The Social Union for Housing (USH), a confederation of social landlords, asked the government on Wednesday to refrain from reforming, as it intends, the SRU law establishing quotas for social housing in cities.
“It is with responsibility and seriousness that the HLM movement asks the government not to touch the SRU law,” declares the president of the USH, Emmanuelle Cosse, in a press release.
“The housing crisis that our country is going through today calls for other responses, other struggles than calling into question what works. The few mayors who knowingly stand outside the law by not assuming their responsibilities with regard to national cohesion certainly do not deserve such a gift,” continues the former minister.
Adopted in 2000, the SRU law, for Solidarity and Urban Renewal, imposes on cities a quota of 20 to 25% of social housing. But Prime Minister Gabriel Attal promised to reform it to include intermediate housing in the count, with rents and income ceilings higher than in social housing.
“There is no taboo in adjusting the SRU law”
The contours of the reform, which must be included in a bill “for housing for the middle classes” expected before the summer, have not been specified. “There is no taboo in adjusting the SRU law,” said Minister Delegate for Housing Guillaume Kasbarian in mid-March, recalling that it had already been modified several times.
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“We will always continue to have an objective of incentive, of objectification, of construction of social housing in the SRU law”, he however promised. “The SRU law has certainly undergone changes, always in the direction of fairer application and a renewed ambition for social diversity. Until now, no significant measure has come to call into question its scope, on the contrary,” retort the social landlords.
According to the USH, 2.6 million households are waiting for social housing, a record. Between 2020 and 2022, nearly two thirds of the municipalities affected by the SRU law did not meet their social housing production objectives, some, such as Nice, Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine) or Toulon, even being very far.
In February, right-wing mayors, including those of Nice, Reims, Aix-en-Provence and Nîmes, had asked, in an open letter to Guillaume Kasbarian, “to open a peaceful and without pretense debate on the subject of the law SRU”, described as an “insult to common sense”.
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