The shocking figure has reassured the housing world about the need to combat building fires. In October 2023, at the HLM congress, the HTC consultancy, commissioned by the Social Housing Union (USH), stated that, according to its calculations, France needs 518,000 new homes per year in the period 2024-2040.
A few weeks earlier, in July, the online review Housing policy However, it publishes a completely different estimate. Detailing the cost calculation carried out by the Agency for the Environment and Energy Management (Ademe), the public body committed to the ecological transition, its head of prospective studies in the construction department, Albane Gaspard, publishes an estimate of only 110,000 homes to be built each year, assuming the most sober scenario.
Who is telling the truth? Should France produce around 100,000 homes a year or rather five times as many to meet the needs of its population? The assessment is very important because it helps to decide on housing policy and the dynamics of construction: it is estimated that 287,000 homes will be opened in 2023.
In an attempt to see things more clearly, and as the HLM 2024 congress opens on Tuesday 24 September, the USH, which brings together social housing organisations, is publishing on the same day a report on “Seventy years of housing needs figures. The trajectory of a controversial indicator of housing policy in France”, commissioned by Alexandre Coulondre, a researcher at the Gustave-Eiffel University, and sociologist Claire Juillard.
The question of housing needs arises. “With the reconstruction and the baby boom after World War II” and, after an eclipse in the early 1970s and 1980s, “is gradually returning to the agenda with the persistence of precarious housing and the withdrawal of specific public funding”but also with the control of the artificialization of the soil, everything “in a context of demographic slowdown”track the document.
It was in the 1950s, amid the shortages caused by the destruction of war, that a public policy indicator was developed, adopted by the ministry responsible for housing, to manage a planned economy. As the years and plans passed, the housing need figures became increasingly ambitious: 240,000 units per year in 1954 and up to a peak of 510,000 in the early 1970s.
Battle of numbers
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