Sylvia Pinel, the French Minister for Housing, is seeking to promote social diversity within neighbourhoods by means of around twenty measures. The aim is to improve the distribution of social housing, while reforming the way it is allocated and the rent policy.
The Minister points out that some of the planned measures, which came out of an inter-ministerial committee meeting on 6 March, will be included in the "Equality and Citizenship" bill, which will be presented to Parliament this autumn and debated in the first half of 2016.
Ms Pinel is now urging social landlords to take action in the very short term, starting in May.
Building more social housing
By means of a ministerial instruction, the prefects will be encouraged to speed up the construction of social housing in areas that have been identified as lacking under the Solidarity and Urban Renewal Act. To achieve this, the prefects will have to make full use of the powers available to them, such as the right of pre-emption and the possibility of subrogating elected representatives to issue building permits.
As a reminder, the SRU law of December 2000 made it compulsory for municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants (or 1,500 in the Ile-de-France region) to build 20% social housing by the period 2011-2013. This rate has risen to 25% since 2014.
As it turns out, 218 municipalities have so far failed to meet the targets set under the SRU Act, and are therefore liable to be subject to a prefectoral decree of default. These municipalities are subject to penalties that have increased fivefold since 1 January 2015, up to a limit of 7.5% of their operating expenditure. In addition, the allocation of subsidies will be more selective and refocused on tense areas.
Appropriate rents
Prefects will ensure that rents for social housing are adapted to each situation, so that more low-income households are housed outside priority urban districts. Pending a law specifying this plan, social landlords will be encouraged to test this approach from May onwards.
Land transferred by the State in areas with a high social housing provision will have to be used for the construction of home-ownership housing or free and intermediate rental housing.
Legislative provisions will also be introduced to reinforce the SRU Act for municipalities with less than 30% PLAI housing in their total construction projects. In such cases, the regional prefect, rather than the departmental prefect (to avoid a convergence of interests), will be able to issue deficiency orders.
The Minister plans to provide specific funding to facilitate the purchase of private housing by social landlords with a view to renting them out to associations, which will use them to benefit the most disadvantaged.
Finally, inter-municipal bodies will be obliged to set up a partnership plan for demand management, in order to achieve an inter-municipal allocation policy for HLM housing.
