It is not only in Nanterre, France, that social housing lags behind the requirements.
Foto: Imago Images/IP3press
The Abbé Pierre Foundation’s latest report on the housing situation in France was published last Wednesday. This draws an extremely critical balance of housing policy during President Emmanuel Macron’s tenure. Immediately after taking office, he sent a negative signal in this area: Macron reduced the housing benefit, to which only the poorest families are entitled anyway, by a flat rate of five euros a month.
For the individual affected, this is not much, while it adds up to hundreds of millions of euros for the household, Macron calculated at the time. By his own admission, he has often regretted this decision, but it remains a big negative on his balance sheet and has certainly contributed much to his reputation among left-leaning Frenchmen as a “president of the rich”. All the more so because in 2017 he quickly abolished the ISF »wealth tax« that left-wing President François Mitterrand introduced in his first year in office in 1981.
According to the report now presented by the Abbé Pierre Foundation, twelve million people, around one in five French people, live in unsatisfactory or precarious housing conditions. Of these, four million have “poor and actually unacceptable” housing or no accommodation at all and live in emergency centers or on the streets. The number of homeless is estimated at 300,000 today, doubling in the last ten years.
In order to stop the rapid rise in rents, President Macron announced a “supply shock” at the beginning of his term in office, but that didn’t materialize – speculation on the housing market continues. According to the Foundation’s calculations, French families’ home spending has increased by 150 percent over the past 20 years.
The report attributes this development to the fact that the housing problem was not a priority for the current government, like for its predecessors: there is a lack of direction and the political will to put a decisive end to the housing crisis. As a result, the report says the number of families who have been waiting for social housing, most of whom have been waiting for many years, has risen from 1.9 million in 2017 to 2.2 million today.
That’s no wonder, because government spending on social housing has steadily declined, from 1.82 percent of gross domestic product in 2017 to 1.63 percent in 2020. The sector has repeatedly had to help when other gaps in the state budget have to be filled Plug. Accordingly, no more social housing is being built – as it would be necessary – but less and less. In 2016 there were still 124,000 and last year only 95,000.
Since 2000, the law on urban solidarity SRU has stipulated that all cities and communes in France with more than 3,500 inhabitants are obliged to provide as many new social housing units for building permits that their share within the commune is at least 20 percent.
But while this proportion is often 40 or even 60 percent in Paris suburbs that have long been governed by the left, in 550 municipalities these targets are far from being achieved. The mayors often use the excuse that there are no suitable plots of land available. Others, particularly on the Côte d’Azur and in other desirable residential areas, prefer to build luxury homes and prefer to pay from the city treasury the fine provided by law for non-compliance with the quota.
In order to make living space affordable again and to create a sufficient number of new ones, the Abbé Pierre Foundation is demanding that the government cap rents as well as decidedly more money and accompanying political measures for social housing construction.
The Abbé Pierre Foundation continues the work of the Capuchin monk who died in 2007 and whose name it bears. He came from a wealthy manufacturing family, but dedicated his life to the poorest and divided his inheritance among them. During the occupation he was active in the Résistance, where he forged papers to enable Jews and other persecuted people to flee abroad. After the war he founded the aid organization Emmaüs, which primarily takes care of the homeless.
In the particularly harsh winter of 1953/54, he drew attention to their fate in a stirring radio speech, which triggered a wave of willingness to help among the population and the pressure from which prompted the government to launch a multi-billion dollar program for the construction of social housing. In addition to its day-to-day work helping the homeless, the Foundation monitors the situation on the housing market and regularly publishes its analyzes of the housing situation in France.