Marseille plans 27.000 additional housing units by 2028, half of which "affordable"

This so-called "affordable" housing includes both social rental housing, housing managed for precarious people or housing benefiting from a social home ownership scheme.

"In these 2.300 affordable housing units, 1.500 will be built new and 800 created in the existing private stock by rehabilitation or restructuring", detailed Mathilde Chaboche, deputy mayor of Marseille in charge of urban planning.

The latter also insisted on the need to "break down and distribute" this supply of affordable housing across all sectors of the city, which is not currently the case.

The second city of France also conditions these objectives on a "territorial justice" on the scale of the 92 municipalities of the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, and this in terms of social housing "but not only", insisted the elected representative of the "Marseille Spring", a broad union of the left.

However, we are witnessing, according to her, an "unequal distribution of the constructive effort on the scale of the territory", with "small municipalities around, very attached to the preservation of the living environment of their inhabitants", who have contracted a "form of symbolic and ethical debt vis-à-vis Marseille", whose proximity guarantees them an economic and cultural dynamism that they would not have otherwise.

"The metropolis has no PLH, it should have had one since its creation (Editor's note: in 2016), and unfortunately, for years, we have been navigating on sight on this housing issue, which is nevertheless eminently political and strategic", added Ms. Chaboche, stressing that this future PLH, which should be adopted by the metropolitan council at the end of 2022, will commit the territory for six years.

We are faced with a "real urgency of the housing issue in this" Marseille territory, characterized both "by its poverty and by the legacy of poor development at the urban level, in terms of the construction of housing and in terms of its distribution", further lamented the elected official for urban planning.

Alongside Deputy Mayor Samia Ghali and Social Affairs Assistant Audrey Garino, she recalled the sad record of Marseille: 40.000 unworthy housing, 40.000 applicants for social housing awaiting allocation, seven out of ten households who are eligible, or 100.000 energy strainers.

"We have a lot of poor quality housing", added Ms. Ghali, specifying that in certain large degraded condominiums, with "squatted, unworthy, even unhealthy" housing, people will prefer "to go to social housing when they could be in the private accommodation".

Even before this press conference of the city of Marseille, the metropolis had regretted Friday morning the delay of the second city of France to give its proposals for this future PLH, affirming that the 91 other municipalities of the metropolis had "transmitted their copies there more than six months ago."