In housing policy, a great similarity and many differences. Paris and Barcelona share, like most large cities, the problem of a stressed and difficult-to-access market, but the figures illustrate the drastic ways of addressing the issue. In Paris, public urban management allows the housing stock to increase by around 2,500 units per year. Of these, approximately half result from major rehabilitations. Another big difference is the extensive social park, with a large and sustained public investment that meant that in 2022, 3,374 new apartments would be added to this package, compared to 11,803 in Barcelona.
The commitment to social housing started in the French capital in the 1950s with the aim of reaching 25% of the total market (now the proportion is 21.2% compared to 2% in Barcelona). “Despite having in common geographical pressure, little land to build on and market tensions, in Paris they do not experience the housing emergency that there is in Barcelona, because they have a series of public policies sustained over time, and well equipped” , maintains Joan Ràfols, president of the Urban Property Chamber.
This entity has prepared a comparison based on data from the Agence Départamentale d'Information sur le Logement of Paris (Adil) which highlights the different composition of the property regime and the policies related to the management of social and private housing. . Thus, during 2022, direct aid to families to pay rent, whether public or private, reached 233,008 households.
“Another of the theses that we have been defending for some time to improve the situation in Barcelona is to increase the number of both social and private housing with effective measures that allow the market to grow,” adds Ràfols. Among them, the solidarity surcharge, an additional amount that families residing in social housing have to pay if their income is above a certain level. This measure began to be considered in Paris in 2016 when it was detected that half of the residents of the social park had incomes higher than those required to access that year. With this solidarity surcharge, the aim was to increase the mobility of tenants to provide social housing for other families who were in greater need.
The rental of privately owned housing represents close to 44% of the Parisian stock, compared to 29.8% in Barcelona, and the average price was 26.40 euros per square meter (compared to 14.50 in Barcelona). “The result of the rental price control system in Paris, which was introduced in 2019, is still under discussion and evaluation,” explains Ràfols, who calls for a serene debate that takes into account a broad and less politicized vision of the situation. . The main criticisms point out that price containment is insufficient for low-income families and does not generate incentives for owners to invest in improving apartments, something that constitutes another problem in a city with an older housing stock and whose Modernization and rehabilitation is a priority objective to have housing.
