ReportageOwning a house with a garden is the aspiration of many French people, reinforced by the confinements. But to achieve this and find affordable land, first-time buyers must move away and use their car more.
Little Lyana’s inflatable unicorn castle and trampoline have already been ordered, and the rack-barbecue scheduled for the end of the year. “It’s going to be an amusement park”jokes Alisson Guichard, showing their future “cocoon”, impatient to hear the sound of the diggers, within a week. For the time being, 571 square meters of grassy plot fringed by the fields of La Chapelle-d’Aligné, a village of 1,700 inhabitants in the Sarthe, mounds of rubble and the first two dwellings that have emerged from the ground. Soon: an 85 m² single-storey house, hipped roof, two bedrooms, telecommuting space, free-standing bathtub, wooden terrace, in what will become the Lilas housing estate. Alisson Guichard already takes care of the smallest detail, site manager with purple capsule nails: she has reproduced her plans in 3D, created an Instagram account…
To build is a “accomplishment” for this 34-year-old single mother. Apartment confinement was a trigger. Alisson would have preferred to find land closer to Angers, where she works as an advisor to the mutual insurance company MAIF. But his budget “didn’t pass” : land prices are rising around metropolitan areas, forcing first-time buyers to move back.
Without his two days of telework, Alisson would not have been able to push his research to La Chapelle, forty-five minutes from Angers. His sister lived there and their mother has just taken a rental there. At 47 euros per square meter of land, his dream was here within reach. In the meantime, she lives with her sister. Rising fuel prices oblige, she opted for the train, which she takes in Sablé-sur-Sarthe.
Owning a house: Alisson Guichard thus pursues the residential ideal of a large majority of French people, which the confinements have only accentuated, after decades of home ownership policies and stone aid.
Who says house often says pavilion on the periphery, in these intermediate suburbs neither frankly urban nor quite rural, less expensive. A model desired as much as criticized, for the disillusions generated: it would encourage withdrawal, is greedy in land, hard to heat, imposes polluting mobility, and – with the concerted development zones (ZAC) – empties the hearts of the city… From “HLM flat”, according to the words of certain first-time buyers of residential housing estates interviewed by the sociologist at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) Anne Lambert.
“The Holy Grail of a lifetime”
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