ABSTRACT
In France, as in many countries, social housing is in a state of crisis. Homeless people are invading the streets. The level of unpaid rents and mortgages is soaring. But this crisis is not simply sectoral in nature. On the contrary, the neocraft character of this industry would seem to facilitate a switch to the newly fashionable post-fordist methods of organising production. Restrictions on public spending and rising interest rates have little to do with the sector itself, and do not reflect, at least in France, a decrease in the social legitimacy of housing assistance: they are only the specific consequences of a general economic crisis. The explosion of the property market in the late 1980s has not affected those suburban areas devoted to social housing, although it has affected the coveted de facto social housing zones in the city centres. In fact, the land question was much more urgent at the end of the ‘glorious years of fordism’ when France was building more than 700,000 homes a year. Similarly, the bursting of the speculative bubble and consequent depression of the building sector in the early 1990s have not affected the construction of mainstream social housing.
