social landlords ask “not to touch the SRU law”

Gabriel Attal announced, at the end of January, an adjustment to the SRU law, which currently requires municipalities to devote 20 to 25% of their real estate to social housing.

The Social Union for Housing (USH), a confederation of social landlords, demands “with responsibility and seriousness” the government to renounce reforming, as it intends to do, the SRU law establishing quotas for social housing in cities.

“The housing crisis that our country is going through today calls for other responses, other struggles than calling into question what works. The few mayors who knowingly stand outside the law by not not assuming their responsibilities towards national cohesion certainly do not deserve such a gift”, declares the president of the USH, Emmanuelle Cosse, in a press release, Wednesday March 20.

Adopted in 2000, the SRU law, for “solidarity and urban renewal”, imposes on cities a quota of 20 to 25% of social housing. But the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, promised to reform it to include intermediate housing, intended for the middle class, in the count. The contours of the reform, which must be included in a bill “for middle class housing” expected before summer, have not been specified.

Record waiting lists

“There is no taboo in adjusting the SRU law”, the Minister for Housing, Guillaume Kasbarian, said in mid-March, recalling that it had already been modified several times. “We will always continue to have an objective of incentive, of objectification, of construction of social housing in the SRU law”, however, he had promised.

“The SRU law has certainly undergone changes, always in the direction of fairer application and a renewed ambition for social diversity. Until now, no significant measure has come to call into question its scope, on the contrary “, retort the social landlords. According to the USH, 2.6 million households are waiting for social housing, a record.

Between 2020 and 2022, nearly two thirds of the municipalities affected by the SRU law did not meet their social housing production objectives, some, such as Nice, Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine) or Toulon, even being very far. In February, right-wing mayors, including those of Nice, Reims, Aix-en-Provence and Nîmes, had asked, in an open letter to Guillaume Kasbarian, “to open a peaceful and unpretentious debate on the subject of the SRU law”, qualified as“insult to common sense”.