Belgian social housing turns to lofts

London's Trellick Tower was perhaps the first social housing high-riser to attract a lofty audience and since yesterday Belgium's social housing seems to go down the same way. A high-riser in Boom (near Antwerp) of Belgium's most famous postwar architects - Renaat Braem- was sold for over 2,32 million EUR to a real-estate agency which was prepared "to offer 10.000 EUR more than anyone's best offer" to turn the 75 m2 apartments into 150 or even spacious 300 m2 ones. The location of the building (next to the A12-motorway) and the building itself harnesses all failures of modern social housing, so one wonders if after living in converted industrial spaces, this will become the new craze. Incidentally, this reminds me of the Java Eiland-project in Amsterdam where the social housing-aesthetic was used for a prestigious building project.
Braem -once a trainee of Le Corbusier- considered designing social housing as a duty towards society and one can't help wondering what he would have thought of it.