The new Minister of Housing and Urban Renewal, Valérie Létard, assures us that she is indeed the one taking over the portfolio of the City and its programs in disadvantaged neighborhoods, by virtue of an allocation decree that has not yet been published.
The fact remains that the title of his ministry has not changed, while the sectors of disability and veterans have been given delegate ministers.
For Catherine Arenou, DVD mayor of Chanteloup-les-Vignes and vice-president of the Ville et Banlieue association, there is no question of making a judgment on the new minister's intentions.
Close to Jean-Louis Borloo, the father of urban renewal, Valérie Létard worked extensively on urban policy as an elected representative of Valenciennes.
"With Catherine Vautrin (former president of ANRU, the National Agency for Urban Renewal, editor's note), we are dealing with two personalities who have real know-how," observes Ms. Arenou.
However, during his general policy speech, the Prime Minister did not include any reference to the 1.580 so-called "priority urban policy" districts (QPV) and their more than 5,4 million inhabitants.
To cut short the criticism, the new minister will go to Lille on Monday to visit an integration project "relevant to the city's policy".
"We always imagined that the day when urban policy would disappear - and we hope it will disappear - it would be because we would no longer need it," observes Driss Ettazaoui, vice-president of Ville et Banlieue.
Except that today "the divides have never been so great between rural areas and neighborhoods, villages and our cities," he notes.
"Of course the quality of buildings is fundamental," underlines Agnès Bourgeais, DVG mayor of Rezé (Loire-Atlantique), in reference to urban renovation, "but our neighborhoods are not limited to a problem of concrete."
"Erasure dynamics"
"Forgetting the inhabitants of our working-class neighbourhoods means telling all these young people that they don't have a complete place in our society," adds Johanna Rolland (PS), president of France urbaine.
For Thomas Kirszbaum, associate researcher at Ceraps in Lille, the title "urban renovation" reflects "a reductive conception of urban policy, which now only works on one leg, that of the physical transformation of neighborhoods, forgetting to respond to the social problems of residents."
"Martine Aubry's bet to mobilize National Education, the Ministry of Employment, etc., assuming that we could do without a specific policy, has fizzled out," he analyzes.
"We structurally need a specific policy precisely because ordinary public policies are not doing their job," he continues, believing that priority neighborhoods "are no longer a priority except in name."
Far from being a "miss", the disappearance of a dedicated ministry is "a choice", observes sociologist Renaud Epstein, recalling that rurality has its place, with a delegate minister.
"This choice completes a dynamic of erasure of the urban policy that has been at work for ten years," he judges. The various "catch-up" programs associated with this policy, whether they are on education, living together, culture or economic development, "still exist", but according to him, it is necessary "to stop displaying it".
"The government is paralyzed by the pressure from the National Rally and now from the right, with a discourse that consists of saying that we are putting billions into the suburbs, implying for the 'Blacks and the Arabs', while France, supposedly peripheral, suffers," he analyses, estimating that the riots of 2023, the most important that France has known since 2005, "have not given rise to any announcement, except on order and security."
More generally, elected officials are questioning the sustainability of the 624 million euros of credits allocated in 2024 to urban policy, in a context of budgetary scarcity.
According to several people close to these files interviewed by AFP, the cuts could range from -14% to -25%, or even more. "Urban policies have completely disappeared for Michel Barnier, and they will disappear in the budget," one of them even assures.