The Order of Chartered Surveyors is making its contribution to solving the housing crisis

The event, which brought together leading figures from the public and private sectors, provided an opportunity to review the consequences of this crisis and propose solutions to respond to it collectively.

For Séverine Vernet, President of the Higher Council of the Order of Chartered Surveyors: "The raw material for housing is land. There is no development project, construction project, or renovation project that doesn't involve a surveyor. That's why we wanted to bring the industry together today to discuss ways to overcome the crisis."

A combination of crises and an observation shared by the entire sector

From the FFB (French Building Federation) to the USH (Social Union for Housing), including the FNAIM (National Real Estate Federation), the FPI (Federation of Real Estate Developers) and the ANIL (National Agency for Housing Information), the reasons for this crisis are known and shared: structural imbalance between supply and demand, rising cost of raw materials, overlapping regulations, particularly environmental regulations, financial obstacles for those seeking to access the property, suffocation of the rental market, saturation of the social housing stock... The sector also denounces government inaction and legislative and regulatory instability: "Faced with the urgency to act, we believe that the issue is not being tackled head-on by the public authorities. Housing is a basic necessity: after eating, you have to find a place to live!" points out Séverine Vernet.

The Order of Chartered Surveyors is contributing its stone to the building for a global and sustainable exit from the crisis

After emphasizing the need to reposition land as the basis of any housing policy, Séverine Vernet presented the various measures taken by the profession to emerge from the crisis.

The President of the Higher Council of the Order of Chartered Surveyors first calls for making Zero Net Artificialization (ZAN) a lever for production rather than a constraint: "The Senate bill and the National Assembly bill on land sobriety revisit the methods for implementing ZAN, but not the initial objective. We have been working on the subject for more than three years and we have identified pragmatic measures that rely on existing tools and procedures, to be adapted or created." The chartered surveyors thus put forward 12 proposals to reconcile the consideration of land sobriety objectives with the need to produce more housing. The profession calls for a shift from a plot-based approach to a larger scale by working on the heart of blocks and pooling environmental compensation through joint urban and rural land restructuring. Surveyors are also banking on gentle densification and are proposing changes to local urban planning schemes (PLUs) to accelerate the raising of buildings and to relax majority rules in subdivision specifications to rethink the existing fabric of peri-urban areas. "However, we must be careful to listen to our fellow citizens and be educational to ensure these projects are well accepted," warns Séverine Vernet.

At the same time, the profession is interested in commercial areas that are currently abandoned: "City entrances offer opportunities to recycle land with considerable resources, especially since they are often already connected to public transport. With the transformation of commerce and the acceleration of the phenomenon, it will not be a question of carrying out operations piecemeal but of favoring a global and coherent development that favors functional diversity and is part of the dynamics of the territory."

The Order of Chartered Surveyors also announced the launch of a cross-cutting Habitat-Housing mission to develop a structured, documented, and proactive approach to all the levers for exiting the crisis. "There are issues in particular that are beyond our control but impact us, such as the processing times that are currently hampering housing projects," says Séverine Vernet.