A pyrrhic victory? The contested and peripheral financialisation of social housing in France

Résumé :

This paper contributes to debates on the financialisation of social housing and the related development of affordable housing, which has been shown to expand in relation to the increasing role of capital, actors, and instruments of financial markets. Building on housing studies, we develop a relational approach that takes into account the context-specific, complex interactions that exist beyond the dominant pattern of substitution of social by affordable housing found in the literature. Our case-study focuses on France, where policymakers have framed capital markets as a solution to the destabilisation of the traditional ‘generalist’ model of social housing by austerity. We show that governmental attempts to unlock access to capital markets through equity investment have been met with contestations, resulting in very limited experiments. However, capital markets have made their way through intermediate housing (logement locatif intermédiaire, LLI), a bespoke tax regime created to stimulate institutional investment into the production of ‘affordable’ housing for the ‘middle class’. We discuss three modes of interrelations between social and intermediate housing (substitution, cross-subsidisation, and competition), and reflect on the long-term destabilising effects of peripheral financialisation on the social housing sector and policies.