The State provides additional funding for social housing renovation, but professionals say it’s not enough.

A fund to provide more resources for renovation. The government and the HLM world announced this Thursday that they had concluded an agreement providing 1.2 billion euros to renovate the social housing stock, without however achieving the large “pact of trust” wanted by the government which would have brought the sector out of the doldrums. On Wednesday evening, the Social Union for Housing (USH), the confederation of social landlords, approved a list of proposals sent on Sunday by the office of the Minister responsible for Housing, Patrice Vergriete.

“Today, you are offering us support for the ecological transition of 1.2 billion over three years, improvement of production loans of 8 billion, maintenance of a PTZ [prêt à taux zéro, ndlr] for social accession: your proposal is serious. We accept responsibility for it,” declared the president of the USH, Emmanuelle Cosse, during the closing plenary of its congress Thursday in Nantes.

Subsidized loans

The fund proposed by the State, endowed with 1.2 billion euros divided into 400 million per year, “aims to support a target of around 120,000 energy renovations per year in social housing and to gradually increase to 150,000”, promised Patrice Vergriete. “An agreement which marks the common commitment of the State and the HLM movement to jointly meet this double challenge of renovation and production”, he praised. This budgetary commitment should involve a government amendment to the 2024 finance bill. It should therefore allow landlords to meet the timetable imposed by law to eliminate thermal sieves.

The Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations must also increase its support for the HLM world, with an additional 150 million euros for the production of housing and the transformation of priority neighborhoods. It must also, via its subsidiary Banque des Territories, offer more advantageous loans for social housing, and more credits for intermediate housing – at regulated rents but higher than in social housing.

It will finally release, with the Ecological Transition Agency, subsidized loans for the connection of HLM to urban heating networks and the development of renewable energies in social housing. In total, these advantageous loans represent the equivalent of 650 million euros saved by social landlords, calculated Emmanuelle Cosse. Other more technical demands from the HLM world were taken up, such as maintaining the zero-interest loan in its current conditions for social access to property, while it must be tightened for the general public.

“Good news, not enough”

The agreement is rather surprising as discussions have been dragging on for months, with the HLM world regularly criticizing the government for making budgetary savings to its detriment. On the other hand, the “pact of trust” that the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, had hoped for when she started at Matignon is not yet there. “We asked for a lot of billions, we have a few million… which is therefore good news, not enough, but good news,” summarized the president of the Federation of Private Social Landlords, Valérie Fournier.

The USH, said Emmanuelle Cosse, would have liked more long-term commitments from the executive, which would not force it to renegotiate each year to obtain favorable budgetary choices.

Another hole in the racket: no strong measures to revive the production of social housing, in free fall, with less than 85,000 new HLM authorizations planned for 2023. According to a study commissioned by the USH, 198,000 new housing units should be produced social services per year to respond to major demographic trends and reduce poor housing. And the number of households waiting for social housing has never been higher: 2.42 million, including 1.63 million for a first allocation.