Housing ‘On The House’: The Common Good Problem in French Social Housing

Challenged with urban poverty and shortage of affordable housing, governments around the world have resorted to various interventions to stabilize housing prices. Some have done so through directly providing units, subsidizing rents or home loans, or incentivizing construction. Despite these market interventions, municipal governments have had limited success in ensuring adequate affordable housing.

A recent essay published in Housing Studies offers a more nuanced insight into how a society’s valuation of public housing as a common good shapes policies by defining the roles of the government and private markets. In her article “Contradictory Narratives on French Social Housing,” sociologist Claire Levy-Vroelant evaluates why housing remains such a contentious policy issue in France, even after the country declared housing to be a basic human right following overwhelming public pressure.

In 2007, following public protests against lack of affordable housing and homelessness, France became one of the few countries of the world to establish an enforceable right to housing under the DALO Act, which essentially allows people to sue the state if they are homeless; this is in addition to the fact that French municipalities are mandated to allocate at least 20 percent of the housing stock for social housing. One-fifth of housing units in France is comprised of ‘social housing’: low-rent units directly provided or partly subsidized by the state. In French society, housing is a highly charged issue and is interlinked with notions of social contract theory. According to a survey, over 80 percent of French people consider social housing a necessity.

However, in application, the French can be as unsupportive of subsidized housing as people elsewhere are: the same survey reports that 74 percent of the population thinks that social housing has a negative image, associated with poverty and crime, and NIMBY objections are also common. Moreover, high rents and the current construction-oriented housing policy are evidence of a housing shortage in France.

Similar to the contradiction in public opinion, there is also a growing rift in the actual and perceived role of government. While laws like DALO suggest a greater institutionalization of the state’s role, the government is in fact distancing itself from direct involvement in the market and is experimenting with various forms of limited interventions. For example, the government has been encouraging households to invest in home ownership through tax incentives and zero-interest loans. Employers contribute to social housing by contributing one percent of wages toward housing finance saving loans for employees. Another measure is encouraging public-private partnerships with “social developers,” who receive subsidized loans in return for controlled rents in the future.

One of the driving forces behind the more recent liberal policies has been the European Union’s shift in its view of the role of government from “welfare state” to “enabling state,” which naturally affects French policies. While Levy-Vroelant does not discuss the reasons behind this apparent death of the welfare state, debt and deficit crises that led to the rollback of government programs during the recent global recession are all too well-known. It is not surprising that the European Justice Court has limited social housing to the most vulnerable population groups in recent judgments.

So where does this leave the future of housing? According to the author, despite these conflicting narratives, a new deal is silently at work, as evidenced by the government’s continued experimentation with different affordable housing supply models. Nevertheless, this equilibrium is fragile and any economic or political shock can potentially put the government in a legal bind.

Although France presents an extreme case of disagreement among stakeholders over the valuation of a common good and the implications of its provision, lessons from this treatise very easily apply to cases outside France. The key contribution of Levy-Vroelant’s article is her assertion that a stable policy path cannot be adopted without getting at the heart of the ideological dissonance among the players affected by the policy. The resolution of the housing policy debate must begin with an effort to build a national consensus over the concept of housing as a value.

Article Source: Claire Levy-Vroelant, Contradictory Narratives on French Social Housing: Looking Back and Looking Forward, Housing Studies, volume 29(4), 2014.

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