The SRU Law, twenty years later: evaluating the legacy of France’s most important social housing program

Twenty years ago, in December 2000, the SRU Law (Loi Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain) was passed in France, requiring selected municipalities to devote 25% of their local stock to social housing, in order to curb growing trends of segregation. Almost twenty years later, the balance is striking: still 1,222 municipalities targeted by the program do not comply with the set quota of 25% social housing units per municipality. Out of these non-complying municipalities, 269 had to pay an increased fee in 2017, based on the Article 55 clause included in the SRU Law. The total fee that these ‘outlaw municipalities’ had to pay for not providing enough social housing represented a total of € 77 million in 2017, and helped finance the national rental social housing fund for housing. In this paper, I ask what impact the Article 55 fee clause designed to enforce SRU Law objectives has had on the rebalancing of social housing stocks for municipalities not complying with set quotas. To answer such a question, I conduct a Difference-in-Differences study that measures changes in social housing stocks before and after the passage of the law. The treatment group comprises municipalities not complying with quota requirements and subject to the Article 55 fee, while the control group consists of municipalities not complying with quota requirements, but exempt from the fee. Findings underscore how after the passage of the Article 55 fee, municipalities that were subject to the fee have built less social housing than municipalities that are exempt, relative to before the enactment of the law. They corroborate my conceptual framework, which states that beyond the adoption of a national fee for noncompliant municipalities, social housing production trends are impacted by the types of land use ideologies in place in municipalities, be they pro-social housing or exclusionary. Twenty years later, these findings bring a new perspective to current debates taking place in policy circles around the effectiveness of one of France’s most important social housing policy programs.