Could France’s Approach to Combating NIMBYism Work in the United States?

[M II A II R II K]

Could France’s Approach to Combating NIMBYism Work in the United States?


November 9, 2021

By Josh Cohen

Read More: https://shelterforce.org/2021/11/09/...united-states/

Twenty years ago France passed a law that required cities to have a certain percentage of social housing or face penalties for failing to comply. Since then the country’s most exclusionary cities and suburbs have seen a fivefold increase in the availability of social housing, according to a new study.

- Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain, or Urban Solidarity and Renewal (SRU), mandated that French municipalities ensure that at least 20 percent of their total housing stock be “social housing,” subsidized affordable housing restricted to lower-income residents. --- More than two decades after the law’s passage, new research from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy attempts to determine whether SRU has been effective in its aim to get every French city to do its fair share when it comes to providing affordable housing and how such a law could work in the U.S. Though many French cities have yet to meet the 25 percent social housing threshold, author Yonah Freemark, an Urban Institute senior research associate, says the law has been a success.

- The major accomplishment of the law has been a reduction in the level of exclusivity of the wealthiest communities in the country. When you look at the sort of suburban cities where affordable housing had been most rare before the law was passed, the amount of social housing in those places increased by fivefold after the law was passed. So that is certainly a success. The other thing that the law has done is it has significantly reduced the concentration of affordable housing in parts of the urban areas where it has been implemented. That is really a positive thing. --- That said, the law has not accomplished all of the things it aimed for. There’s still a significant gap between what would need to be accomplished in terms of adding social housing units and what is actually being accomplished based on the law.

- The law was not intended specifically to increase the number of social housing units in the country as a whole. Arguably France needs more social housing units. It obviously has a lot more than the United States does, but the goal of this law was not really to increase the number of social housing units. In metropolitan areas in France, the number of social housing units did increase over this period, but they did not increase as quickly as the number of market-rate units over the same period. The main accomplishment of the law was suggesting that social housing units should not all be located in the poorest communities, which had been much more of the case before. That social housing units need to be distributed fairly across urban areas.

- The first thing that is clear is that this would have to be undertaken at the state level, not the federal level. State governments are typically those that oversee local land use law. They’re essentially the custodians of municipal government. Because the concentration of affordable housing is so much more extreme in the United States than it is in France, it would be harder to achieve some of the changes that have occurred in SRU law, especially because there isn’t enough funding for affordable housing. One thing I show is that in Connecticut, if you wanted everywhere to have a level of affordable housing that New Haven had, you would have to fund 26,000 new affordable housing units, which is more than the state of Connecticut has received in LIHTC funding since the program was initiated in 1986.

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[Acajack]

It's totally unrelated to what France is doing (in spite of what some might think) but Quebec does something like this as well. As in it forces municipalities to mix things up in terms of housing types.

For example, not too far from where I live, there is this social housing:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4966...7i16384!8i8192

Which is less than 500 m or a 5-minute walk away, from this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4983...7i13312!8i6656

That path in the second photo leads straight to the basketball court and skating rink in front of the social housing buildings.

And this isn't just affluent infill into an already poor area with a good location.

The whole area was planned this way, and built around the same time.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Im pretty sure we have new housing minimum requirements in CA now as well. Each city has to provide a certain amount of new housing under state rules.

[mhays]

Washington State also requires municipalities in urban counties (96% of the state pop?) to accommodate growth, and has measures to make some of it affordable. In fact, if they allow a hotel they have to allow a shelter. But all of that depends on developers and agencies wanting to build -- nobody is mandating that social housing gets built.

[10023]

Without reading the article, I strongly suspect the answer is no given the vastly (and I mean vastly) different concepts of individual property rights in France and the US. They would be better off looking to the UK, which is politically well to the left of the US overall but has a similar legal system and ideas about property.