The Minister of Housing Patrice Vergriete presented on Tuesday his plan to combat degraded housing, which affects a million people in France, who wants to facilitate upstream work and accelerate evictions in the most difficult co-ownerships.
The measures announced by Mr. Vergriete at the end of the council of ministers are brought together in a bill for the acceleration and simplification of the renovation of degraded housing, included on the agenda of the National Assembly for the week of January 22. This text follows the Co-ownership Initiatives plan, launched in 2018, which mobilized nearly a billion euros to reclassify 88,000 homes.
We see today that the measures on which this plan is based are much too long: five to ten years for co-ownership recovery plans, more than twenty years sometimes for the largest co-ownerships, declared the minister.
This text should therefore make it possible to facilitate expropriations when necessary, but also to simplify judicial and administrative procedures (…) to speed up work on degraded co-ownerships, he indicated. The longer we wait to intervene on a co-ownership in difficulty, the worse it is. It’s a bit like unpaid rent, you have to react very, very quicklysaid the minister.
Work ahead of definitive deterioration
Concretely, the text consulted by AFP provides for the creation of a new procedure for expropriation of owners of housing affected by a police order (stopping danger or unsanitary conditions, editor’s note). He also plans work ahead of definitive deterioration making it possible to anticipate the handling of difficulties by several years and also facilitates the right of pre-emption of communities to fight against the arrival of slumlords.
It also creates a collective loan for co-owners to facilitate their access to credit for work. The bill finally provides for measures to accelerate the construction of housing in extended areas as part of so-called operations of national interest.
The measures are based on a report submitted at the end of October by the mayors of Saint-Denis Mathieu Hanotin (PS) and Mulhouse Michle Lutz (LR). According to official estimates, 400,000 to 420,000 housing units in the private stock are considered potentially unsanitary, plus 100,000 others overseas.
The Alur law of 2014 and the Elan law of 2018 had already strengthened certain provisions against indigenous housing by, for example, prohibiting slumlords already convicted from being able to buy back rental property or by providing for confiscation of their property.
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