., 2020; Pfeiffer et al., 2019). Shared housing providers do not necessarily exclude older groups, but their focus is reflected in the tenant demographic (Bergan et al., 2020). In student cities, landlords providing shared accommodation specifically for students similarly exploit the use of sharing as a coping mechanism to extract higher total rents from their property (Miessner, 2021).

In that respect, these types of shared housing are a manifestation of the post-GFC (Global Financial Crisis) transformation of the PRS into an asset class, using new accumulation modes relying on value appropriation (Sadowski, 2020) and advances in digital technologies (Fields, 2022). The latter have enabled new forms of rentierism (Shrestha et al., 2023), relying on speculative rent-extraction opportunities (Jover and Cocola-Gant, 2023) and new relationships between (global) landlords and ‘platform real estate’ (Nethercote, 2023). This has encouraged institutional investors to penetrate several rental market segments (Kadi et al., 2025) – including PBSA – by exploiting regulation voids in specific institutional frameworks (Kadıoğlu and Listerborn, 2025; Taşan-Kok et al., 2021).

Nevertheless, market-driven shared housing takes specific forms and scales in different contexts. PBSA generally offers independent studios with shared spaces and services. It was initially developed in North American cities, concomitantly with the implementation of mixed-use and densification planning principles (Pendall et al., 2024). In European cities, PBSA and high-density shared housing for young professionals have notably emerged in the peripheries of large cities (e.g. in Amsterdam: Uyttebrouck et al., 2020), where they contribute to densifying former industrial sites and fulfilling urban renewal goals, albeit not without socio-spatial concerns (Heslop et al., 2023). These developments follow a similar logic to the Build-To-Rent (BTR) sector, which consists of large residential developments managed by global landlords and providing on-site amenities that compensate for the lack of facilities in the neighbourhood (e.g. in London: Brill and Durrant, 2021).

This article distinguishes the above from co-living, where only a bedroom and sometimes a bathroom are private. Co-living mainly caters to young professionals, ‘digital nomads’ – the ultra-mobile and flexible cohort of the creative class (Bergan et al., 2020) – and freelance workers (Harris and Nowicki, 2020). In European cities, this institutionalised and professionalised form of dwelling-sharing often uses existing apartments and homes, for example, in Brussels (Casier, 2023) and Amsterdam (Ronald et al., 2023). Part of the co-living availability is found in the Buy-To-Let (BTL) sector, referring to properties purchased by private and professional landlords to be rented out in the PRS (Aalbers et al., 2020). In post-industrial university towns, student housing has also largely expanded in the BTL sector, whereas PBSA has remained relatively small scale to date (see, for example, Lodz and Turin: Zasina et al., 2023). This categorisation certainly requires nuance, since there are some hybrid projects combining PBSA and co-living, and the development process can mix BTR and BTL models, for example, when a BTR development is sold to BTL investors who then rent out to young people (e.g. in Canada: Revington and August, 2020). Regardless of these variations, public support for private-led, shared rental housing products raises several issues in post-industrial cities.

Issues related to shared housing for young adults in post-industrial contexts

The development of shared housing under rental housing financialisation and rentier capitalism (e.g. Sadowski, 2020) entails several risks and issues. From a political-economy perspective, it follows previous waves of commodification resulting from the combination of the state withdrawing from housing provision, the responsibilisation of households in accumulating assets (Moreno Zacarés, 2024), state-led financialisation of homeownership (Kalman-Lamb, 2017) and housing deregulation (e.g. in the United Kingdom). However, the ongoing acceleration of financialisation fuels market instability and local governments’ dependence on global capital investors (Conte and Anselmi, 2022; Taşan-Kok, 2010). Shared housing supply further exploits regulation voids (Aalbers, 2019; Uyttebrouck et al., 2020) and fosters domestic space shrinking and lower housing standards (Harris and Nowicki, 2020; White, 2023). Rather than disrupting housing provision, it tends to reinforce crisis narratives, thereby creating a sense of emergency that legitimates policies furthering ‘housing privatisation, deregulation, capital accumulation and commodiﬁcation’ (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020: 153). When intersecting with deindustrialisation, such developments can produce and reinforce socio-spatial inequalities (as shown, for example, in Romania: Vincze et al., 2025).

From the perspective of tenants, young people may be trapped in transitional (shared) rental housing segments that offer precarious housing conditions and little security of tenure (Bergan et al., 2020; Parkinson et al., 2020). Because the residents of shared housing do not necessarily correspond to the narrow target public, those who are no longer in a transitional situation may face unsuitable long-term housing conditions that further disrupt their life courses (Druta and Ronald, 2020) and keep them as ‘perpetual renters’, in contrast with households that accumulate real estate (Moreno Zacarés, 2024).

At the neighbourhood and urban levels, Grundström et al. (2024) have shown the relationship between different forms of shared housing and socio-spatial inequalities in Swedish cities, where people sharing housing are often located in lower-income neighbourhoods. More broadly, youth and student housing development can enhance specific forms of gentrification, such as ‘youthification’ and ‘studentification’: that is, exclusionary patterns following the expansion of these populations in particular neighbourhoods (Moos, 2016; Revington et al., 2018; Smith and Hubbard, 2014). These issues have been observed in post-industrial, university towns, where the growth of HEIs has created safe investment places for PBSA (Miessner, 2021); however, PBSA development on former brownfield sites has fostered commodification and neighbourhood change (Heslop et al., 2023). More needs to be known about how local governments tackle these risks in post-industrial contexts, and the related implications for the actors and types of shared housing that emerge in these places.

Data and methods

This research draws on case-study cities in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium. This country has liberal housing and planning regimes, built on support for homeownership and sprawled urbanisation, and a fragmented institutional framework (Terhorst and Van de Ven, 1997). Throughout the twentieth century, housing policy was seen as a facet of the political economy and until the post-GFC centralisation of financial institutions, it relied on the nexus of banks, households and the state (Pradella, 2023). With the regionalisation and decentralisation of housing policy in the 1980s–1990s, municipalities came to be seen as central actors in housing provision, which enhanced opportunistic and clientelist behaviours (Pradella, 2023), and led to mixed outcomes.

Up to the 1960s in Wallonia, the economy relied on coal mining and steel-making, concentrated along the Sillon Sambre-et-Meuse, an industrial axis formed by the two rivers (Reid and Musyck, 2000). The 1970–1980s recession hit the economy, which since the mid-1990s has been transitioning towards research and development activities and other knowledge sectors (Reid and Musyck, 2000). Today, Walloon university cities with an industrial past host a highly qualified young population; however, young graduates tend to move to suburban locations when their income grows (Halleux et al., 2020). Residential attractiveness and local employment opportunities are central issues for these cities, which face high unemployment rates – up to 23 per cent in Liège and 22 per cent in Charleroi (IWEPS, 2024).

For this research, three cities (Namur, Charleroi, Mons) and one group of municipalities (Liege, Seraing, Esneux) were selected along Wallonia’s industrial axis. Most of these have traditionally had coalition local governments and, above all, a high proportion of students. For Liège (socialist-liberal coalition, 28,000 university students, 196,296 inhabitants¹), the neighbouring municipalities of Seraing (socialist government, 63,787 inhabitants) and Esneux (liberal-socialist coalition, 13,018 inhabitants) were included because they border the university campus, situated on the city’s southern outskirts. Since 2005, Seraing has been implementing a vast masterplan as part of its deindustrialisation. In Charleroi (conservative-green-socialist coalition, 2000 university students, 201,837 inhabitants), the university premises are still in development, but they attract and retain young adults and hence contribute to the city’s economic growth and renewal, driven by a masterplan (Charleroi Bouwmeester, 2022). While Mons (green-socialist coalition, 10,000 university students, 95,705 inhabitants) has been marked by the coal industry, Namur (conservative-green-liberal coalition, 7000 university students, 111,603 inhabitants) has been less affected by the steel industry that developed in its province. Although hosting over 30,000 students, Louvain-La-Neuve was excluded from the study because of its specific situation, as a newly built city (in the 1960s) using a long-term land lease to host the new Catholic University of Louvain.

In each selected city, policy, regulatory and strategic documents were examined, at both the regional and municipal levels (all the subsequent quotations from these sources were translated by the author from French to English). The Walloon region is responsible for housing and planning, so the analysis examined regional instruments, such as the Walloon Decree on housing leases, the CoDT (Code du développement territorial; that is, the spatial planning regulation), and the SDT (Schéma de Développement du Territoire; that is, the strategic regional development plan). These instruments all interfere with shared housing provision, because they define what is subject to planning permission, what is considered collective housing, the rules different kinds of housing should comply with, and the types of lease contracts that can be used in sharing arrangements.

At the municipal level, the PTS (Plan Transversal Stratégique – Transversal Strategic Plan) was created and made compulsory for all Walloon municipalities in 2018. This strategic instrument draws on operational goals, projects and actions. It requires close collaboration between the local government and the administration (Wallonie, 2025), reflecting a shift towards managerialised and contractual local governance (Fallon, 2019). The introduction of the PTS has fostered political-administrative cooperation by giving more power to officials in terms of defining and implementing strategic goals for municipalities (Fallon, 2019). An analysis of the strategic plans for the selected municipalities (except Mons, where this document was unavailable) was thus included in the desk research. In addition, municipal masterplans (where available) were examined, as they can offer additional information on the instrumental role of students, young professionals and/or the specific housing forms catering to them. To understand the actors and types of shared housing developed in Liège (see zooming in on Liège in the results section), the websites of the identified companies as well as online information and media content on their projects were used to complete a listing and mapping of shared housing.

This extensive desk research was complemented with a qualitative analysis of transcriptions of semi-structured interviews (n = 12) conducted during 2021–2022 in French (with excerpts presented in the results translated into English by the author). The interviews were conducted with:

Municipal civil servants; that is, officials of the municipal administration (heads of the planning departments in Esneux, Liège, Mons and Namur, and heads of the housing departments in Namur and Seraing);

A planner from Charleroi’s ‘Bouwmeester’, an independent organisation (and currently the only one in Wallonia) that advises the local government on the ‘consistency of the city’s urban, landscape and architectural development’ (Charleroi and Bouwmeester, 2025);

A project manager in Seraing’s agency for spatial-economic development, the primary mission of which is to manage and coordinate the implementation of Seraing’s masterplan (a strategic urban regeneration plan);

An employee of the Walloon cities and municipalities’ union, a non-profit organisation that acts for all the municipalities of Wallonia and their local authorities by representing them to the regional authorities;

Representatives of two co-living companies (one CEO and one hospitality manager) and one student housing REIT (CEO).

The next section draws on the analysis of the above instruments and actors’ discourses to unpack public and private interests, as well as the role of the flexible regulatory framework in the creation of a shared housing market in a post-industrial context.

Results

Municipalities’ strategic interests in people and housing types that contribute to improving their attractiveness

Two main interests were identified in the studied municipalities: (1) attracting and retaining young middle-class (future) families, and (2) regenerating deprived city centres and former industrial areas to make them more appealing to this target public. They are examined hereafter, with attention paid to how different types of shared housing align or oppose these interests.

With regard to the first interest, municipalities aim to anchor young professionals when they start a family (Esneux, planning; Namur, housing):

We deal with people who are no longer spatially anchored, who are transiting. Because there is less anchorage, there is less involvement, less life, etc. Therefore, we want a social mix, because families allow this anchorage; they ensure the use of schools, busses, community equipment, whereas dwelling-sharers live less in the neighbourhood. (Municipalities, housing)

Shared houses resulting from single-family housing subdivisions are therefore seen as a threat to families’ access to affordable and quality housing, with units of ‘indecent size’ (Seraing, housing), and a driver of speculation and precarity. Municipalities are aware of the rent-extraction strategies of investors and landlords, and oppose building subdivision that aims to ‘strengthen land rents’ (Namur, planning) and raise real estate prices (Mons, planning), with rents up to three times higher than for family housing (Municipalities, housing; Namur, housing). These concerns are addressed in some of the municipalities’ PTS. In Namur, the plan pursues the ‘fight against the improper or excessive subdivision of buildings’ under the goal of improving families’ access to housing in the city centre (Ville de Namur, 2019). In Liege, the city plan 2012–2022 actually aimed to develop PBSA as a way to free up subdivided houses for families (Liège, 2013). The development of poor-quality student housing in subdivided houses has been tackled in practice through the requirement for rental permission for collective housing, small housing units and student housing (see the last subsection). Seraing and Liège now aim to use this permit as an indicator of a housing quality label (Liège, 2025; Seraing, 2019).

Interestingly, the municipalities studied seem to distinguish the above from co-living created for young professionals in existing houses, which they support if it is ‘organised’ and of ‘fair quality’ (Namur, planning). This attitude was initially similar in other parts of Belgium, for example, in the Brussels Capital Region, where an unclear regulatory framework and the absence of a regional response have facilitated the rapid expansion of co-living in converted single-family houses (Oxenaar et al., 2024). Backing co-living rather than student-shared houses further reflects municipalities’ preference for registered citizens who generate local income. Students usually stay registered at their parents’ address in Belgium, and this has negative financial and power implications for the cities where they settle to study:

The real problem for the city is that a student is not registered, or very rarely, so he or she does not pay taxes, which is a financial burden for the city. [. . .] We have almost 200,000 registered inhabitants, but if we included students, we would be far above this threshold. But when you reach the threshold of 200,000 inhabitants, the city is considered differently and has the right to other regional resources. (Liege, planning)

By contrast, in former industrial areas undergoing regeneration to enhance their residential and economic attractiveness (the second main interest), municipalities seem to consider students as less demanding newcomers and an ‘easy’ target group, likely to become pioneer residents – as in other redevelopment areas of larger cities, such as Stockholm (Uyttebrouck, 2020) or Amsterdam (Uyttebrouck et al., 2021b). The studied municipalities hence encourage PBSA and high-density shared housing where urban renewal is needed. Charleroi and Seraing – the case-study cities faced with the greatest issues concerning deindustrialisation and attractiveness – are the most interested in PBSA as a means of urban renewal. This link is explicitly mentioned in Charleroi’s ‘metropolitan project’ (Charleroi Bouwmeester, 2022: 101). In Seraing, PBSA is considered a higher quality and more ‘structured’ student housing offer (as argued above for co-living), given the possibility to interact with one professional manager (Seraing, housing). The city has planned a 40,000 m² redevelopment project with PBSA in its masterplan to host students from the University of Liège and other HEIs (Eriges, 2022). This ‘Trasenster’ project is listed as one of the goals in the strategy ‘being an attractive, smart and connected city’, along with, for example, the goal of attracting a ‘fiscally contributive skilled workforce’ in the city’s PTS (Seraing, 2019). The project will involve young adults to:

. . . facilitate the delicate transition towards professional life and access to individual housing, as well as to integrate young workers in the neighbourhood; the latter contributing to its economic and social renewal, just as do students. (Excerpt from the local economic development agency’s website: Eriges, 2024)

This excerpt shows how local authorities can assign themselves a role in young people’s transition to adulthood and position the young adults as a tool for renewal in the city’s most deprived area (the median income in this district is the lowest, at 16,322 euros vs 21,632 euros for the city as a whole: IWEPS, 2024). The municipality has required social rents for 28 units out of the 300, which means less than 10 per cent of regulated rentals, raising concerns about the project’s potential socio-spatial implications.

Territorial competitiveness between these Walloon municipalities appears to back both interests, as has been similarly observed in primary and capital cities, where international competitiveness has influenced mixed-use redevelopment policies aiming to make former office and industrial areas for young professionals and mobile workers – for example, in Amsterdam and Brussels (Uyttebrouck et al., 2021b). In smaller, post-industrial cities, young adults – as ‘easy’ newcomers – seem to serve even more the regeneration of declining city centres and deprived neighbourhoods, including through redevelopment projects:

Namur does not specifically want to grow, but we are in a spatial marketing logic, clearly when it comes to residential attractiveness. We compete with Liege, Mons and the Walloon Brabant [province south of Brussels]. [. . .] We are in a renewal logic, including in the city centre, towards new urban forms that are more adapted to host early housing pathways. (Namur, planning; emphasis added)

Right now, the city centre is really empty, and we would like to house students in vacant buildings rather than buildings that are used to increase prices and drive families out. For now, the city centre is abandoned so there is no problem of this kind. [. . .] The students’ flexibility allows filling up some spaces where families will not be able to come. For instance, students tolerate noise better. (Charleroi, planning; emphasis added)

We see the creation of student housing as potential economic leverage in deprived neighbourhoods. Bringing students back can be an opportunity to act on the social mix. (Mons, planning; emphasis added)

In a similar vein, Liège’s newest PTS, which was issued after the study period, aims to regenerate ‘deserted economic areas’ to attract ‘new populations wanting to resettle in cities’ (Liège, 2025). Giving a role to institutionalised forms of shared housing – here co-living and PBSA – in reaching these goals can be paralleled with the same municipalities easing single-family house subdivision in the 1990s – which they oppose now, given the quality and health issues encountered – to repopulate city centres.

Market interests in developing shared housing as a response to attractiveness issues in a post-industrial, university context: zooming in on Liège

This section focuses on Liège,² the selected city where shared housing is the most developed. PBSA, high-density shared housing and co-living houses were listed and mapped (see Figure 1 and Table 1) to identify the market actors that develop these types of shared housing, their interests and their strategies. The analysis excludes dwelling-sharing provided by individual landlords and on-campus student housing provided by the university. Rather than areas near the campus, investments are concentrated in central locations with urban amenities, especially for student housing – in contrast with, for example, observations in North American university cities (Revington, 2023). However, these neighbourhoods are poorer and denser (Figure 1). The location choice may also be opportunistic, such as an empty building to redevelop in a neighbourhood where student housing is considered attractive (CEO, student housing).

Figure 1.

Left: Mapping of shared housing in Liège in spring 2022 according to median incomes (in % of Wallonia median income) – Right: same mapping according to population density (Ville de Liège, 2019, with author annotations).

Table 1.

Listing of shared housing in Liege.

Residence	Investor/manager	Units (rooms and/or studios)	Description
Avroy Student House	XIOR Student Housing (REIT)	146	Rooms (10–18 m²) and studios (22–24 m²) for students Shared spaces: kitchens, leisure/workroom Services: Internet, TV, laundry
Meuse Campus	Generation Campus – Eckelmans Immobilier (Institutional investor)	235	Studios (single; double) for students (17–29 m²) [and young professionals] Shared spaces: study room, leisure room, fitness space, rooftop terrace, sauna Services: Internet, TV, laundry
Student station	Student station SPRL (local investor)	57	Studios (17–40 m²) for students Shared spaces: kitchen, living room, study room, terrace Services: Internet, TV (incl., Netflix), laundry
Chick & Kot	Individual investors/managed by Chick & Kot	60 (spread in 3 locations)	Rooms (from 15 m²) and studios (18–26 m²) for students Shared spaces: study room, living room, kitchen, terrace Services: Internet, laundry, housekeeping
Erasmust	Erasmust as manager	60 (spread in 14 houses)	Rooms (from 10 m²) in shared houses (co-living) for international students Shared spaces: kitchen, living room (and possibly bathrooms) Services: Internet, TV (incl., Netflix), laundry
IKOAB	Individual investors/managed by IKOAB	102 (spread in 11 houses)	Rooms in shared houses (co-living) for young professionals Shared spaces: kitchen, living room (and possibly bathrooms) Services: Internet, TV (incl., Netflix), laundry
Arc	XIOR Student Housing (REIT)	232	‘Lofts’ (38–64 m²) for students and young professionals Shared spaces: garden, living room with kitchen, theatre, rooftop terrace, fitness, wellness, library, meeting room Services: Internet, laundry, housekeeping, furniture
Yust	Yust hotel company	98	Long-stay ‘lofts’ (35–50 m²) and rooms with shared spaces in a hotel – Access to: gym, meeting/co-working space, rooftop, restaurant, coffee corner, laundromat, car sharing, electric bikes
Trasenster	XIOR Student Housing (REIT)	300	Student housing with shared spaces (no more details so far)

Both international and local companies develop shared housing in Liège (Table 1). The municipality has contributed to attracting these actors, as it has stated in its city plan its willingness to meet developers to start PBSA projects (Liège, 2013). Investors in PBSA consider Liège to have a sufficient critical mass of students to make the market ‘liquid’ enough and are aware of their role in meeting the attractiveness goals for municipalities (and HEIs):

The recent influx of large new student complexes is also a conscious strategy on the part of the town’s and educational institutions, in partnership with major developers and institutional investors. (XIOR Student housing, 2023)

Human capital is mandatory for a region’s economic development [. . .]. They [cities] have accepted that students are an economic leverage for their cities and that they have to host them, accompany them and create a housing offer that allows them to enjoy those cities. (CEO, student housing)

As scholars have demonstrated in other contexts, considering young adults as economic levers may nevertheless lead to ‘studentification’, as found in Germany, Italy and Poland, for example (Miessner, 2021; Zasina et al., 2023).

The shared housing market is designed in a way that mitigates investment risks and increases yields, with assets branded as ‘crisis resistant and defensive’ (Eckelmans, 2024; XIOR, 2024) or promising ‘worry-free profit’ (Chick and Kot, 2024) to landlords who can ‘get the maximum possible income from [their] rent’ (IKOAB, 2024). The identified actors range from international Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs, here XIOR) to institutional investors (Ecklemans) and hotel companies (Yust), as well as local student housing (Erasmust, Chick & Kot, Student station SPRL) and co-living (IKOAB) companies. REITs are financialised actors that bond urban housing markets with institutional investors and financial markets. XIOR is the first international student housing REIT established in Belgium and is listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange. The presence of these actors in Liège could indicate, as Oxenaar et al. (2024) have shown for Brussels, ‘emerging financialisation’.

The development strategy of international investors relies on delivering a large number (up to 300 here) of small units (starting from 10 m² for one person), digitally managed – such as through a maintenance platform (XIOR, 2024) and through virtual visits and booking (IKOAB, 2024) – to compensate for the shared spaces and services offered. They also combine ‘affordable’ and ‘exclusive’ products. For example, Ecklemans creates ‘ready to live in’ and ‘niche investment rental products commercialised through an exclusive concept’ (Eckelmans, 2024), and their Meuse Campus residence mixes individual private spaces and studios. XIOR’s Avroy Student House similarly mixes standards, from budget to standard-plus rooms and studios.

This business model is justified by the presumed quality and affordability levels that students and young professionals are expected to need. The products are branded as innovative, experiential – ‘maximising the overall experience’ (Erasmust, 2024) in an ‘outstanding living environment’ (Chick and Kot, 2024) – and promise the provision of ‘high-quality’ communal spaces (CEO, student housing). This assumed quality level is used to legitimise the prices and pretend that ‘when luxury is shared, luxury becomes affordable’ (Liege, hospitality manager) or that the rooms have ‘the same rent as a shabby mezzanine’ (IKOAB, 2024). These actors also increasingly exploit life-course disruptions at a later stage in life by marketing the flexibility and easiness of their products:

Many people who are breaking up and who have to find something quickly choose something smaller while they are sorting their life out and looking to buy again [. . .]. No matter what age, we are in transition periods at several times in our lives. Co-living allows adapting to these periods. [. . .] It is a flexible and fast solution, in that they [the tenants] sign one single contract that includes water, electricity, heating, lighting, curtains, internet, etc. You get in as fast as out. (Liege, hospitality manager)

However, previous research has shown that this illusion of flexibility (Casier, 2023) puts tenants in insecure (‘in as fast as out’) or precarious situations that may become permanent (Hoolachan et al., 2017).

Finally, as observed elsewhere, real estate developers are increasingly incorporating high-density shared housing for young professionals into mixed-use projects and upscaling the sector through standardisation. For example, an interviewee from a co-living company active in Liège mentioned their project to develop the largest co-living residence of Wallonia in Charleroi:

[We want to] move towards projects between 4000 and 6000 square metres, where we would develop a copy-paste of what we are currently doing, actually. Because I believe it’s a model that will be successful everywhere. So, it will have co-living on the upper floors and a food market on the ground floor. We are clearly thinking about other Walloon cities. Besides, at the MIPIM [famous Real Estate fair], we presented the project for Charleroi. Directly, the cities of Mons, Namur, La Louvière and Liège came to see us, for us to develop the same type of project. (CEO, co-living)

This mixed-use project will play a central role in the city’s urban renewal goals, defined in its masterplan.

Similarly, in Liège, the Arc residence – a large-scale shared housing project catering to young professionals and only 18 per cent (international) students – results from the conversion of a former technical laboratory on the old engineering campus. Although the neighbourhood lacks amenities, the investor (XIOR) was convinced about the area’s potential because of its connection with the future tramway line (Liege, hospitality manager). The structure of the existing building constrained the division of floor space into small units, and this inclined the developers to target young workers able to pay higher rents (Liege, hospitality manager). Since this project was completed in 2021, the city seems to have gained a greater awareness of housing affordability issues for young adults. The new PTS aims to develop social student housing by requiring developers who deliver PBSA to provide 10 per cent of the units dedicated to this tenure (Liège, 2025). Whether this goal will be enacted and enforced remains to be seen.

Shared housing growing under flexible regulations and few enforcement means

This section points to discrepancies between the local and the regional power levels – reflecting the country’s institutional fragmentation (Terhorst and Van de Ven, 1997) – that hamper the regulation of shared housing and are utilised by the market. The foregoing highlights municipalities’ support for PBSA and co-living as ‘high-quality’ and ‘organised’ shared housing. PBSA and high-density shared housing fall under the ‘collective housing’ regulation; however, for co-living, this regulation appears to remain flexible enough for developers to use it ‘creatively’:

Our main development axis is Wallonia where, actually, in terms of market and relationships with institutions, it’s much simpler [than in Brussels]. Decision-making is much faster, as well as permit submission. We don’t face permission refusals and appeals [. . .]. We will qualify it [speaking of a newly-built co-living development] as collective housing,³ knowing that the rules for collective housing are not always adapted for what we do [. . .] so we will have to be creative. (CEO, co-living)

Such opportunistic behaviour confirms the appeal of flexible regulatory frameworks to small investors (Taşan-Kok et al., 2021) and their inclination to exploit regulation voids (Aalbers, 2019). This flexibility is supported at the regional power level, where the strategic development plan aims to facilitate flexible, ‘new housing models’ (including co-living), as long as they contribute to improving the living environment (Wallonie, 2023).

Flexibility in regulating co-living is also apparent in the housing lease legislation, despite the addition of specific rules for dwelling-sharing in the 2018 Walloon decree (revised in 2023). While dwelling-sharing relies on one lease contract between the landlord and the tenants (and a ‘pact’ between the tenants), each co-living tenant usually has an individual contract. At the time this study was conducted, the Walloon Minister of Housing was not intending to regulate co-living further, in contrast with local concerns:

Regulate in this matter [co-living] does not seem useful to me so far and would probably be premature. Furthermore, the difficulty lies in the specificity of each contract, which sometimes looks more like a hotel flat than a usual long-term rental. Of course, we are watching the evolution of these phenomena closely. (Answer from the Minister of Housing to a parliamentary question asked on 20 April 2022)

The lease decree adopted in 2018 barely considers new housing forms. Student housing and dwelling-sharing are dealt with, but co-living is not really considered. (Municipalities, housing)

The regulations lag behind when it comes to shared housing. In planning terms, you create a dwelling or you do not. You have to accept a dwelling or refuse it, there is no nuance. So, it is not always easy to decide. (Esneux, planning)

Furthermore, municipalities’ opposition to housing subdivision seems to be difficult to put into practice at the planning and enforcement levels because, again, companies investing with a BTL logic find ways to avoid planning permission procedures and quickly deliver new units:

We have another kind of developer that rules here. These are people who buy up single-family buildings, redevelop them [officially] into single-family housing, yet systematically rent them out as dwelling-sharing. (Liege, planning)

We do not have any leverage against dwelling-sharing. We cannot forbid it, so there are a certain number of applicants who utilise this legal gap. (Namur, planning)

Although the regional spatial planning regulation specifies what requires planning permission and defines exhaustively (and restrictively) what is meant by creating a new dwelling in an existing building (Bernard, 2022), it does not officially define co-living, and ambiguous cases remain, especially in the existing stock (Municipalities, housing).

Similar issues appear with rental permission. This instrument obliges landlords⁴ who rent out small housing units (under 28 m²) and collective housing to ensure sufficient quality and health conditions, yet municipalities lack monitoring and enforcement means to apply this rule:

When it comes to co-living, there is no preventive tool for the municipality to control its creation. Co-living has an impact on living conditions in a neighbourhood, especially if there are several [projects] in the same street, because it is a density level that is difficult to manage. (Municipalities, housing)

Some municipalities nevertheless define specific housing quality requirements and local strategies to cope with the regional level’s diverging views (e.g. the aforementioned goal of creating quality labels in some municipalities’ PTS). While Charleroi’s plan aims to revise housing-subdivision rules and ‘facilitate cohabitation’ (Charleroi, 2019), in line with the city-specific and urgent need to repopulate its city centre, in Namur, a guide for house subdivision was established to require keeping ground floors for families through larger dwellings with a garden (Namur, housing). Similarly, Liege’s agglomeration plan (Schema de développement territorial de l’arrondissement de Liège) aims to increase the housing supply for 30–50 year olds with children, notably by fighting against subdivision and housing vacancy. To strengthen its capacity to implement this plan, Liege’s new PTS mentions the willingness to create the role of Bouwmeester at the agglomeration level (Liège, 2025). Charleroi is currently the only Walloon city where this role exists. This type of actor, together with local guides and plans, contributes to improving the governance capacity of these cities – as has been observed in larger cities such as Brussels (Uyttebrouck et al., 2021b) – and partly compensates for the weaknesses of regional planning instruments.

Concluding discussion

This article has examined the processes enabling the emergence of market-driven shared rental housing products for students and young professionals in post-industrial cities. Framed as solutions to issues of these cities’ attractiveness, as well as the presumed needs of young adults, specific types of shared housing have been given government support despite related issues for tenants (e.g. lack of tenure security), local markets (e.g. higher instability) and cities (e.g. reinforced socio-spatial inequalities). Against this backdrop, the article has sought to better understand the strategic interests of the market and municipalities in developing shared housing for young adults in post-industrial, university cities – in this case, along the historical Walloon industrial axis – and how a flexible, fragmented regulatory framework contributes to establishing a shared housing market.

The analysis of public and private interests suggests that competitiveness concerns influence the agendas of smaller, post-industrial cities – in particular, their goal to attract and anchor young, middle-class professionals, considered as economic levers and influencing their power and resources. Municipalities do not seem to draw sufficient lessons from past failures to avoid, for instance, housing subdivision with the ‘co-living’ label delivering possibly similar outcomes to past developments. The same could be argued regarding PBSA in regeneration areas, since only one of the studied municipalities – Liège, which was also initially the most proactive in attracting such developments – has so far explicitly intended to require future PBSA projects to include social student housing units.

From the closer analysis of the case of Liège, real estate actors (both local and international) appear to strategically align their shared housing offer with municipalities’ interests by claiming its presumed quality and affordability for young people, and emphasising professional and digitised management. Their strategy further relies on developing low-risk, profitable products – either in central locations with a ‘critical mass’ of their target public or in places where they see opportunities to attract this public. In the latter case, shared housing is integrated into high-density, mixed-use redevelopment projects that meet cities’ strategic planning discourses. These market strategies may enable ‘emerging financialisation’ (Oxenaar et al., 2024), including in the other case-study cities, given the presence of similar actors (e.g. the REIT XIOR is also active in Namur) or ongoing projects (e.g. in Charleroi).

Furthermore, the discourses driving support for the growth of shared housing may be questioned in light of their possible socio-spatial and market effects. Namely, tenants who cannot afford PBSA or high-density shared housing may be relegated to cheaper, old shared houses – as observed, for example in Namur (Namur, housing) – which would confirm outcomes observed elsewhere (e.g. in Waterloo, Canada: Revington, 2023). From the supply side, institutionalised shared housing may create tensions and competition within the PRS, with individual landlords having ‘more difficulties in attracting students because they do not have all services or the community that goes with those types of housing’ (Liege, planning).

Addressing these possible risks, and more broadly steering shared housing development, may be challenging for local governments if (1) other power levels have diverging views and/or fail to adequately regulate these market segments (as may be the case with the Walloon flexible regulatory framework) and (2) they lack enforcement and monitoring tools (e.g. to control the use of rental permission). Although this would incline scholars to call for reinforced regulation, planning instruments may not suffice (Pendall et al., 2024) and the growth of platform intermediation, especially in shared housing provision, makes local enforcement more complex (Colomb and Moreira de Souza, 2023). In this regard, contractual local governance using strategic instruments – such as the PTS in Wallonia – and the support of independent actors – such as a Bouwmeester – can help counterbalance regulatory weaknesses and empower municipalities.

This article advances understanding of the relationship between public and private interests, and the complex role of the regulatory framework in balancing, translating and constraining them. The article further reflects on governance challenges to address the possible consequences of supporting shared housing for students and young professionals in post-industrial cities. The governance mechanisms that enable the growth of these rental segments and the potential for governance innovations to better steer their development would deserve more in-depth exploration. Also, there are pressing needs to further investigate the socio-spatial implications and market disruptions of shared housing in post-industrial environments, as well as to engage with young adults’ standpoints in these contexts to understand whether and how shared housing responds to their needs and helps them improve their residential perspectives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I warmly thank Yoann Quehec, former Master’s Student of the University of Liege, for his high-quality Master’s thesis on this topic, and Prof. Jacques Teller, for co-supervising the thesis. I am also grateful to the attendants of the WG Housing and Young People at the ENHR Conference 2023 as well as Antoine Paccoud (LISER) for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Constance Uyttebrouck

Notes

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Enabling the emergence of shared housing for young adults in post-industrial cities: Between common interests and regulatory challenges

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Shared housing for young adults as regeneration means in post-industrial cities: theoretical background

Competitiveness issues for cities and entrepreneurial support for specific housing types

Shared housing ‘solutions’ catering to students and young professionals, seen as attractiveness levers

Issues related to shared housing for young adults in post-industrial contexts

Data and methods

Results

Municipalities’ strategic interests in people and housing types that contribute to improving their attractiveness

Market interests in developing shared housing as a response to attractiveness issues in a post-industrial, university context: zooming in on Liège

Shared housing growing under flexible regulations and few enforcement means

Concluding discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References