French social housing—which costs the state €34 billion a year—benefits sub-Saharan Africans on a massive scale, leaving the poorest French people with virtually no access to it. That is the conclusion of a report examining the operation of the housing system.
The study, first reported on by Le Point, was conducted by one of France’s leading political think tanks in collaboration with a research institute specialising in immigration. Titled “Non-European foreigners and social housing in France,” it examines the operation of the French social housing system—a unique system in Europe, known as Habitation à Loyer Modéré (Cheap Rent Housing or ‘HLM’)’—rooted in the years preceding the First World War. A significant proportion of its housing stock was built during the years of reconstruction after the Second World War, while a third of HLM dwellings were built after 1985. Today, around 12 million people live in low-cost housing in France.
The initial aim of HLM was to, with the help of the State, combat the crisis in low-income housing and provide decent accommodation at a reasonable price for the poorest households. But the study reveals that the system is failing totally, since the French families who need it most do not have access to it: only 11% of non-immigrant French people benefit from it.
Conversely, the system disproportionately benefits immigrant families from Africa: “57% of foreigners and descendants of foreigners from Sahelian Africa live in social housing, as do half of Algerian immigrants and their descendants.” Asians are under-represented in social housing.
The injustice of such a situation is compounded by the fact that housing turnover is extremely low, creating what the survey calls “rentes de situation” for the lucky beneficiaries, who can sometimes stay there for several generations, thus blocking access to the most needy, even though social housing was initially designed as a temporary solution for families.
The consequences are easy to foresee: the take-up of low-cost housing by the same populations leads to a concentration or ghetto effect, and whole neighbourhoods sink into communalism, cut off from the authority of the state.
Driven by the political demands of the French Left for ever more social housing, low-cost housing has become a kind of obese monster. France now has a quarter of the 21 million social housing units in the European Union. HLMs account for a quarter of the urban housing stock in France—a colossal figure, even though the housing concerned is no longer fulfilling its function of helping those who need housing at a lower cost.
Le Point threw a wrench in the works by publishing the study. The Front National, now Rassemblement National, has been denouncing the ‘foreign preference’ at work in council housing for decades. In the collective consciousness, low-income housing has become the symbol par excellence—which it was not originally—of mass immigration and large-scale population replacement. Certain political figures, as Nadine Morano and Éric Zemmour, keep pointing out that these neighbourhoods, once popular and populated by French people who grew up there, have become ‘lost territories of the Republic’ where whites are a stigmatised minority. With this document, the figures corroborate and vindicate what was hitherto a diffuse and forbidden sentiment.
The political solution to this impasse will require courage. Interviewed by Le Point, Prefect Michel Aubouin, former Inspector General of Administration and Director of the Reception and Integration of Foreigners, called for a drastic overhaul of French housing laws, rejecting the cosmetic adjustments of recent years.
