“Resolving the housing crisis means restoring purchasing power to the French”

2023-05-10 14:30:13

Ahen throughout the debates on pensions, Emmanuel Macron has not listened to Parliament, nor the inter-union, nor the street, nor the opinion of three quarters of French men and women, he asks us today to hear it. The President presented a classic triptych based on “work, justice and purchasing power”. And he says he wants to put this purchasing power at the heart of his priorities. I sincerely wish I could believe it.

Read the decryption: Article reserved for our subscribers Housing: at the roots of a crisis that the government is slow to tackle

However, I note that the president remains silent on one subject: housing. However, it is the first item of household expenditure. Emmamuel Macron asks to make the effort to work two more years – and what an effort! But has he taken the measure of the one that the French and the French consent each month to “simply” pay their rent or repay their mortgage?

In our country, housing is very expensive. Households devote an average of 28% of their expenses to it, a proportion that can even reach 45% for the most modest among them, thus forcing them to ensure their daily lives with a living allowance that is dwindling. To deprive oneself of the essential. To give up treatment.

There is an urgent need to act for housing

In this area, the action of the Head of State remains marked by the breakage of personalized housing aid (APL). After the fall of 5 euros per month in the summer of 2017, the reduction in the solidarity rent and the abolition of the APL accession have finished setting the tone! Two decisions that have hit hard the most fragile of our fellow citizens. They never saw the slightest measure of social justice that these reforms should have been accompanied by.

It is the very model of “French-style social housing” that has been weakened, when 70% of French women and men can claim it. Six years later, and despite the mobilization of local elected officials, social landlords and real estate developers, the housing sector finds itself almost at a standstill. Do you regret a lack of consensus on pension reform? After chairing with Serge Contat, Managing Director of Emmaus Habitat, a working group of the National Council for Refoundation (CNR), I can assure you that one subject does indeed make everyone agree: the urgency to act for housing!

Read the testimonials: Article reserved for our subscribers Housing crisis: “After several months of research, we ended up accepting a two-room apartment without light and extremely noisy”

Since November 2022, within the very tight deadlines set by the executive, all housing stakeholders – associations, developers, landlords, etc. – mobilized in a constructive and collegial spirit to formulate courses of action. At the end of February, the leaders of the working groups – led by Véronique Bédague, Chairman and CEO of Nexity, and Christophe Robert, CEO of the Abbé Pierre Foundation – sent Olivier Klein, Minister of Housing, a series of immediately operational proposals .

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