It is a short text, whose stated objective is to put housing back on the market, in a context of acute crisis, while many French people are struggling to find housing since the sudden increase in interest rates in 2022. The bill “to develop the supply of affordable housing”, which has just been transmitted to the Council of State and must be presented to the Council of Ministers at the beginning of May, nevertheless provokes distrust among housing stakeholders and among certain elected. Because the text carried by the new delegate minister responsible for housing, Guillaume Kasbarian, plans to fundamentally reform social housing, where 5.6 million households live, and criticizes, in passing, those who would benefit unduly from it.
One of the flagship measures consists of revisiting the emblematic solidarity and urban renewal law (SRU), which obliges municipalities in urban areas to offer a minimum rate of social housing (20% or 25%), with the aim of promoting Diversity. The idea of the reform came from Gabriel Attal, upon his arrival at Matignon. He gave instructions to relax the constraint for municipalities which do not meet their objective, by allowing them to include intermediate rental housing, allocated to the “upper” middle classes, in their compulsory quota of social housing.
However, as evidenced by Antoine Homé, mayor (Socialist Party) of Wittenheim (Haut-Rhin), “at no time has the Association of Mayors of France requested that intermediate housing be taken into account in the social housing quota”. Faced with the bronca of the HLM world and many elected officials, and following the reservations expressed by former housing ministers, such as Benoist Apparu or Julien Denormandie, the government has however provided some safeguards. Only the “municipalities which have already reached a certain level of social housing” will thus be able to integrate intermediate housing into their “SRU quota”, specifies a document from the Ministry of Housing summarizing the bill, including The world got a copy.
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In addition, the objective set for cities to achieve 20% or 25% social housing ultimately remains in force: it is the path to achieving this which becomes less restrictive. The rule today is that municipalities falling behind in their HLM production are assigned, every three years, production objectives to catch up. If they do not respect them, they can be declared “deficient” and face heavy fines. However, the bill will, according to information from the Worldallow deficit municipalities to achieve up to a quarter of this “catch-up” by building intermediate rental housing. “Symbolically, the objective has not changed, but this reform creates an escape route for municipalities which are reluctant to produce social housing, since they will no longer be sanctioned as they are currently”analyzes a member of the National Housing Council, the body before which the Minister of Housing presented his text, Monday April 15.
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