Public housing development and segregation: SRU law in France

Guillaume Chapelle, Laurent Gobillon and Benjamin Vignolles

No 17535, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the effects of the SRU law introduced in France in December 2000 to support scattered development of public housing in cities and favor social mixity. This law imposes 20% of public housing to all medium and large municipalities of large-enough cities, with fees for those not abiding by the law. Using exhaustive fiscal data, we evaluate the effects of the law over the 1996-2008 period using a difference-in-differences approach at the municipality level. We find that the law stimulated public housing construction in treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings. Within these municipalities, it decreased public housing segregation but it barely decreased low-income segregation. A mediation analysis actually shows that the construction and dispersion of public dwellings generated by the SRU law did not affect much low-income segregation. We investigate intra-municipal dynamics by running block-level regressions that include municipality fixed effects. Within treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings, public housing concentration increased to a larger extent in blocks with below-average income and below-average public housing concentration.

Keywords: Housing prices; Policy evaluation; Construction; public housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R31 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09
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