Faced with the exodus of inhabitants, the town hall of Paris is accelerating

Between 2014 and 2020, 12.400 fewer inhabitants per year: "Parisians are increasingly numerous to move", and these departures "are notably motivated by the high cost of housing" and "the reduced supply of large housing for families", says INSEE in a report published at the end of December.

"The situation would be much more difficult without our policy", replies to AFP Ian Brossat, the communist deputy of the mayor (PS) Anne Hidalgo, for whom housing remains an "absolute priority".

Rent control: "tighten the screw"

New for the start of the school year, the city can control the rent controls in force since July 2019 in the capital in place of the prefect.

Concretely, the town hall has launched a platform where tenants can report too high a rent, then instructed by the town hall which will put the landlord on notice so that he reduces the rent and returns the overpayments. Without compliance, the town hall may impose a fine.

But for the elected LR Jean-Baptiste Olivier, this strengthening of controls, added to the increase in the property tax and the progressive ban on renting thermal colanders, provided for by law, risks creating a "perverse effect" with "fewer homes on the market".

Anti-Airbnb measures: objective achieved

Since January 2022, any change of use of a business in furnished tourist accommodation is subject to authorization from the town hall and the accommodation transformed into tourist rentals must be subject to double or even triple compensation in surface area.

A year later, Mr. Brossat takes stock of an "extremely dissuasive effect", with the rejection of a large majority of requests to change businesses into furnished tourist accommodation.

Preemptions will continue

In December, the city's housing property account for 2023 was supplemented by 148 to 200 million euros in order "to increase the capacity to acquire buildings and to provide social housing in this way", summarizes Ian Brossat.

Solution to the scarcity of available rights of way in the capital, the pre-emptions are not at all to the taste of the right-wing opposition, Jean-Baptiste Olivier judging that it is a "serious political error" in a city heavily in debt.

By pre-empting, "we reduce the possibilities of private housing, (...) the price per square meter will increase and it will be more and more the city of the very well-off", vituperates the elected representative of the right. "It would be better to rehabilitate the existing and review the heating systems that really need it," adds Mr. Olivier.

A PLU shaped "public housing"

Having almost achieved its objective of 25% social housing for 2025, the town hall is now setting itself, by 2035, 30% social housing and 10% "affordable" housing, i.e. "20% in- below the market price, for the middle classes", according to Ian Brossat.

To do this, it intends to further strengthen the obligation for all new residential buildings to include at least 30% social housing.

Future office buildings would also be obliged to integrate "a share of housing (...), and on this, a share of social housing", he says.

The majority on the left also intends to establish "areas with a large social housing deficit": the new apartment buildings created in micro-districts with "less than 10% social housing" must be devoted to 50% social housing.

The communist elected finally put on the "reserves", buildings of the tertiary sector where the town hall will be able to encourage the owner, on the occasion of a new building permit, to "the transformation into housing, in particular social".

The BRS, stammering but symbolic

With 90 new dwellings marketed in 2023, the real solidarity lease (BRS), which allows an individual to become the owner of the building but not the land, is only in its infancy.

But with a thousand housing units in the pipeline, "the idea is to ramp up", underlines Ian Brossat, supporter of these units sold at half price, and who wants to develop this category in the north-east of Paris, surplus in social housing .