The Housing Crisis in France. The Reasons for the Shortfall in Available Housing

In the last five years or so there has been a sharp rise in property prices in France and this is now making it difficult for young couples and middle class families to afford to buy housing, and indeed more and more people are having to live in whatever housing they can find rather than what they would choose. Four factors are responsible for this shortfall, according to Jean-Paul Lacaze: the failure of the authorities to make land available for house-building, the (unpredictable) sharp decline in the average size of households, the refusal by decision-makers to allow the expansion of private housing on the outskirts of towns, and finally the “aberrations” of land-use forecasting that led to the development of “malthusian” planning (based on underestimates of population growth in large urban areas). Lacaze presents a detailed description of these factors and the consequences of their interaction for the housing situation in France. He emphasizes in particular the typical cases of the Paris region (the Île-de-France) and the Mediterranean coast, and he calls for a major effort to forecast housing needs because he argues that, even if the rate of house-building in the Paris region is doubled, it will take between 10 and 15 years to restore equilibrium. This effort will require the creation of a permanent team within central government specifically charged with forecasting supply and demand for housing in the medium to long term; at present, this does not exist.