The President of the Republic recently acknowledged that there was a housing crisis. We should be satisfied with this, when all the experts have been saying it for years and the last five years have not made it possible to provide structural answers.
The lack of arbitration on social policies is becoming all the more unbearable as the actors have been tossed about successively, for more than a year, between the working groups on the programming of the Housing First policy, the national council of the refoundation then now, perhaps, in a conference of the parties.
The meeting to present the conclusions of the refoundation council, now set for June 5, has been postponed for a few weeks and we have no news of the second part of the Housing First plan, which must be announced for several months. Faced with constantly increasing needs (300.000 homeless people, 2,4 million applicants for social housing and more than 4 million poorly housed people), the time is no longer for wait-and-see, observation or organization of a new conference of the parties.
Because they can partly respond to this housing crisis, Integration Housing Actors, bringing together the association federations Fapil, Soliha, Unafo and Unhaj, quickly expect precise and multi-annual budgetary commitments on the production of housing in general, and on the production of integration housing in particular: very social housing, private park with social vocation, family pensions and reception residences, social residences, Habitat Jeunes… Without this, despite the good will of the actors, projects in the territories are on stand-by and do not see the light of day.
The sense of wait-and-see is found in other areas of public policy. After having mobilized for hours and hours of meetings of multiple actors, the solidarity pact also seems to be at a standstill. Even the publication of decrees seems subject to abnormally long delays: for example, while we are assured that everything is arbitrated, it has now been several months since the managers of social residences have been waiting for the exceptional aid promised to deal with their extremely tense economic situation. If the government can wait, this is no longer the case for managers.
This wait-and-see attitude does not create appeasement but, on the contrary, annoyance and anger. To respond to this, structural measures financed from 2023 are essential. For this, both an amending finance law for 2023 and the next finance law will have to budget for a proactive relaunch of the Housing First plan, giving full place to integration housing. We must produce more social housing and integration and give the actors the means to finance support for precarious groups, such as young workers, workers in 1st line, single-parent families and recipients of social minima.
