What does Oostende’s new Hangar d’Amour change for sex workers and the Hazegras district?

The most consequential changes are ordinary workplace provisions. Het Nieuwsblad reports that each of the 36 rooms has three alarm buttons. The building also includes lockers, a communal rest area and a kitchen where workers can store food and eat during breaks. Those details may sound prosaic beside the building’s red-lit work corridor, but that is precisely their significance: they treat sex workers as people completing shifts who need privacy, clean facilities, food, rest and contact with colleagues.

Operator Franky De Coninck, who is also associated with Antwerp’s Villa Tinto, told Het Nieuwsblad that safety, comfort and social contact between workers guided the design. Focus-WTV reports that a caretaker is available around the clock and that workers rent the rooms themselves. The broadcaster also says the sex workers using the complex are legally registered. These arrangements should not be confused automatically with salaried employment: Belgium distinguishes between self-employed sex workers and employees working for a federally recognised employer.

The complex is part of the wider restoration of Hangar 1, a protected historic warehouse. According to Het Nieuwsblad, the site is intended eventually to include a brasserie, event space, offices, sports facilities and a rooftop bar. A pedestrian and cycle route crosses the broader development, while the sex-work area is screened to protect workers and clients from direct public view. The stated ambition is integration without exposure: the activity is acknowledged as part of the city, but individual privacy remains protected.

Belgium removed consensual adult sex work from the criminal-law framework when its reformed sexual criminal law took effect on 1 June 2022, the Federal Public Service Justice explains. Adult sex workers may work independently, and paying an adult for consensual sexual services is not itself an offence. Coercion, exploitation, human trafficking and abuse remain criminal offences.

A second reform, effective from 1 December 2024, created a special employment-contract framework. The Federal Public Service Employment says only an employer recognised in advance by the federal ministers responsible for Employment and Justice may employ sex workers under such a contract. Employees retain an explicit right to refuse a client or a particular act, interrupt an activity, impose conditions and end the contract without notice or compensation.

Recognised employers must provide safeguards including an alarm button in every room, access to showers, clean linen and condoms, and a continuously reachable reference person. They must also make procedures and information understandable to every worker. That last requirement matters in a multilingual and often internationally mobile sector: safety instructions cannot merely exist in Dutch on paper if a worker does not understand them. Oostende is a Dutch-speaking gemeente, so municipal information is principally in Dutch, while federal guidance is available in Dutch and French through werk.belgie.be and justice.belgium.be.

For a sex worker considering a room or contract, the useful checks are concrete: establish whether the arrangement is self-employed or salaried; if salaried, ask for the employer’s federal recognition number and a written contract; identify the on-site reference person; and test how the alarm procedure works. Independent advice is available through UTSOPI, the Belgian Union of Sex Workers. Federal Justice also lists free, confidential medical and psychosocial services, while suspected exploitation can be reported through stopmensenhandel.be or the Belgian trafficking helpline on 078 05 58 00. Immediate danger should always be reported through 112 or the police number 101.

Hangar d’Amour is both labour infrastructure and an urban-planning intervention. The city wants safer, more inspectable premises for workers while clearing the way for redevelopment in Hazegras. That pairing deserves attention: concentrating a stigmatised activity can improve facilities and contact with support services, but it can also give landlords, operators and authorities greater control over who may work and where.

The Belgian Union of Sex Workers, UTSOPI, recorded in its 2024 annual report that it visited the construction site and later collected feedback from workers at Antwerp’s Villa Tinto for the Oostende developer. That consultation is an encouraging part of the project’s history, although it does not by itself establish how workers will experience rents, management, privacy or access over time.

For Hazegras residents, the most visible consequence is the disappearance of the former red-light streets as redevelopment continues. For workers, the test is more demanding than a successful opening: whether the alarm systems function, rents and rules remain workable, independent health organisations can enter freely, and no one is displaced into more isolated or informal settings.

The next phase will therefore be measured less by the building’s striking name than by routine practice. Federal rules require social inspectors to examine a recognised employer within six months of recognition, although the publicly available reports reviewed for this article do not establish the precise employment status of every person renting a room at Hangar d’Amour. Oostende, the operator, support organisations and workers will now provide the evidence on whether centralisation delivers what the project promises: safer work without pushing sex workers out of sight or out of control of their own conditions.