Aubervilliers reaches out to Saint-Dizier to attract real estate developers

This agreement, at the initiative of Grand Paris Aménagement, a group of public developers in Ile-de-France, aims to promote the construction of new housing in Saint-Dizier, a town of 23.000 inhabitants, which is suffering from a double decline economic and demographic.

Between low sales prices, uncertainty over the presence of buyers and the crisis in the construction market, certain medium-sized towns are attracting less and less developers.

The idea consists of twinning two sites: one in Aubervilliers, a town of 90.000 inhabitants whose proximity to Paris strongly attracts developers, and the other in Saint-Dizier, sub-prefecture of a rural department.

The first is to accommodate 88 new housing units in the “Coeur de Fort” district and the second, 50 in the city center.

In Saint-Dizier, the closure of two colleges effectively freed up 40.000 m2 of land in the center and the town has since struggled to attract developers.

“We are the archetype of these hundreds of medium-sized towns which have been hit by deindustrialization,” explains its mayor Quentin Brière (LR) to AFP.

The partnership consists of launching a joint consultation with the developers and forcing the latter to respond on the two lots.

The selected developer will first have to submit a building permit in Saint-Dizier before being able to build in Aubervilliers. To build in Aubervilliers, it will therefore necessarily be necessary to build in Saint-Dizier.

“The operator will not lose money by going to Saint-Dizier. Simply, the risk is higher, so we will reward this risk by giving him the right to build in Aubervilliers,” underlines Mr. Brière, for whom Aubervilliers “loses nothing in this approach but is clearly committed to territorial solidarity”.