2023-12-04 01:01:09
In a few figures, gathered in a report published Monday December 4, the NGO Oxfam France highlights the determining role played by housing in a life course. First observation, it constitutes the main expenditure item for the French, at 23% of their gross income, compared to only 9.5% in 1960. Behind this average, however, lie very strong disparities, since the 25% of households with the highest Poor people spend 32% of their income on housing, compared to only 14.1% for the wealthiest 25%.
“In other words, the cost of housing is more than twice as high for the poorest 25% as for the wealthiest 25%”, notes the NGO, which highlights the progressive disconnection of real estate prices, which soared by 125.6% between 2001 and 2020, with the disposable income of the French, which only increased by 29%. In twenty years, property prices have therefore increased four times faster than gross household income.
If, on the rental price side, the curve is less steep, these, social and private housing combined, also increased more quickly, by 36.5% over the same period.
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Figures from INSEE data, “which taken end to end give the measure of the systemic dimension of the question of inequalities linked to housing”says Cécile Duflot, general director of Oxfam France and former minister of housing under the mandate of François Hollande. “Housing is therefore the most important fuel of inequalitiesshe adds. These inequalities are reproduced and amplified from generation to generation, hence the dizzying situation in which we find ourselves, with half of the rental housing now belonging to 3.5% of the French population. Which further fuels the rent phenomenon. »
« Privatisation »
In this context, the NGO deplores the progressive disengagement of the State “and its harmful effects on inequalities in access to housing”, taking as an example the drop in the production of social housing (126,000 financed in 2016 compared to 96,000 in 2022). Or the evolution of the nature of financial support from the State, previously “massively focused on construction”but which today takes the form of support for the most precarious, through personal housing assistance, “planned down in recent years”.
For Oxfam, this disengagement opened the way to the private sector and financial investors, a process which “transforms housing into a financial product, and results in above all “financial” management of housing”, with the main determinant being yield forecasts based on rental flows and resale capital gains.
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