“Housing red alert: measures urgently needed for the French! “. This is how representatives of the real estate and construction sector titled their open letter, published this Monday morning exclusively in Le Parisien Today in France and addressed directly to Emmanuel Macron.
While the National Council for Refoundation, wanted by Emmanuel Macron and dedicated to housing, postponed its conclusions yet expected last week, professionals in the sector are once again sounding the alarm. Because housing is bad. very badly and production has never been so lowas are sales.
While this council brought together 200 experts for six months, no postponement date has been set. “Yet we read that another ‘conference of the parties’ could be organised! The time is no longer for observations, procrastination or hesitation. When will the State take the real measure of the risk of an economic, social and societal bomb represented by the crisis of the “power to live” that our fellow citizens are facing? “, challenge the signatories.
About twenty proposals were expected from this National Refoundation Council dedicated to housing. They could, however, take place by the end of the month, but construction professionals remind the President of the Republic “that there will be no full employment if the mobility of employees is hampered by the impossibility of housing” .
The destruction of 150,000 jobs
“Do we still need to remember that housing is a formidable driver of our economy and that, without powerful and rapid decisions, its cessation will lead in the coming months to the destruction of more than 150,000 jobs, but also a crying and obvious lack of housing? as well as the worsening of the living conditions of the French due to a shortage of accessible supply? This deficit will also concern the construction of social housing, of which 54% is carried out by real estate developers”, they want to alert.
A sector whose deterioration has accelerated with access to credit which has considerably hardened in eighteen months, the increase in construction costs and the reluctance of mayors to issue building permits. The managers of the sector also recall their essential role in the ecological transition, “with the application of the 2020 environmental regulations in new buildings, undoubtedly the most demanding in the world, the clear commitment to land sobriety, with its component recycling soils that have already been artificialised, or even the fight against the obsolescence of buildings by changing their use”.
They therefore implore an “essential electroshock with immediately applicable and powerful measures to prevent this crisis from worsening further”. To do this, they recommend activating the lever of “support for communities, to relaunch the supply of housing and, beyond public funding linked to the emergency, we need banking solutions”.
Before concluding, “Is real estate investment a hell or a paradise? We now no longer expect yet another consultation, but the expression of a clear and ambitious presidential will as well as quantified measures, a rapid implementation schedule and financial resources adapted to the challenges”.
And to threaten that it is necessary “to resolve to make the calendar of the Climate and Resilience law more flexible, in particular to make it compatible with the constraints of co-ownership, under penalty of seeing the private rental stock suffer heavy losses”.
The list of signatories: Olivier Salleron, President of the French Building Federation (FFB), Loïc Cantin, President of the National Real Estate Federation (FNAIM), Pascal Boulanger, President of the Federation of Real Estate Developers of France (FPI), Grégory Monod, President from the Pôle Habitat FFB, Yannick Borde, president of the Procivis network and Danielle Dubrac, president of the first professional union of property managers (UNIS).