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.
Home ownership in decline since the 2008 crisis Insee Références - Edition 2017
Céline Arnold and Jocelyn Boussard
The share of owner-occupier households has continued to increase in recent years. It stood at 57.9% in 2013 in Metropolitan France, or around 10 percentage points more than in 1973. However, the pace at which this increase has occurred has seen some variations, since after slowing during the 1990s, the rate of home ownership recovered with the arrival of the new millennium until the 2008 crisis, then turned downwards once again.
The purchasing capacity of a typical household at the beginning of the 2010s was higher than thirty years before, despite reaching a peak at the end of the 1990s then decreasing slightly. This may seem paradoxical, given the very sharp increases in real estate prices, especially between 2000 and 2008, but it is the result of the lengthening of borrowing periods and the fall in interest rates during the 1990s and 2000s.
The majority of new homeowners buy on credit, usually a personal loan, for a second-hand dwelling. They are usually aged under 40, living in a couple with one or more children and they have a high income. A quarter received financial assistance from their family of around one sixth of the total down payment. Recently, home ownership has been slowed by structural factors: the population of non-homeowner households is concentrated at the bottom of income distribution per consumption unit, they are growing older and are increasingly faced with high prices in the areas where they live. Inequalities in home ownership are thus reinforced.