The Parisian who walks with his nose to the wind, at nightfall, in the 8e district may be surprised to sometimes find no lit windows. In this chic neighborhood, luxury real estate agencies like to target foreign buyers looking for a pied-à-terre, for a few days a year spent in the capital. According to an advisor from the Belles residences de France agency, “there is, in the area of Place François-Iervery beautiful buildings closed for twenty years”. This district “lost almost half of its inhabitants in fifty years”underlined the mayor of 8eJeanne d’Hauteserre, during a Paris Council meeting on October 5, deploring the existence of buildings “desperately empty”.
To quantify this phenomenon, the City of Paris turned to the Parisian Urban Planning Workshop (APUR), which issued a report on Tuesday, December 5 “which concerns us a lot”, recognizes Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy mayor of Paris. The study reports, over the recent period, an explosion in the number of unoccupied homes: in 2020, they represented 19% of homes in Paris (262,000 homes), compared to 14% in 2011 (191,000 homes). A development which results in a drop in the Parisian population, the capital having lost an average of 11,500 inhabitants each year over this period, while it gained nearly 14,000 per year between 2006 and 2011.
This term “unoccupied” however encompasses different types of housing, which have the common point of not being main residences: vacant housing, secondary residences and occasional housing, used for professional reasons – the latter two categories being able to house occupants from time to time.
“Very unequal” distribution of second homes
It is the curve of these second and occasional residences which has skyrocketed in recent years, their share increasing from 3% in the 1970s, to less than 7% in 2011 then to 10% in 2020 (i.e. 134,000 housing units) . A raise “partly linked to the increase in undeclared furnished tourist rentals”, says the APUR. The latter identified, in February 2023, 55,000 advertisements on the Airbnb site alone and estimates that nearly 90,000 accommodations are used in Paris for tourist rentals, with a very high fraud rate. The City of Paris estimates that around 25,000 Parisian apartments are diverted from their use as primary residences, to be rented on short-term platforms, throughout the year.
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