Redistribution opérée par « l’avantage HLM » et impact de potentielles réformes : l’apport de la microsimulation

Tenants of social housing benefit from an implicit rent saving that represents, on average, about 40 % of what they would pay for a similar dwelling on the private rental market. Actually, this implicit saving is not integrated into microsimulation tax-benefit models, whereas the existence of a social housing sector is one of two major kinds of government intervention towards tenant households, alongside a personal housing benefit (i.e., a financial support). In this paper, we propose a methodology to integrate this implicit saving in the Ines model. We then compare the redistribution generated by this implicit benefit from social housing with the one operated by the personal housing benefit. We finally simulate both budgetary and redistributive effects of two different potential reforms. In the first one, the rules used to compute social housing rents are profoundly redefined so that tenants pay a uniform 16 % of their household income in rent, which is the ratio that maintains budgetary neutrality. In the second reform, a tax is established on the implicit benefit derived from social housing. The results suggest that this tax would be mainly paid by households between the third and sixth income deciles. Classification JEL : R21, C81, H20.