Apur'Café #19 : The fight against substandard housing in Paris - Assessment of action carried out from 2002 to 2018

On Thursday 3rd June 2021, Apur presented 20 years of work on substandard housing in Paris, with the assessment of action taken from 2002 to 2018.

As from 2002, the City of Paris and the State together took the decision to eradicate substandard housing on the Parisian territory by providing considerable ressources and developing new processing tools. This plan marked a turning point in the way of dealing with substandard housing conditions, notably by introducing an intricate work method, and was carried out on an unprecedented scale. In around 20 years, 2,200 substandard or run down Parisian residential buildings, that is 56,000 dwellings, were upgraded. 

These results were obtained thanks to numerous schemes put in place: the 450 most run down buildings were subject to public acquisition and were demolished, rebuilt and replaced by over 5,300 social housing units. The remaining 1,700, less run down buildings, remained private and benefited from support and subsidies amounting to 238 million euros of work.

This presentation was also an opportunity to re-examine the results of the process to prevent old Parisian housing from becoming run down in the 2020 report.

Publications carried out by:

• Stéphanie Jankel, Director of Studies
• Corentin Ortais, Research Manager

Cartography and statistical processing:

• Gustavo Vela-Barron, IT specialist cartographer

With contributions by:

• Pascale Dietrich-Ragon, Research Manager with INED
• Nancy Bouché, Honorary General Inspector of Public Facilities, Honorary President of the National Centre for the Fight against Substandard Housing