Objective: 40% public housing by 2035. This is the goal displayed by the City of Paris, she announced this Sunday. “Our goal is to ensure that those who work in Paris have the opportunity to live there”, declared on franceinfo the housing assistant of the capital Ian Brossat.
This 40% target will include 30% social housing and 10% intermediate housing. “Paris has made great progress in recent years since we have almost reached 25% social housing, that is to say that today one inhabitant in four is protected from real estate speculation. That said, the problem we have is that private housing is still too expensive. It’s too expensive to own. It’s too expensive to rent and that’s why we now want to go further away”, detailed Ian Brossat. The capital – where the average purchase price per square meter is around 10,000 euros, and where a 50 m2 costs 1,200 euros to rent per month on average, according to the Rent Observatory of the Paris conurbation (Olap) – has lost nearly 10,000 inhabitants per year for a decade, according to INSEE.
In order to curb this trend, Ian Brossat therefore intends, in addition to increasing the total amount of social housing to 30% by 2030, to develop up to 10% social housing “affordable, that is to say 20% below the market price, for the middle classes”. It is thus counting on the current revision of the local urban plan (PLU) to insert an obligation to integrate a part of housing in any new construction, including offices. “The threshold has not yet been set, it will not necessarily be 30% on offices” as on new housing, an obligation in force since 2015, underlines Ian Brossat. But “every square meter built in Paris must allow us to make additional housing”, he insists.
Buy offices and hotels
“Do we want to make Paris a city that would be a citadel reserved for the privileged, or do we want to make Paris a city that allows those who run it to simply live there? We make this choice there. It obviously has a cost.” Achieving this objective will go through the “repurchase of a certain number of buildings”,_ estimates the housing assistant (PCF). “I am thinking of office buildings, I am thinking of aerial garage buildings. I am also thinking of hotels, which are sometimes obsolete, to transform them into affordable housing. We must ensure that all surfaces built in Paris help to housing policy and facilitate the housing conditions of Parisians, precisely in order to keep the middle and working classes within the city.”
For the opponent LR Jean-Baptiste Olivier, these proposals do not contain “nothing new: this is what has been going on for years and what we qualify as concretization” of the capital. “We only do housing to the detriment of any other activity”, deplores this elected member of the group of Rachida Dati.