Construction of new social housing has slowed sharply in recent years, but demand is booming. First-time applicants are facing increasingly long waiting times.
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Nearly 2.7 million households in France are seeking social housing, a record figure. Among them, 1.8 million are first-time applicants. The others already housed in social housing want new housing. Unprecedented figures that translate into ever longer queues and waiting times.
And among the first-time applicants, Margot, who lives in a small two-room apartment in a working-class Parisian neighborhood. She is one of the households eligible for so-called “intermediate” housing for the middle classes. Her rent there would be two to three times lower. “I work in an association and my partner is a college teacher, she says. We would like to be in social housing to be more financially comfortable. In Paris, from memory, there is a wait of between eight and ten years. For us, it has only been two years, it is still recent.”
Margot, who had to be patient before getting her accommodation, is not the worst off. It is in very social housing that the waiting times are the longest. Anything but a surprise for Eddie Jacquemart, president of the National Housing Confederation (CNL). “We are not building enough very social housing, he laments. Some mayors don’t want this very social heritage in their territory, because it’s a bit stigmatizing, the most popular neighborhoods. So we’re moving more toward intermediate-type housing and for slightly more affluent families.”
According to the CNL, the number of applications and waiting times will increase further. In fact, only 82,000 social housing units will have been built in France in 2023, compared to more than 100,000 per year in the 2010s.