Guillaume Kasbarian, the Minister responsible for Housing, presented this Friday to the Council of Ministers, a bill on social housing, with the idea, among other things, of an additional rent for households which occupy HLM, while they have exceeded even of one euro the eligibility thresholds. The rental search becomes a path of the cross.
franceinfo: Jean Viard, we feel that this theme is important to many French people?
Jean Viard: The question of housing is a real subject for different reasons. The first question is that France puts a lot of money into housing and that deep down, there is real dissatisfaction, there is a lack of housing even though it is very expensive. The countries around us are spending less money, and in general, people are happier. So this requires rethinking the question.
The second element, obviously, is that France is changing. People are moving to the coasts, 67% of people have a garden, people live around big cities. If you want to live in ‘the diagonal of the void’, basically, if you go from Metz to Montauban, you will find accommodation, possibly including social housing. 40% of HLMs are occupied by single women with children – the figure is that of Marseille, but it must be fairly general, because they are given priority for reasons that everyone knows.
There are all these elements: change of family, change of territory, inflation, and then new standards: the fact that we cannot build anywhere, that increases the price. The fact that we have set “disabled standards” is good news, since there are more and more elderly people, and therefore older people have more difficulty getting around. But therefore, we impose standards, it is more expensive. And then of course, the question of heating, of ecology. This too increases the cost of buildings, therefore more expensive buildings, but like many of the reforms we have made recently, we set standards a bit, and then we wonder how we make it work.
Afterwards, there is a crisis too, why? The question is: what is social housing? In France, there are approximately 5.5 million social housing units for a stock of 33 million housing units. There are approximately 1.5 million families looking for social housing. The question is: is social housing a way to start in life, when indeed wages in France are low for young people, and then they increase a little over time – for many , not for everyone since there are people who remain on minimum wage. But most people see their salaries increase, and in the end, 70% of retirees are owners. So yes, there is this curve.
For example, can you buy a second home when you are in social housing? When you increase your income, will people immediately tell you: listen, you have exceeded the ceiling, you have to find other accommodation. There are all these social issues behind it. It’s a little difficult to understand, when we see that there are 1.8 million families waiting.
There is a real question because the first poverty is the absence of housing, and it is truly the most dreadful thing. It is clear that we have a problem here and that it is the entire chain that must be affected, to reopen the most social housing, for the most disadvantaged.
There is a difficulty in finding social housing, and then there is this almost revolutionary proposal which comes from the Sapiens Institute, which proposes that there be no more social housing, but that all housing potentially be social housing, as long as an eligible person or family lives there.
The owner would receive part of the rent from the tenants according to their means and the rest would be paid by the State. Does this seem relevant to you as a proposal?
I am not enough of a specialist to move towards this kind of major reform, but in any case, we need to build more. The problem is how we increase construction, that is to say freeing up land in the peri-urban areas, since many people want to live next to cities, where we have started to make subdivisions in a huge mess. It is this whole question of land use planning which has been very weak for several years.
There is no longer any thought of land use planning. I think we need to put all that back on the table, think about residential journeys, think about the fact that teleworking allows 30% of people to live further from cities. This too is extremely important new data. And then, when we have this vision of the French way of life, how to protect the weakest and how we promote individual construction.