Since the beginning of the year, construction of new collective housing has continued to decline. Sales of single-detached homes fell by more than 30% last year. Conversely, in large cities, selling prices are still on an upward slope. As a result, half of those under 25 believe that they will never have the means to buy real estate. It seems a long way from the “France of landlords”, a slogan successively defended by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing then by Nicolas Sarkozy: the time has come for resignation for the French in search of housing.
In terms of social housing, the situation is no better. The government had set a target of 250,000 new constructions for the years 2021 and 2022. Only a little over 170,000 have been built. At the same time, France continues to accumulate sad records: 330,000 people homeless, 2.4 million households waiting for public housing and 4.1 million people with poor housing in 2022. Fall in sales, scarcity of land, inflation in construction costs, drastic reduction in the supply of credit : in reality, all the components of the real estate crisis are there.
Immobilism and negative discourse
A crisis which is only in its infancy and which calls for a strong reaction from our leaders. Unfortunately, the few measures presented on June 5 by the government are closer to hiding poverty than major works. The executive pleads budgetary rigor to plan zero-rate loans or to ratify the end of the Pinel system and its tax advantages. If the control of public spending is essential, the argument is not understandable from a president who multiplies gift vouchers in all other areas, and who penalizes an activity whose failure could ultimately be very expensive, no not only economically but also socially. How can we ignore the considerable number of companies and employees who work in this sector, and thus contribute to the GDP… and therefore to the tax revenues of the State?
This government immobility has already been recorded when the Prime Minister admitted not knowing any “magic measure” to help the real estate market. However, there are effective levers to improve both supply and demand. It is still necessary to have the political will to activate them. The example of credit access conditions for households wishing to become homeowners is typical. The calculation of the debt ceiling has been suddenly reduced without taking into account personal situations which are often not limited to simple income. And why not allow a flat tax readable and simple, like what has been put in place for securities? Moreover, the framework for the energy performance diagnosis certainly meets an absolute requirement, but due to the brutality of its implementation, it gradually paralyzes the supply of housing and dries up the rental market a little more.
But, beyond the adoption of concrete measures, it is also the incessant negative discourse on housing that must end. Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron’s speeches on real estate have spoken of “annuity”. Economic nonsense. Its successive governments have continued to weaken the foundations of the sector by nourishing stereotypes from another era. As early as 2018, the transformation of the solidarity tax on wealth into a tax on real estate wealth sent a disastrous message. Investors in real estate are therefore assimilated to rentiers and no longer to players whose activity is beneficial to the economy. In the same way, the Climate and Resilience Law and its objective of zero net artificialisation by 2050 have tarnished the image of the builder mayors, forgetting the considerable achievements, implemented in our cities in terms of sustainable development, including included in buildings.
Finally, real estate is the hope of passing on a heritage to one’s children after a lifetime of work. This existential and affective dimension, so anchored in the minds of millions of French people, is ignored in Paris. One more distance.