Episode 20: Social Housing in France with Magda Maaoui

Paavo Monkkonen 0:00
What is social housing?

Shane Phillips 0:08
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. Each episode we discuss a different housing research paper with its author, mostly in regular human language without all the jargon, with the goal of better understanding of the causes and potential solutions to the housing crisis. Our guest this episode is Professor Magda Maaoui of the University of Cergy Paris. And our resident guy who's super curious about international housing policy, Pablo Monkkonen is my co-host. Our subject this time is social housing, something that most housing advocates feel positively toward, even though few can agree on what it actually means, at least here in the US. But France definitely knows what social housing is. And in recent years, they've been building a lot. That's thanks in part to SRU, a 20 year old law that requires many French municipalities to hit a target of 25% social housing. Magda's research paper focuses on one element of the SRU law, a fee that's levied against cities that don't hit their 25% target, and how effective that has been. As with our other international episodes, we of course, take the opportunity here to learn as much as we can from a local expert on housing policy in France. We review some of their history, including a period of divestment in public housing and a shift toward favoring home ownership that will sound very familiar to North American listeners. And more recently, their reorientation back towards social housing and the public good, and commitments to seriously addressing the segregation and concentration of poverty that have defined French suburbs for decades. Our previous episodes on Japan and Thailand hold really valuable lessons for us here in North America. But France's approach is one that might feel more familiar and maybe more easily adapted to a Western context. We're sure you're gonna find it interesting. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. If you've been enjoying the show, be sure to give us a five-star rating and a review. And you can email me at Shanephillips@ucla.edu with comments or guest ideas. Here's Professor Magda Maaoui.

Our guest this week is Magda Maaoui, adjunct professor at the University of Cergy, Paris and a little bit closer to home a recent graduate of Columbia University with a PhD in urban planning. Prior to being in New York, she was originally based in Paris as a civil servant. And her research looks at how politics and power relations have shaped affordable housing outcomes in historically disinvested neighborhoods in both France and America. So we are continuing our world tour in this episode with a conversation about social housing policy in France, which has seen some I think, notable successes in recent years, but faces plenty of challenges as well. Magda, thanks for joining us.

Magda Maaoui 3:01
Thanks for having me. I love the podcast. And I'm really thrilled to talk to you guys today about my research.

Shane Phillips 3:08
Thank you so much, and Paavo Hello.

Paavo Monkkonen 3:10
Hey, Shane, how's it going? Welcome Magda. I'm very excited. I was very excited to discover your research, hat tip to Arthur Acolin who pointed me to it. Because I think you know, the topic is super important for two kind of themes in California housing conversations around affirmatively furthering fair housing and kind of desegregation, as well as this idea of social housing being beneficial. So I think it's going to be a really useful conversation for our listeners.

Magda Maaoui 3:38
I'm grateful for the invitation, and also thrilled of having this very, very timely conversation with you guys.

Shane Phillips 3:44
So we'll get to all that. To start though, we'd love to have you tell us a bit about Paris and some of the favorite places for you in the city since you've also lived in New York while you were at Columbia. I think we'd both be interested to hear your thoughts on kind of how the two cities compare, you know, for better and for worse.

Magda Maaoui 4:01
Yeah, I love the question. So I'd say that my version of Paris would probably add a bit of texture to that recent popular show that everybody's talking about the 'Emily in Paris' show. I'd start with a place that I really recommend. It's like a snapshot of what I feel is Parisian lifestyle without the clichés so it's an Verseau d' Avilette that he led in the Eastern 19th arrondissement of Paris. It has been very dear to me since I was a child. So picture, a portion of a canal, which is boarded by tons of bike lanes, cafe terraces, two public cinemas (which) are very cheap facing each other. Old people playing bocce, kids and puppies playing in public playgrounds, a soccer field that's overlooking the water. I mean, all of that. Also, because we're housers you know, set in the middle of the utmost version of social mix because you have you know, the top condos that overlook the canal. You have student housing, senior housing, ground floor social housing units that are, you know, added to the mix. And somehow this is not cliché at all. It's just this essence of Paris life, also very ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. And I just think is a perfect snapshot. I would of course, if you were to visit me take you to some other must-see landmarks, like the Musee d'Orsay, my favorite museum, perfect to tell you about, you know, Paris modernization, urbanization, and all kinds of later transformations throughout the 20th century, I would show you a 360-degree view of Paris from the hill of Montmartre or the path to Belleville. And then, of course, because we love housing, I would probably take you to housing projects, I think our historic heritage gems, for instance, they have Arc de Flandre in the 19th arrondissement, if you want to feel like you're in 'Blade Runner', I would show you the modernist Nuage Towers in the bonlieu Nanterre, or maybe the Espaces d' Abraxas because they were designed by Ricardo Bofill, and he just passed away. In terms of your second question about how the two cities compare. I thought about it a lot, because of course, you know, the two cities have been my back and forth for the past now six, seven years, very dear to me. And the first thing I came up with was sort of a joke, you know, I was like, Paris has better bread, and New York has better beaches. And then I thought, that's not enough. So I thought about it more from...

Paavo Monkkonen 6:29
New York has better beaches?

Shane Phillips 6:31
I guess Paris doesn't really have an ocean.

Magda Maaoui 6:40
...yeah. And I was trying to think about it from you know, sort of a perspective of what interests me also intellectually, I was thinking about this book by Daniel Rogers, the historian who wrote 'Atlantic Crossings' and he writes something, comparing New York and Paris and also describing the policy transfers that really shaped progressive politics in the two places. And he says, one finds oneself pulled into an intense transnational traffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices. And that would be me, basically, and also a lot of people who try to navigate the two places, maybe three important key points just to situate the audience about the comparison between the two cities that also sort of can be generalized to France and the US, housing-wise, there is a lot less affordable housing in New York. And it's more concentrated, you know, compared to Paris, right? Although, of course, New York is an outlier when it comes to the preservation of its public housing. When we compare two equally large cities like, say Chicago, but at the same time, it did not really survive or escape rather the trends of restructuring, state retreats inaffordable housing provision, which have characterized the American context. The second important point to again, add to the panorama is a socio-economic perspective, New York is characterized by higher levels of income and racial inequality, and also residential segregation. Whereas Paris does not really follow, for instance, the same central city versus suburb framework that we see more in the US. On the contrary, and I'll come back to it later, most French cities almost have the opposite sort of difference or dichotomy, they have prosperous urban cores, and then they concentrate in the suburbs, very high levels of affordable housing. And then the last sort of point to summarize this panorama would be market dynamics, you know, due in part to the larger role of the private sector, New York's housing market has been more dynamic in terms of rapidly rising prices. But then Paris is characterized by more construction. New York's housing market is more market-driven. It has a smaller share of its housing being developed by the public sector. And we'll get back to that later. And that's, in part also associated with the fact that the private sector, you know, plays a bigger role in building housing in general. And then affordable housing specifically, as a matter of fact, my dissertation was comparing upzoning programs in both places. And so we need this connection between public private sector in both places, I could talk about it for days, but I'm going to stop here. And yeah.

Shane Phillips 9:26
So your paper is titled 'The SRU Law, Twenty Years Later: Evaluating the Legacy of France’s Most Important Social Housing Program', and it was published in Housing Studies just last year, I guess first, can you tell us what SRU law stands for, what the French translation of that is?

Magda Maaoui 9:44
Yeah, absolutely. So we call it SRU law for the purpose of the podcast and usually just to talk about it in English, but it stands for the "Loi Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain", which would translate roughly as law for solidarity and urban renewal, not the kind of urban renewal that we historically associate with American history. But, you know, I'll come back to that later.

Shane Phillips 10:10
Okay. Yeah, thank you. And I think your pronunciation of that just illustrated why I did not even try. So I'm gonna avoid French words as much as possible here. So the SRU law was intended to encourage social housing development in municipalities across the country as a way to reduce segregation in particular, and its ambitious goals were later complemented by financial penalties for at least a subset of cities that weren't hitting their targets. And, you know, one might expect that those fees would motivate those cities to build more. But in fact, you find that after the fee went into place, municipalities that were subject to it saw their social housing stock grow more slowly than in places that were exempt from the fee. So that raises I think, a lot of interesting questions about the use of different strategies to change behavior, be they incentives or penalties or mandates. And as you discuss in your paper, it also illustrates how much other factors like political leadership really weigh heavily on these outcomes, as you put it, beyond the adoption of a national fee for non compliant 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. So in the show notes, we're going to include two articles in addition to Magda's, one published for Brookings Institution by Arthur Acolin, who's already mentioned. And that's about France's rental housing market. And the other is an International Journal of housing policy and written by Yonah Freemark. And it's specifically about the country's success at doubling housing production in the Paris region. To give our listeners some of that additional context, I'll quickly share a few facts from Arthur's paper and we'll come back to Yonah's later after we've talked about Magda's work. So first is, and Magda touched on this a little bit, is just the sheer scale of public sector involvement in the French housing market with about 40% of renter's living in public housing of some kind. In the US, I don't know the figure off the top of my head, but I imagine it's closer to 2 to 5%, depending on how you define public housing...

Paavo Monkkonen 12:22
Something like that.

Shane Phillips 12:23
...yeah, public housing, you know, whether you include low income housing tax credit units, even with those, we're still not very high. Public Housing isn't just for low income households in France, more than three quarters of French households were eligible for some form of public housing in 2013. Renters in France receive a lot more government support than in the US. And even in the private rental market, only about 1/5 of French renters in the bottom income quintile pay more than 40% of their income on rent, compared to nearly 50% of us renters in that bottom fifth. As I suspect will be important to this conversation, a lot of French public housing is concentrated in mid-rise and high-rise buildings at the outskirts of metro areas. And due in part to the SRU law we'll be talking about (how) France has built about 1.8 million social housing units between 2001 and 2019, or about 100,000 per year. For comparison, the low income housing tax credit in the US also builds about 100,000 low income units per year. But we also have five times the population of France. France has a generous rent assistance program funded at about $16 billion per year, while US spends about 24 billion on tenant based housing vouchers through the Housing Choice Program. But despite all of these supports for renters, homeownership is still quite popular in France, and almost 60% of French households own their homes compared to just about two-thirds or I think around 65% of US households. Few more here. French renter households are far more stable in their housing with a median length of residence of six years compared to just two years in the US. And in a similarity to Japan. And in contrast to the US over 90% of private rental units in France are owned by individual rather than institutional investors. And finally, unsurprisingly, France also has very strong tenant protections. landlords have to offer lease terms of at least three years, that was news to me, and many metropolitan areas have rent control. And also news to me, they have a seasonal eviction moratorium every year independent of COVID-19 where you basically can't evict someone from the beginning of November to the end of March, which is five months out of the year. So hopefully that gives our listeners some idea of how France's housing policy is, and (how) its housing market differ from the US in addition to what Magda already shared. Magda, Is there anything else that is maybe outside the scope of your paper, but you'd want to add to that list just to give some color to this.

Magda Maaoui 15:00
Oh, yeah, I'm glad to connect my research to such solid papers as those by Arthur Acolin and Yonah Freemark. I'm teaching a course on the very specific topic you summed up very well, for undergraduates in Cergy, Paris University. And I always add to the very sort of comprehensive panorama that you described, three key trends or three key characteristics that we'll just list quickly. The first one is, social housing is indeed, in large part still concentrated in mid-rise and high-rise buildings at the outskirts of metro areas. But there's also many other typologies of social housing, also located in inner city areas. So to give you an illustration of that trend, even the post-war social housing stock is slowly but steadily transforming just as an illustration of that, last year's Pritzker Prize was given to a couple of architects like Lacaton et Vassal, and their specialty for the past few decades has been designing very cutting edge, environmentally friendly, humane social housing projects. And there's also this idea that, you know, social housing goes to a lot of middle income or middle class or lower income category...basically, you know, associated with different types of incomes. But it's also tied sometimes to professions, a lot of social housing is attributed to certain essential professions like, you know, teachers, firefighters, nurses, city agents, that's a big thing as well. The second trend is social housing is in large part occupied by minorities, so mostly children of immigrants or foreign born residents. In France, it's technically unconstitutional to ask for data on race and ethnicity as part of the census, which makes research on segregation, inequality, discriminations very hard to do. And so in order to sort of approximate this social diversity, what we do is use the percentage of foreign born in the overall population. That's how basically, we measure diversity through immigration figures. And to give you an overview of the French demographic landscape, the share of population that's born abroad is 14%. So largely from two big channels, either neighboring European countries, or France's former colonies. So for instance, the larger, the largest, sorry, minority groups, right now are Portuguese. And the second one would be the Algerian community, very important historically, I, myself am, for instance, French Algerian, so I'm a representative of that minority. The third trend is the context of the pandemic. You know, and I'm sure that here, France is not different from the US. We are a model of having...

Shane Phillips 17:58
I think it's probably different in some ways.

Magda Maaoui 18:01
...in some ways, I'm sure in like the safety nets, and all kinds of things for sure. But just keeping it down to the housing-construction rhythm, or trends, I think everybody got hit hard. Meaning that yes, France is a model of housing construction. But of course, you know, the pandemic has messed up construction rhythms and growth cycles in France, a number gives you an idea in 2017, we were permitting 240,000 units, whereas in 2021, we went, you know as low as 180,000 units. So it's just to give you this, this context, against the backdrop of a lot of political transformations, a lot of constant electoral deadlines for really (the) entire period of the pandemic, municipal, regional, and now presidential elections. And I'm not saying this like, you know, for no reason. You know, housing is highly political everywhere in France also. And so, this matters in the conversation we're gonna have today.

Paavo Monkkonen 19:04
Yeah, so my class on housing policy, I talk about the kind of fuzzy definition of social housing and like, is low income housing tax credit programs, a social housing program? And in what ways it is and isn't. So I talk about French social housing, and I sort of divide it between HLM and like the newer style Pritzker Prize winning projects, is that a fair kind of division, like the old style is more similar to what we think about in terms of big US public housing, whereas the new style is social housing associations, kind of nonprofit run and higher quality.

Magda Maaoui 19:36
Yeah, that's a perfect definition. I'd say that, you know, the notion that comes up often when we talk about the HLM is the Grands Ensembles, and I think the equivalent of that would be maybe the project as an notion in the United States. And then you have that, that makes a portion of the housing stock and then on the other side, you would have, you know, something that's smaller scale. And yeah, definitely more innovative and inventive in terms of designs, but also, services offered, you know, some of them are inter-generational housing, a lot of components add now environmentally, you know, like LEED certified construction measures and things like that. Absolutely.

Paavo Monkkonen 20:20
And is there this similar tension? I think, in other European countries, where kind of the better quality social housing units are lived, like, given that they're open to higher income groups? Is there like a capture of the better quality units by the higher income groups? And is that an issue?

Magda Maaoui 20:36
Yeah, so in terms of, you know, the trajectory, the residential trajectories of households that occupy those different typologies of housing units, I would say that there is for sure, you know, trends of, I would say, HLM housing units being more allocated to the lowest income bands, and then, classically, or in a more common way, you would have newer "Pritzker Prize winning projects", like you said, being taken over by more middle class or upper middle class, even households who do not necessarily have the means to go into the private market. That is also being sort of thought or corrected, by certain measures that have been taken a few years ago, where now every project has to, in addition to I'd say a number of housing units being built, include percentages of so, like a third of the project would have to go to the lowest income band categories. Yeah, even the beautiful ones, basically, although everything is beautiful. And my message and my fight as somebody who loves, you know, housing architectures is to say that all the HLMs are very interesting, but a lot of them are decaying as well and have huge, huge maintenance problems, you know, yeah,

Paavo Monkkonen 22:00
no, yeah, I mean, then we could go off on a whole separate tangent of kind of lovely, boring, generic housing being superior to the fancy bespoke stuff, just because it can be provided so much more inexpensively. But so there's these three income categories that the social housing system uses, maybe just kind of mention what they are, and then like, is that what you're talking about in terms of a certain percentage of the new units have to be allocated according to those categories?

Magda Maaoui 22:28
Yeah, yeah. So there's three income categories that determine the allocation of housing units, to give you a sample, because, again, my research and this program that we're talking about today, span from the year 2000 to today, the balance has been roughly, and the balance that makes up the housings, their social housing stock, is that half of units are for low income categories, which we call PLUS. It's an acronym, you know, everywhere in the world, planners (and) housers love their acronyms. And then the second category would be approximately a third of the housing stock, and that's for moderate income households. So the PLS category, and then the remaining 10% would go to middle income households who are in fact, you know, upper class technically compared to the two other ones, but they're still having trouble finding, you know, stability, and good access in the private market. So they get this help getting access to the social housing units.

Paavo Monkkonen 23:32
So when we're talking about this SRU, it's a certain amount of housing units that each municipality has to have that are social housing. So all three of those categories count for that quota?

Magda Maaoui 23:45
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that was part of the program's core or essence, not necessarily since the 2000s. But later, when it was reformed in 2013. What most officials realized was we cannot just, you know, give up a certain quota a fair share to be mandated or municipalities we need also to be...I use the word qualitative, but I don't think that's necessarily appropriate. But it's more about thinking among these 25%, you know, portion of the housing stock that were mandated to be social housing, what are we exactly talking about? And so they incorporated this obligation of having a third being, for instance, for lowest income category, households.

Shane Phillips 24:29
I see. And we should clarify. So the SRU law, when it initially passed, it said, every, well many municipalities need to make 20% of their housing stock, social housing, that changed I think you said in 2013, to become 25% by 2025. A couple questions on that. So one is just a quick one about like, are we talking 25% of new housing stock or do they have to, you know, increase the housing stock so much that 25% of the total is social housing?

Magda Maaoui 25:08
Think the strictest option.

Shane Phillips 25:11
Okay, so, all of the housing stock has to be...okay. And then, you know, I think we've hinted at this a little bit, but I think it would be really interesting if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about the context and maybe specifically about the bonlieus, and how they relate to all this. And the problem trying to be solved in that context, in particular.

Magda Maaoui 25:32
Yeah, absolutely. So um, I mentioned earlier that most French cities have, you know, prosperous urban cores, and they concentrated in those suburbs, very high levels of affordable housing that's built in large housing estates during the post war period, which we call the bonlieus, and the bonlieus, and their inherited landscapes since the post war era, not only are they considered by most, as, you know, an architectural, or a policy failure sometimes, and I'm thinking here of maybe movies that the audience might be familiar with, the movie 'Lion' which was released in 1985, which follows, you know, three young friends, basically, during one day in the bonlieus, and what happens to them over the course of that day, or a more recent movie, which I really love, because I think it's such a powerful representation of the social ills that are still structuring, the neighborhoods located in the bonlieus is called 'Le Misérables' And it was released a couple years ago. And it tells a similar story, you know, several years later, it tells exactly the same story, it was actually filmed, and, you know, directed by people who are part of the same artistic crew and production crew. The bonlieus became a symbol of France's social ills that really illustrate the French nation's inability to basically integrate its immigrants, its minorities. It's also representing this stock that's just decaying and not being fixed in a way, you know, think about it. If I give you a number 60% of today's social housing, located in the bonlieus was completed before 1975. So that gives you sort of an idea, you know, they were located in areas that were mostly enclaves. Oftentimes, food deserts not really connected to any transportation system, although that is changing today, because a lot has been built and is being built right now. For instance, in Paris, there's a lot of work around transportation infrastructure. So they were located often in modernist high rise towers, which we call the Grands Ensembles. And I mentioned that it's sort of the equivalent of the projects in the US, they were the battlefield of highly violent riots in 2005. At moments were really, was sort of an emergency call from residents who just took the streets for the longest time in France history. And you know, France loves protests, but those were just the longest ones. It lasted for weeks. And it was just like rising like a fire that took over the entire territory, just to say, fix your policies and fix the relationship with the state to the bonlieus residents. And so the failure of the dialogue between the state and the residents of these neighborhoods is really a context in which the SRU sort of rises. And so project yourself in the 2000s, take this highly intense context of the values and this context of thinking about their future. Add to it longer term trends, at a combined relative retreat of estate, from social housing production, you know, towards more homeownership opportunities and subsidies in the 70s, which you already mentioned. Also add to it a devolution of housing policy prerogatives to the local and to the municipal levels, in the 80s. What happens is political figures, you know, particularly on the left, they start announcing that it's necessary to implement a national program aimed at rebalancing the geographic location of social housing units. And that's really when the SRU is born. It was basically a response to growing trends of segregation and concentration of poverty in French cities. That's actually why when I tried to define SRU program, I insist that it was not to necessarily...of course, it was to accompany in a way, you know, the increase or the growth of the number of social housing units, but it was more about rebalancing, rebalancing geographically and rebalancing of efforts in terms of who was doing the job. And who was. yeah, helping the national efforts.

Paavo Monkkonen 29:44
I think maybe for the listeners, you know, the closest parallel is Massachusetts' 40B, which we talked about in an earlier podcast with Nick Marantz and Huixin Zheng, and they have this you know, idea that 10% of the housing stock in each municipality should be affordable housing. So that's maybe something but you know, I think it's just so impressive the ambition of this program set out in the year 2000, that 1/5 of housing in every municipality should be social housing. But it's not every municipality, right? it's just urban municipalities, because there's like 30-something thousand municipalities, and it only applies to a fairly small percentage of...that could just explain like, how the geography plays out?

Magda Maaoui 30:26
Yes, absolutely. So in France, due to many reforms that happened after the 1789 revolution, you had this idea that the territory had to be sort of divided into very equal or sort of spread out system where you would have a lot of municipalities, which means we have 36,000 of them. And, you know, we're a very small country, and we have those municipalities, and not all of them have to comply with a law, it's approximately less than 2000 municipalities that are subject to this program. And out of these, most of them do the job of, you know, keeping up with the deadlines and the quarters, and then you have a little bit less than 300 that are sort of not working well, and not doing the proper, yeah, just not following the rules or not just meeting the deadlines. Some are doing it on purpose, and some are really trying hard, but not really managing to do well. And there's two categories, and we'll come back to that.

Shane Phillips 31:32
Yeah, and this might actually be the transition for that because your paper is not just about SRU generally, but specifically this article 55 clause, which is a penalty, a financial penalty for cities that don't hit their 25% target. Not all cities are subject to this fee, but many are. So among these cities that are subject to the SRU law, only a subset of those is actually subject to this fee, if they're not meeting their target. Can you explain how that works? Who is subject to it? Who is exempt?

Magda Maaoui 32:05
Yes, absolutely. So like you said, there's this article 55 fee, which is I would say the stick component to the SRU program. It was an additional component of the law that was added, actually two years after 2000 because officials were thinking we need something we need to stick we cannot, you know, the stick, and the carrot? I don't know if that's an expression in English. But...

Shane Phillips 32:28
yes, yeah.

Magda Maaoui 32:29
In France....

Shane Phillips 32:30
Actually, before we even talk about the subset, is there a carrot or is there....?

Magda Maaoui 32:34
No, no, french style, we just like the sticks. Exactly. So the article 55B was this additional component that is meant to enforce in a system what I'm going to say right now, in larger urban areas, that's really a component that matters. Also, you know, areas are sort of more tense in terms of their housing markets, better connected with a lot of job market dynamics, too. So yeah, it was designed to attempt to correct territorial imbalances, like I said, social segregation also. And so it required a little bit less than 2000 municipalities counting more than 3,500 inhabitants to follow the rule; in Paris, this cap of 3,500 inhabitants goes as low as 1500 just because we're in such a dense and very well-connected metropolitan region. And so yeah, with the article 55 fee, the stake is there to punish those who do not meet the 25% quota by certain three-year time periods; every three years, there's a measurement, and we check whether the municipalities have obeyed the rule, and followed the law, and met with this quota. I might add, just to clarify to our audience, that there are municipalities that we call 'exempted municipalities', if I translated correctly, those are roughly 250, always less than 300. And they're exempt but just for the following reasons. For instance, there's been an admitted observation that there's a low need for social housing or, you know, their municipalities are super isolated from centers of activity and employment, or the land is just unsuitable for construction due to let's say, environmental constraints or risk constraint constraints, generally speaking.

Paavo Monkkonen 34:38
So can you tell us how you studied the potential impact of this baton or stick in French?

Magda Maaoui 34:43
So the way I studied the SRU program was actually not immediately from a quantitative perspective. I was doing fieldwork and participant observation with different planners, housing experts or advocates and elected officials in the Paris metro region. And one conversation I had at some point with the housing expert at the Planning Agency of Paris, APUR, Stephanie Jankel, back in 2017, and she was just telling me about the SRU, and how hard it was for everybody to measure its impacts. Everyone has their own view about the SRU, she was telling me, but no person properly, you know, did the study of investigating quantitatively or just geographically, the evolution of housing construction, and specifically, social housing construction over time to finally have, you know, assessments that were not politically entrenched, or, you know, just following an ideology, and not necessarily precisely scientific. But she also advised me to not start this project, because it was just, you know, French data, French data, I can complain for hours about that but French data is really, really hard to collect and get access to, so to collect, because sometimes our stuff is so you know, yeah, it has to be anonymized. And, you know, access to it is highly expensive, and sometimes just not available for people who are academic researchers, or just think tank researchers also. And so it makes it impossible to get access to it. And also, once you get access to it, you're not allowed to use it or, you know, study it or analyze it in places that are random. You have to use a computer that's, you know, fingerprint accessible, and really, you feel like you're in a James Bond movie sometimes. And so, once I managed to, you know, assemble this dataset, I set out to develop a research design. And the idea was that I would think of a difference in differences methodology, because I thought it would be the perfect way or, you know, a perfect match between the methodology and the case study or the themes studied. And so the treatment group that I looked at comprised municipalities that were subject to the article 55 fee, a control group comprised municipalities exempt from paying the fee, the timeline was spanning from 1986 to 2017, because of availability of data, and 2002 was my before after limits, which is the year when the article 55 fee was put in effect. The hypothesis that guides this paper is that change in the production of social housing would be positive and bigger in the treatment group compared to changes in the control group. So yeah, so the result was a surprise, because my findings underscored how, after the passage of the article 55 fee, municipalities that were subject to the fee have built less social housing than municipalities, are exempt relative to before the enactment of the law. So my study was measuring more the effectiveness of that specific fee. And what it underscored was not necessarily that the SRO program is not a success, I do believe it's a success. And I do underscore that there has been a rebalancing of housing construction units overall. But what I insist on is, maybe let's qualify the fact that the article 55 fee a strong enforcement of, you know, this idea of mandating housing units or the 25% housing unit portion in municipalities, maybe the article 55 fee could be strengthened. Maybe there's you know... we're always thinking in housing policy that things work, not when you just pick one specific fee or one specific program and make it all powerful. It's the whole toolbox, right? It's the purpose of what we try to think about is, what is the perfect mix and match of things are going to really make a place a success story, be it in a municipality, be it a region, be it a nation. And so yeah, that was (what) my biggest takeaway was, also because I was sort of measuring the correlation of social housing construction variations linked to things like income or, you know, political affiliation. Because as a reminder, 71% of municipalities that are not building social housing units reaching the quotas (that) are required of them are right wing or extreme right wing, and that's really also what set off my excitement and dedication to finding all the data, it was just because I wanted to know,

Paavo Monkkonen 39:30
Well, so you're trying to figure out why they didn't build the social housing, even if they're having to pay a fee. And some of the explanations are these are rich right-wing municipalities that don't mind paying a fee maybe?

Magda Maaoui 39:42
Yeah, exactly. And I think that part of it is because and of course, there's a whole conversation we could have about this - does it factor, you know, maybe maybe it's it's based, of course on their political values and sort of ideological lens. I talk about ideologies, they're going to think that it's cheaper for them to just not build social housing units and not welcome lower-income minority households that they think are undesirable. And in their calculations, they are going to think that let's not add that to the equation. But I'm also questioning the fact that the Article 55 fee might be higher, might be increased, and I'm not the only one thinking that.

Shane Phillips 40:28
On the subject of the fee amount and how much it's raising, and how much is costing these cities like whether it's enough to change behavior, you report in your paper that these fees can amount to 5%, up to 5% of a municipalities operating budget. That sounds like a lot to me. I don't know if maybe it's not as much as it sounds like because a lot of costs are covered by higher levels of government, including the national government. But you know, interested if you can reflect on that a little bit like why maybe this isn't really enough to change behavior. But also, I think there's just an interesting conversation to have here about whether the goal even necessarily is to change behavior to have these cities build, you know, all the way up to their level. Because I think in the paper, you say, the fee that is charged, it goes toward housing purposes. And so, you know, as an analogue here in North America, we talk about vacancy taxes a lot. And I use Vancouver as a case study very often where they have a vacancy tax there for long term vacant housing. It's put some homes back on the market, but the main effect has not actually been to reduce vacancy, but to just generate a lot of revenue. And then that revenue can do to, you know, good things, including build income-restricted housing, social housing, what have you. So I'm curious, like, if that debate is happening in France, or if it's more just like, "no, we need to make sure all of these cities fall in line, and this, this is really just a stick, we're not trying to... it's not about doing positive things with the money, it's about forcing cities to comply".

Magda Maaoui 42:09
I think you pointed to the right sort of intuition when you said that many services are provided through national taxes and programs. So yeah, I'm going to just outline to you how I would describe it. It's not nothing, you know, that Article 55 fee, collecting 77 million euros, relatively to the French context. We're talking about a program that's targeted at less than 2000 municipalities, and then less than 300 municipalities are non-compliant and get taxed. And the fee can indeed amount to 5% of the municipalities operating budget. But French municipal budgets are considerably smaller than their American equivalents relative to their population, in part because higher levels of government are paying indeed for services, such as public schools. So that means that it raises less money than say, if we were in American context, I don't know that already hints to sort of, yeah, putting back in context, a few of the numbers.

Shane Phillips 43:07
You say in the in the paper that the average non-compliant city that's paying this fee, the budget for those cities is about 1,100 euro per resident, and on average, for France, it's 700 per resident for the municipal budget. Here in Los Angeles, City of Los Angeles, our general fund is somewhere in the order of $3,000 per resident, Santa Monica is about 8,000 or 9,000 per resident in their general fund so much larger, but you know, not because our government is spending so much more kind of in aggregate, it's just distributed differently, and a lot more is spent at the local level as opposed to higher levels of government.

Magda Maaoui 43:51
Yeah, absolutely. So it was a very good question, because I think it puts in perspective, some of the numbers. But also to sum it up, yeah, they're willing to pay the price. You know, I'm insisting on the fact that interesting reform for again, a program that I think is a success would be to strengthen this fee, or, you know, part of the fee at some point in terms of, once the state started understanding that some use basically, we were just fine paying the fee. They thought, "Okay, we're just going to multiply it up to maybe five times sometimes in certain contexts", but that's not really enforced. So a number I have for you is rarely do the amounts of fees are taken from the municipalities multiplied by more than three, never reaches five. And also, another sort of component that is part of this article 55 fee components is the prefects who are at a higher state of governments intervening at the municipality level and taking over the prerogative of giving construction permits. You know, that's the biggest prerogative when you talk about planning and housing, and the municipal level is having the power to give or deny the construction permit. And technically, the fee has added or associated possible multiplication of the fee combined with the prefects coming in, basically, like sheriffs, and being like, "Okay, I'm taking your toys away from you, and you're not allowed to give the permits anymore". But that has been done only in 11 municipalities so just to give you a number, we could do more of that.

Shane Phillips 45:33
Which California is doing a lot of that kind of thing with our Housing Accountability Unit and a lot more enforcement and oversight than we've we've had in the past, even though we've had a lot of these laws on the books for decades. Sounds like a similarity there.

Paavo Monkkonen 45:46
And we had the same similar discussion a couple years ago at the state level in terms of adding a fee or taking away some kinds of transportation funding to certain municipalities if they're not meeting their obligations. But I mean, I do like the idea of having a fee, in addition to the taking away local powers to some extent, and then using that money for social housing. I mean, it seems like a win-win there.

Magda Maaoui 46:09
Absolutely!

Shane Phillips 46:10
I was just going to add that the fact that you mentioned sheriff was very appropriate, because in your paper, you describe these cities as outlaw municipalities, and here in California, we would just call them like non- compliant cities or something boring, like that. So I think has been used...

Paavo Monkkonen 46:27
Chop law is inferior to our law.

I think we need to strengthen our language a little bit though. And maybe that's a good segue about the media. I mean, I think the role of the media is really interesting in this issue.

Magda Maaoui 46:40
I'm gonna just comment on the outlaw municipalities. It's so funny that you asked me about this translation that I use the, 'outlaw municipalities', you know, the direct translation and my defense is 'commune hors la loi', that's how we refer to them, and I do remember, you know, one Housing Studies reviewer telling me that my translation sounded like it was straight out of a Sergio Leone movie. And, you know, I indeed found the lingo that's used in France, you have practitioners who refer to these new specialties as 'regalticran', so recalcitrants; advocacy groups, affordable housing developers, nonprofits, they call them usually the outlaw municipalities. And then the media call them altogether 'mauvaise eleves' bad pupils. I do think that the bad pupils are...

Shane Phillips 47:27
I like that one too, it's very patronizing.

Magda Maaoui 47:31
But at the same time, you know, when you have a media call them bad pupils, bratty children, stuff like that, I think that it just takes away the accountability and agency, municipalities are just choosing to allocate their budgets in a certain way to just push away lower-income minority households, to put it bluntly,

Paavo Monkkonen 47:49
Exclusionary is better probably yeah,

Magda Maaoui 47:52
Right, right. But it's true that the outlaws is very like Western movie style. So yeah, it's just a way I think, to add something you're asking me about the purpose of the article 55 fee. And in connection with this sort of name that I use, it's to rebalance and sort of call upon the municipalities that are doing, for instance, 0%, social housing, there are places in the French Riviera, that it has 0% social housing, and they're on the list of places that have to do the work. And I think it sort of creates a bridge where the case studies that you use Paavo, in your study on the California Housing element where you mentioned correct me if I'm wrong, Palos Valdes and Beverly Hills, they're like Kafka-esque and their way of dealing with social housing quotas and talking about, you know, the potential and the future potential, which makes me think of science fiction more than policymaking. But, yeah, so I think there's bridges there.

Shane Phillips 48:55
It seems like France's policy, similar to 40B, is much more based on outcomes, as opposed to just planning for the future. And if it comes to pass, that's great. But if it doesn't, like "no, you know, that's not our fault". I did want to dwell on on the media a little bit more. You know, here in California, there's definitely been more attention to our Regional Housing Needs Assessment program, which allocated much higher housing targets throughout the Southern California in particular. And even prior to that, you kind of saw media paying attention to this whole eight-year housing element planning process. And this idea that certain cities were meeting their goals and others were, has that shifted in France like, has it changed over time, and do you see the media actually influencing this or is it just kind of commentary and not really changing behavior necessarily?

Magda Maaoui 49:54
Yes. Um, so of course, you know, when the media talks about bratty kids or about pupil, I don't think that the right-wing Mayor of Nice in the French Riviera, or the mayor of Les Allois Pellets outside of Paris, Patri Balcane, was facing prison charges for corruption really care about what printers think of them. And that's, you know, probably not so different from the politics of affordable housing of, say, Huntington Beach in Orange County or Palos Verdes, Beverly Hills, or Westchester in New York. But at the same time, I think that the question of media shaming matters, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm again going to do a bridge with the two countries. It matters more for those mayors who claim to be pro-affordable housing liberals, but they do not really walk the walk, they do not effectively remove all the barriers to build more affordable housing. So like, LA or Vercetti, or, you know, Lori Lightfoot or, and it was seen in France, an example of that is in Brittany, in the metropolitan region of Rennes, which had, so to give you a sense of how it functions, it was an aggregation of different municipalities that came together, and sort of... I don't know if the word incorporated works here, but incorporated into a larger metropolitan region. And yeah, the shaming worked for those portions of this newly created metro region, that were not following the rules and hoping you know, to sort of escape or find a loophole. So I think that's an example of that, because there were sort of this typology of elected officials I'd say. But ofcourse, at the end of the day, what matters is not just media shaming, you know, it's increased the fee, more systematic enforcement of eminent domain, for instance, that combined with the media shaming has been the equation or algorithm that really works.

Shane Phillips 51:46
Yeah, and I think to start to close this out, maybe we can talk about where there has been, you know, really significant success and progress. And so we can turn to Paris here. And I think there's been real success with housing production generally, and social housing in particular, in the past decade or so. And I have, again, some stats and context really quickly from you know, in a free market paper, like the US and much of the developing world or developed world rather, housing production in the Paris region fell from the 1980s to the 2000s, it fell from about 47,000 units to 37,000 units per year. Not a huge fall but it is a decline. And its share of the national population, also substantially dropped as the national population grew. So again, pulling from Yonas' paper, he notes that some shifts with a new Paris Mayor in 2001, and Nicolas Sarkozy, as president in 2007, both had more of an emphasis on housing, so that played a role and their efforts took a while to bear fruit. But housing production in the Paris region began to really gather momentum around 2015 or so. And from 2017 to 2019, the region built over 80,000 units per year on average, that's not just social housing but about a third of that was social housing. And again, that's in comparison to 37,000 units per year in the 2000s. That increase, also to your point was disproportionately in sort of the inner suburbs, rather than the outer suburbs, where it had been traditionally. Yona attributed this to four strategies pursued simultaneously, not just one thing, but he says, you know, one was a focus on affordable or social housing. Another was the harnessing of public land. Third was financial and regulatory incentives to make it easier to build housing targeted to various income levels. And then fourth was enforcement policies like the SRU and the article 55 clause, implemented by the national and regional governments to share the task of increasing production. So you know, you're based in Paris, I imagine you know it as well as anywhere else if not better, what's happening there? Can you tell us a little about the story how things have changed their over time?

Magda Maaoui 54:06
Yeah, it's it's a great start. You know, you summed it up very well with Yona's research paper, and this typology of the different tools that combined together make up this, what I would call, what he calls the Paris model or success story, kind of. So I know that, you know, the Paris context is really probably an oddity, and that we have publicly owned housing that forms a large share of rental housing. And then the private rental market locally is really strictly regulated by the national government that plays a role in the story. I'm going to sum up or extend from what you already said. We have a mayoral team right now, so not any more Bertrand Delanoë, who was predecessor to the current mayor Anne Hidalgo; Anne Hidalgo is extremely well known for her transportation policies....

Shane Phillips 54:57
We love her here yes.

Magda Maaoui 54:59
Yeah, I know, she's big on... I mean, her policies are widely discussed on Twitter, for instance, and among different advocacy and policy circles. But I'd say that her deputy mayor of housing is just... him and his team are doing fantastic work. And as an example, just to summarize the strategy here is, to tap into a variety of tools from the housing policy toolbox that is offered in Paris, both at the municipal level, but also enforced by the state, and to do stuff like think through abolishing the ghettos of the rich across the wealthiest arrondisement. So the idea is to secure social housing by prioritizing the city's wealthiest neighborhoods as targets for new social housing. And so, you know, when you compare it to a places like New York, where it's, for instance, harder to think about zoning for more affordability in wealthiest districts or wealthiest portions of the city, really in Paris, the strategy is to go in that direction very, very strongly and very aggressively. You add to this a very innovative rent control model, which has been in place and is being reinforced as we speak. You think also about ...I know you had an episode on vacancy, and vacancy taxes if I'm not mistaken, Paris has been really at the forefront of the battle against Airbnb in a lot of units in the city. You know, we're in the capital city, it's a global city, it's very tense market, super expensive housing stock, generally speaking, but there's behind that this whole team of dedicated public sector agents who are really trying to put together a nets of things to maintain the middle class and then lower income categories within the city.

Shane Phillips 56:53
You talked near the end of the article about how France is considering strengthening the SRU law, you know, possibly allowing other levels of government to intervene more directly, or as we mentioned, increasing the article 55 V, maybe by up to five times. Do you have any other updates on where those talks are going anything since the paper even came out? Possibly,

Magda Maaoui 57:14
yes. So my paper came out last August, and that was right in the middle of the context of policy reform. There's been a larger sort of omnibus bill, I don't know that's the correct name for it that covers a lot of grounds. So it can be, you know, it talks about schools and also trash and transportation infrastructure. But also it talks about the SRU program. And it was started or launched by the current president, Emmanuel Macron, as a response to the several protests that took place, that were led by the yellow vest movement, against the increase of prices, like gas prices, and all kinds of things that were not meeting the income they got, in a way. And so this bill that is being evaluated and has been evaluated since last summer, includes all kinds of things, but the reform of the SRU would be a strengthening on the one hand, so for instance, making it last longer than the expected horizon of it ending in 2025. They want to make it more permanent, that's a great thing. But then on the other hand, something that would be bad is they want to initiate, you know, a better rebalancing of housing construction trends, by capping the best students in a way or the best pupils, who are doing more than 40% housing stock, force them to stop basically building social housing, which, of course, a lot of advocates and leftist elected officials mobilized against because they said, "in order to rebalance, you cannot just, you know, cap and stop construction where it's happening, you have to enforce it in the exclusionary municipalities". So it's being evaluated, studied right now, there hasn't been as of yet a formal announcement, it's just still being evaluated. But that's a big sort of piece of news for the evolution of the SME program. And I would say, of course, it's also very big in terms of the upcoming elections, because, you know, we have right- wing and I'm going to just talk about the extreme right-wing for a second. We have candidates like Marie La Pen, you know, the most classic figure of extreme right in France, but also the new one, Eric Zemmour, who has been very mediatized in France, and I'm sure you've heard of him. Both have, you know, zero sort of detailed program of what affordable housing is going to look like if they were to be elected presidents, but both have spoken about the SRU, which, to me is very, very illustrative of how critical of a program it is. Zemmour wants to cancel the program. He just doesn't want social housing to exist anymore. I don't know. That's sort of his philosophy around housing, and Marie La Pen wants to forbid anybody from an immigrant background, or who would be foreign-born to access the social housing units financed by the SRU program, so that tells you how critical and central this program is. And the research around this program is as well.

Shane Phillips 1:00:14
What's next for you on the research? Are you doing more on the SRU law or other projects?

Magda Maaoui 1:00:19
Yes, an area of investigation that I would like to explore would be evaluating the different sort of balances between income categories and housing that's been built since 2000. And there's no available data as of yet. But that doesn't... I mean, that didn't stop me before, and I really hope that that will not stop me. And then in addition to that, yeah, I would continue evaluating the legacy of the SRU and combine it with larger research I've been doing so for instance, with my supervisor, Lance Freeman, we have been working on comparing upzoning programs in New York and Paris. So I've done that qualitatively. But we're also doing it quantitatively just to measure, you know, more ways of finding, and I love the theme of those international focuses that the episodes are taking, which is trying to find, you know, solutions for problems and solutions that may originate from abroad basically, or from this comparative perspective, and look at different housing markets and how they fare better or worse. Looking at programs or similar, tried to find tools and lessons. So that's the work I am doing and then yeah, next next, you know, I'm currently in academia, very happy with that. But maybe, you know, why not Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of housing.

Shane Phillips 1:01:43
I like it, I like it. Alright, Professor Magda Maaoui, thank you for joining us today.

Magda Maaoui 1:01:49
Thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 1:01:57
You can read more about Professor Maaoui's research and find our show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website lewis.ucla.edu. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips. And Paavo is there @elpavo. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai