the surprising turn of North America – L’Express

These phases do not coincide from one country to another. In France, while production is collapsing and rental tension is exacerbating, the temptation will be great to entrust more and more power to municipalities and intermunicipalities to regulate their rental markets. In the United Kingdom, the famous Section 21 of the Housing Act of 1988, which allows a tenant to be evicted without reason within two months, is about to be abolished. In Hong Kong, the government, which saw the madness of residential prices as one of the causes of the umbrella revolution, decided to get involved in the production of cheap housing, by controlling land prices.

The case of North America is rich in lessons for France. The continent has not built enough in recent years. Local elected officials, who feel the deleterious effects, are on the front line trying to reverse the phenomenon. The “Yimby” movement, acronym for yes in my backyardin opposition to the previous “Nimby”, not in my backyard (not in my garden), is in fashion, associations flourishing. In the land of individual houses, there is a race for densification. The city of Milwaukee (Wisconsin) has decided to liberalize its urban plan to go from 600,000 to 1 million inhabitants. In Portland, Oregon, permission to build up to four dwellings on the plot of a single-family home is granted automatically. Ditto in neighboring British Columbia, on the Canadian side, where the regional government has just voted for the same measure.

California, soon to be the fourth largest economy in the world, is a formidable laboratory for this new housing policy. The most populous state in the United States, 39 million inhabitants, has only built 118,000 housing units in 2022. But everything is changing, between redevelopment of commercial zones, buildability around train stations and residential densification. The biggest blow is the builder’s remedya legal mechanism that suspends the city’s planning power and automatically gives approval to any residential project from a developer, provided that it respects a quota of affordable housing.

Taxation is also involved. Ten years after its bankruptcy in 2013, the city of Detroit (Michigan), under the resolute action of Mike Duggan, re-elected twice, has regained some of its luster, demolishing no less than 25,000 devastated houses. But this combative mayor believes that he could have done much more if, after the great recession of 2008, tens of thousands of properties had not been bought for nothing by speculators, who are now sitting on significant reserves land. To stem this predation, the mayor will submit to a referendum, next February, a significant increase in taxes on bare land and, in exchange, a reduction in taxes on built properties.

The archaism of local tax systems is often pointed out across the Atlantic as the cause of the lack of dynamism in the residential market. Proposition 13, adopted in 1978 by California voters, is a good example. It aimed to protect owners with modest incomes from too high an increase in property taxes, by capping them and freezing the base which is only revalued at the time of a transaction. This rule completely froze the market.

Certain political groups no longer hesitate to make housing their battleground. This is the case of the Canadian Conservative Party which, after being shunned by young people, is returning with the odor of sanctity thanks to its positions favorable to new construction. For its part, the White House has just unveiled a $35 billion plan to finance residential construction or conversion projects close to public transportation at a 5% interest rate. A historic turning point.

Robin Rivaton is Managing Director of Stonal and member of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol).