ABSTRACT
Housing policy has been instrumental in the evolution of suburbs in the United States and France. During the postwar period, the French state actively produced collective social housing estates for families impacted by the devastation of the war. In the 1970s, the French middle class abandoned collective housing estates that became increasingly occupied by the working poor and immigrant groups. In the postwar United States, state production of social housing occurred in cities rather than suburbs. During this time, White working and middle classes, encouraged by federal housing policy, left the city and focused on ensuring their purchase of suburban single-family housing to the neglect of minority populations and neighborhoods.
Social mixing has become the cornerstone of more recent housing policy in both countries. In France, polices have sought to redevelop social housing and introduce market-rate rental housing and ownership options for the middle classes in the banlieues since at least the 1990s. In the United States, efforts have focused on encouraging the spatial mobility of poor people, often to the suburbs, through the use of housing vouchers that can be used in the private rental market, and encouraging middle-income people to move to mixed-income and mixed tenure developments in the central city (i.e., the HOPE VI program). In France, there are doubts that regenerating the banlieues without addressing structural problems (e.g., high rates of unemployment among young males of North African origin) will succeed in solving problems for the poor minority populations who live there. In the U.S., spatial mobility of low-income minorities to areas of real opportunity in middle-class suburbs has proven difficult. We argue in this chapter that the emphasis on social mixing without addressing underlying problems, such as unemployment and racial and ethnic discrimination, is highly problematic.
