LHousing policies combine negative results: the cost of housing has increased from 20% to more than 30% income of the majority of tenants and first-time buyers, while waiting times for social housing are lengthening in most metropolises.
On the other hand, many areas are experiencing increasing vacancy and are struggling to revitalize their city centers. Evaluations of these policies show that these mediocre results are in reality not surprising: taxes favor everything except affordable housing, and shortages are aggravated by metropolisation.
Thus, tourist rentals and land retention are taxed less even though they are more profitable and professional premises bring in more money for local authorities than welcoming new residents. On the demand side, metropolisation always attracts more students and jobs, which aggravates housing shortages in these areas and vacancies elsewhere.
Artificialization of soils
More recently, ecological issues have added another problem: although very insufficient, construction contributes to the artificialization of land and represents more than a quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.industry. Faced with these challenges, various players are proposing to reduce construction, reduce surface areas or abandon “the dream of the individual house”. These perspectives remain long-term objectives to this day, but their social impacts could be out of all proportion to what is already known.
Indeed, a sharp reduction in housing construction without increasing the supply of affordable housing would further aggravate the constrained spending of the majority of the population, as well as the health impacts of poor housing and longer commutes. Furthermore, increasing the densification of metropolises could certainly limit the artificialization of land, but the carbon impact per square meter would be 20% higherwhile aggravating the growing “heat islands”, while most low- and middle-income households want more surface and less than noise.
On the other hand, the wealthiest would not be affected by these restrictions, as they already have an individual house. main and or secondary, but they would benefit from an unprecedented increase in their already growing assets.
However, it is possible to spread affordable housing while limiting its ecological footprint, but on condition of moving from a policy centered on the total number of housing units and the rent to a policy aimed at increasing affordable primary residences and reducing the overdemand in tense areas. But for this to happen, the transformations must be major, well beyond the interesting but insufficient proposals put forward by a growing number of local elected officials.
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