The numbers speak for themselves. The Social Union for Housing (USH), the representative organization of the HLM sector, published at the beginning of October the results of a study commissioned from the HTC firm on the lack of housing in France.
The results are on the rise: according to this, 518,000 housing units should be built or put back on the market per year by 2040 in order to be able to meet the future needs of the population. An amount much higher than that estimated by the Court of Auditors several months ago, which then anticipated a need for 370,000 housing units per year.
To arrive at this high total, USH cites several factors. The most important remains that of the fight against poor housing, a long-ignored problem, which alone represents a need for 122,000 new housing units per year. The loosening of households, that is to say the average drop in the number of people per household, particularly linked to the aging of the population, more separations or later life as a couple among young people, also accounts for 116,000 new housing needed per year.
Without forgetting the replacement of 33,000 homes that consume too much energy which will have to leave the housing stock, 74,000 new homes due to positive migration in the years to come, or even 100,000 homes to meet the continued demand for second homes. For comparison, the study recalls that there were 430,000 new homes authorized on average per year between 2017 and 2022. We will therefore still have to do more to avoid worsening the real estate crisis.
A specific need for social housing
If the Social Union for Housing is concerned about the lack of housing in general, the study wishes to place particular emphasis on the insufficiency of social housing that France will face in the years to come. Thus, among the 518,000 housing units missing per year, the USH estimates that 198,000 of them must be social housing, or 38% of the overall need. In recent years, France was very far from the mark, with less than 100,000 authorizations per year in 2021 and 2022. This year, this number should even be down, the Minister responsible for Housing Patrice Vergriete having announced that only 85 000 new social housing units will be authorized in 2023.
Enough to make the new minister himself say that this amount was “not enough” to resolve the crisis. An awareness even if for the USH, which opens its HLM congress this Tuesday, October 3 in Nantes, the government is still far from solving this major problem.
Emmanuelle Cosse, president of the USH, estimated in a press release published on September 27 that the finance bill presented by the executive was “disconnected from the problem posed today by the housing crisis”. The former Minister of Housing under François Hollande regretted “a lack of ambition” of which “Hlm tenants and low-income households waiting for housing will be the first victims”. While Patrice Vergriete will be invited to speak at the closing of the USH congress, the ball now seems in the government’s court to provide solutions to a crisis which only seems to be getting worse.