“Degraded housing”: compromise in Parliament to support co-ownerships in difficulty

A compromise was found on Thursday March 14 between senators and deputies on a consensual bill against “degraded housing”, with measures to support co-ownerships in difficulty and combat slumlords.

Unsurprisingly, the joint committee (CMP), which brings together parliamentarians from both chambers, reached an agreement paving the way for the final adoption of the text after a final vote in the National Assembly on March 19 then in the Senate on the 27th. .

“This text testifies to a real co-construction and our contributions have been confirmed. We found common ground on all the provisions,” said centrist senator Amel Gacquerre, rapporteur in the Senate.

To support degraded housing, numbering 1,5 million in France according to the executive, the bill provides for various mechanisms, in particular to facilitate the launch of work upstream, before definitive deterioration requires demolition.

The text thus provides for the creation of a new procedure for the expropriation of housing affected by a danger or unsanitary order.

It also creates a collective global loan to improve access to credit for co-owners, accompanied by a “public guarantee”. Despite persistent concerns about the financing of this guarantee, this flagship measure was maintained at the end of the work of the two chambers, confirmed Ms. Gacquerre.

Several mechanisms facilitating the work of mayors, introduced in the Senate, were also confirmed in the compromise text, such as the possibility for local elected officials to automatically carry out a structural diagnosis of buildings in degraded housing areas, including included in old city centers.

The bill, the first text defended in Parliament by the new Minister for Housing Guillaume Kasbarian, also contains a component of the fight against slumlords, strengthening criminal sanctions against these owners renting substandard accommodation.

According to the general opinion in Parliament, this text is nevertheless only the first stone of a much larger project to fight against the housing crisis. A new bill is announced for mid-June at first reading in the Senate and its examination promises to be much more eventful: already criticized on the left, it must notably review the Solidarity and Urban Renewal (SRU) law, which sets quotas of social housing in certain municipalities.