Esavings on APL, social housing at half mast… in its annual report on poor housing, the Abbé-Pierre Foundation (FAP) pinpointed the results of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term, “not up to the challenge” in his eyes .
On Wednesday, the President of the Republic, not yet officially a candidate for re-election, will intervene on video during the day of presentation of the report in Paris, while several left-wing candidates in the presidential election – Anne Hidalgo, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Fabien Roussel, Christiane Taubira – will speak in the afternoon.
If the foundation denounces a “blindness of political leaders” in general on the question of housing, it is towards the outgoing government that it is the most scathing in its voluminous and exhaustive report, largely devoted to the results of the five-year term. “In general, it appears that housing has never been a priority for the executive during this mandate,” she denounces.
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The APL reform targeted by the FAP
However, the Abbé-Pierre Foundation welcomes the efforts to bring homeless people back into housing and to improve the energy renovation of buildings. But not enough to compensate for the erosion of the creation of social housing or “the refusal of a redistributive fiscal policy”. In the viewfinder of the FAP, the reform of housing aid (APL), now calculated according to recent income and no longer those dating back two years earlier.
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“Hardly debatable in principle […] this reform mainly results in losers”, judges the FAP, with 1.1 billion euros in savings made by the State in 2021. The subject of APLs has been politically sensitive since the outcry aroused, in 2018, by the announcement of their reduction of 5 euros. The foundation proposes to revalue the APL, and to articulate them with the social minima, which it demands that they be increased to 50% of the median income (900 euros per month) and open to 18-25 year olds.
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Also denounced, the decline in the number of social housing units authorized each year continues during the five-year term until a rebound in 2021: 104,800, significantly less than the annual 150,000 claimed by the foundation. At the Élysée, it is retorted that since 2017, more social housing has been authorized than during the previous five-year period, between 2012 and 2016 (2.2 million against 2.1). On Wednesday, the president should also defend the results of his policy to fight against poverty.
The number of homeless people has doubled since 2012
The FAP is concerned about “heavy trends of a housing crisis” to come in the coming years: “uncontrolled increase in the price of housing” “degraded” functioning of public services which harms the most fragile… Young people, in the he inability to leave the family home, the middle classes, “caught between the evolution of housing prices and the stagnation of their incomes”, and the working classes, increasingly remote from city centers, are the main victims of these developments.
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The foundation counted 300,000 homeless people, twice as many as in 2012, 4.1 million poorly housed, and more than 22,000 people living in an informal living environment (squat, slum, etc.). Against this, it draws a battery of proposals: to curb the rise in prices, it proposes a stricter and broader framework for rents, a universal guarantee, a surcharge on “abusive” rents and the most expensive real estate transactions, and a better regulation of seasonal rentals.
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For disadvantaged people, it calls for more control and sanctions, the end of power cuts in main residences and more aid for the energy renovation of buildings. And, to reduce the “gap between landlords and tenants”, promote solidarity land, allowing disadvantaged households to become landlords by paying their rent, and increase inheritance rights. The FAP estimates the cost of these measures at an additional 10 billion euros per year. According to her, this would represent a return to the situation of 2012, when 2% of GDP was devoted to housing (against 1.63% in 2020).