Housing conditions in France 2017 Edition
Consumption, wealth, family life, relations with neighbours and with the local neighbourhood: housing is at the centre of all our lives. With its detailed descriptions of households and their dwellings, the Housing Survey has been the key tool used by official statistics for 40 years, and the recent mobilisation of administrative sources now makes information available at a detailed territorial level.
In this new publication in the Insee Références collection, Housing conditions in France, the aim is to bring together this wealth of information and present it in a coherent form. An overview sets out the economic and social issues surrounding housing. Next, there are four reports. The first analyses the status of tenants. The second looks at home ownership. The third describes residential mobility and its determining factors. The fourth report takes stock of the housing of immigrant households.
Lastly, to complete the analyses, there are about forty information sheets, organised into 10 themes and produced jointly by the SOeS (Observation and Statistics Service) and INSEE. More information is available only in French on the French pages of the website.
Being a tenant, a more sustainable situation in the social sector than in the free sector Insee Références - Edition 2017
Nathalie Donzeau and Raphaël Lardeux
In 2013, tenants in both the free sector and the social sector were younger, they were urban dwellers and less well-off than homeowners. Since the 1970s, this population has also become more precarious: income per consumption unit of renting households has increased less rapidly than that of owners, whereas their rents have risen less rapidly than their income. The increase in rents, which has been particularly large in the free sector, corresponds in part to an improvement in housing quality.
Over the past forty years, the social sector population has aged more quickly than the population in general. Large numbers of tenants entered social housing as it expanded in the 1960s and 1970s, but subsequently few have left, compared with the trend seen in the free sector, thus restricting the entry of new generations. While tenants in the free sector are more likely to become homeowners as their income increases, this is less the case for tenants in the social sector, as the better off remain there for longer. The highest income households tend to be in the same geographic areas. Spatial polarisation within the social sector is similar to that in the free sector.