One in two Parisian tenants spends a third of their income on housing, the supply of which has decreased in 16 years.

The share of income dedicated to housing, called the effort rate, is considered excessive when it exceeds 35% or 40%, depending on the analysis models.

Single women are particularly exposed to an excessive effort rate: one in two allocates at least 42% of her income to the payment of her rent, compared to 39% for single-parent families and 38% for single men, according to the Insee study, carried out in partnership with the Paris Agglomeration Rent Observatory (Olap).

Young people also face high housing costs relative to their income: one in two tenants under 30 spends half of their income on rent.

These figures are calculated before deduction of housing benefits. Nationally, the rent-to-income ratio for tenants in the private rental sector was 26,5% in 2020, but this figure was calculated after deduction of housing benefits.

In Paris, 17% of tenants in the private sector receive housing assistance. Among them, eight out of ten households spend more than a third of their income on housing before deducting assistance, compared to just over a third of households after deduction.

Faced with the high level of rents in Paris, housing assistance is "considered as a way to alleviate the financial burden, and not as a supplement to income", emphasizes INSEE.

Rents are mainly driven by high property prices in Paris and a supply that remains insufficient to meet demand.

According to another study by the Paris Region Institute (IPR), the number of private rental properties in Paris decreased by 16.208 properties, or -3%, between 2006 and 2022.

"There is a problem in the hypercentre" of the region, "but if we look more broadly at the private rental stock, it is not in such bad condition," says Emmanuel Trouillard, housing studies officer at IPR, who co-wrote the analysis with Anne-Claire Davy.

At the regional level, the private rental supply increased by 15% between 2006 and 2022, particularly in the outer suburbs (+42% with 137.535 additional private rental units), but also in the inner suburbs (+23,7% with 112.258 additional units).

The IPR also notes that "the share of secondary and vacant housing has been rising sharply again" since 2012, reaching 11,2% of housing in the Ile-de-France region in 2022.

The decline in private rental supply in Paris is explained "by the deterioration of rental profitability" due to the "decoupling between rising property prices - which were uncorrelated with wages and supported by very low interest rates - and rents which increased, but could not keep up", according to Emmanuel Trouillard.

While real estate professionals regularly point to rent control as the cause of the decline in rental supply, he believes that this system is not the main factor in Paris.

To preserve profitability, investors have reportedly turned to the rest of the Ile-de-France region, where the rental supply is increasing according to the IPR, particularly in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.