Every weekend with Jean Viard, sociologist, research director at the CNRS, and old LREM candidate in the legislative elections in the 5th constituency of Vaucluse in 2017, we try to better understand current events in today’s France.
In our country, the share of public spending on housing has fallen in five years to reach 1.63% of GDP in 2020, a figure that has never been so low in 40 years, notes the Abbé-Pierre Foundation in its annual report on poor housing.
franceinfo: Is the question of housing today largely neglected in France?
John Viard: At the start of the five-year term, President Macron thought that there was a lot of money going into housing for a result that was bad, because indeed housing in France is expensive, rents or loan repayments play a significant role in the standard of living.
It is much more expensive to live and find accommodation in France, for example, than in Germany, and at the same time, there is a crisis vis-à-vis the most disadvantaged, since even in Paris, we are passed from 3500 to 2600 homeless who sleep outside, according to the surveys of the marauders. It’s better. And then there are two million families waiting for HLMs.
All of this means that we don’t really know how to deal with the problem. So, President Macron actually wanted to put the brakes on HLMs. Historically, we first did social housing. And then after, we said to ourselves: we will rather help people to build individual houses, therefore access to property. We said to ourselves: people who want to be owners, they want houses with gardens, and we have built 16 million houses with gardens around the city. And roughly, 70% of French people live in independent houses.
But except that it does not answer on the one hand, the question of housing in town, people who have a job in town, in the hospital, in bars, restaurants, etc. the popular circles that we saw working in the service during the pandemic. And then, it does not respond to the most disadvantaged, for whom the question is not at all to buy a home. These very disadvantaged people need affordable housing in decent conditions and in acceptable ecological conditions.
So there was an attempt to change direction a bit in 2017. Obviously, that didn’t necessarily pay off. And in addition, at the same time, we are in the debate on urban sprawl. We can clearly see that the French, since the pandemic, are several hundred thousand to have left the big cities.
The movement, currently, is not to go and live in Île de France. Paris is losing perhaps 10,000 inhabitants a year, and probably a few tens of thousands over the past two years. The movement is to go and live, either next to the city, or along the railway lines, and to try to reach the metropolis regularly. This is what is being put in place.
But we can see that the prices, in particular in Paris, are not increasing, but not really falling, that this question therefore concerns the middle classes, the upper middle classes in the big cities who are looking for housing and for whom, in Indeed, the repayment of a loan or the investment is huge in the share of their budget.
And on the other side, there is also the question of social housing: not enough housing built, budget cuts in HLM offices, which will not help with the maintenance of the existing and then with the investment in new construction. So, we understand that this housing problem concerns a broad spectrum of France today?
Yes, including because people, for example, in social housing, when the children leave, they don’t want to move, it’s their home, it’s their neighborhood, they have their neighbors , etc So you rent an apartment, you have three children, you find more than two, how do you do it? You don’t really want to leave…
That’s why one of the objectives was to get people to buy apartments in social housing, to create financing, by selling a certain number of apartments, but that didn’t work very well. It’s an extremely complicated problem but we can’t manage to have a real debate.
In my opinion, there are two things that seem essential to me. The first, with this pandemic, is that we have seen that care and service people generally live very far from their place of work. These must be given priority in social housing, alongside their jobs.
The second thing is the big issue, it is the densification of the peri-urban. We have to block the taking of agricultural land, it’s central, and at the same time, we don’t really want to live up high, and we can’t redensify the city any further, the city needs us to put trees, gardens and water.
We can densify the peri-urban area and structure it through more collective transport, etc. We can multiply the houses, reduce the gardens, create wealth. We say to the person who has for example 2000 square meters: we buy back 1000 square meters from you for 150,000 euros. She then has a garden twice as small, but she has recovered 150,000 euros. We must move towards the densification of the peri-urban as a social project, particularly in Île de France, and in the Bouches-du-Rhône.