The Minister of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion Christophe Béchu on Tuesday called for a law to decentralize housing policy for the first half of 2024.
The objective is to achieve in the first half of 2024 a law on the decentralization of housing and regulatory modifications, affirmed the minister before the social landlords gathered at the Nantes congress.
Wanted by Emmanuel Macron and promoted by the Minister responsible for Housing Patrice Vergriete, the decentralization of housing policy aims to grant more responsibilities to communities.
Christophe Bchu has promised consultations which will start now to carry out ambitious decentralization, simpler, adapted to the territories and where the transfer of skills corresponds to an adequate transfer of financing.
He said he was in favor of the approval decision, that is to say the authorizations to create new social housing, being taken by the communities.
The minister also called for a decentralization of aid for stone, that is to say construction. The communities would be solely responsible for the financial programming of social housing, he explained.
Communities could also adjust rents marginally and would freely define the level of subsidies allocated to different projects, Christophe Bchu also outlined.
We can only note the limits of a uniform and unsuitable national policy. If any area requires decentralization, it is housing policy, he justified.
The production of new social housing has been gradually increasing since 2016.
In 2023, it should be less than 85,000 approvals, according to government projections, a drop compared to the 96,000 in 2022.
According to a study commissioned by the Social Union for Housing (USH, confederation of landlords), 198,000 new social housing units should be created per year, to respond to major demographic trends and reduce poor housing.
Social landlords explain this by the difficulties of real estate developers, who produce part of the social housing in their operations, and denounce the government’s budgetary savings to their detriment.