Urban renewal has partially halted the impoverishment of certain neighborhoods

According to an analytical note published on the eve of the celebration of twenty years of the National Agency for Urban Renewal (Anru), which pilots this policy initiated by the Borloo law, the share of the poorest households has fallen by 17 % between 2003 and 2019 in the “most demolished” neighborhoods.

The National Program for Urban Renewal (PNRU), which ended in 2021, aimed to restructure socially disadvantaged neighborhoods classified as “Sensitive Urban Zones” (ZUS) through major housing operations, with a dual objective of social diversity and sustainable development.

To carry out their study, the authors compared 497 ZUS neighborhoods with a control group of 240 neighborhoods with similar characteristics but not renovated.

The PNRU had a “significant causal impact both on the housing supply and on the population of the targeted neighborhoods”, particularly the most demolished ones, analyzes France Stratégie while emphasizing that the latter are on average “significantly less populated”.

This impact results in “a reduction in the share of social housing, initially predominant, and a reduction in the share of the poorest households”.

The latter was done “essentially for the benefit of an increase in the share of households with a modest to average standard of living”.

Thus in "the quarter of the neighborhoods where demolitions were the most intense, which accommodate 6,5% of the population of all renovated neighborhoods, the PNRU caused a drop of 6 points in the share of social housing (- 9%), as well as a drop of 5 points (-17%) in the share of the poorest households.

Spatial segregation

This effect was caused mainly "by the demolition of housing which accommodated the most poor households" as well as to a lesser extent "by the construction of social housing housing households with slightly wealthier profiles".

On the other hand, in the remaining three quarters of the targeted neighborhoods, where interventions were less intense, the impact of the PNRU is “almost zero and did not prevent a slight increase in the share of the poorest households” .

“We have 75% neighborhoods in which we have no effect because we also have a budget spent per inhabitant which is significantly lower,” underlines Nina Guyon, co-author of the study, specifying that the latter follows the housing and not people and that it “therefore does not say where the poor households who are no longer in these neighborhoods have gone”.

"The study is a little optimistic when it focuses on what is changing, in reality these are not things that fundamentally change the composition of the neighborhood and these very poor households are essentially replaced by households that are still fairly poor", nuance Manuel Domergue, director of studies at the Abbé Pierre Foundation.

“The Anru operations did not disrupt spatial segregation at all (...) but they made it possible to invest relatively massively in largely forgotten neighborhoods,” he adds.

According to an Anru report published in October, operations financed by the first PNRU represented a total of 48,4 billion euros, or on average 2,8 billion euros per year.

According to France Stratégie, it is “around 1% of the annual state budget for a set of targeted neighborhoods which represents around 7% of the French population, or 4 million inhabitants”.

Nearly half of this amount was financed by social landlords, almost a quarter by Anru and the last quarter by local authorities.

In total, 175.000 housing units, the vast majority of which were social, were demolished, while 142.000 social housing units and 81.000 private housing units were built.

Other operations include urban development, rehabilitation and creation of public or commercial facilities projects.