Faced with a “real urgency” in this area, the city of Marseille wants to produce 27,000 housing units by 2028, i.e. 4,500 per year, including 2,300 “affordable” housing units, the municipality unveiled on Friday by presenting its contribution to the future local program of the metropolitan habitat (PLH).
This so-called “affordable” housing includes both social rental housing, managed housing for precarious people and housing benefiting from a social home ownership scheme.
“In these 2,300 affordable housing units, 1,500 will be built new and 800 created in the existing private stock by rehabilitation or restructuring”, detailed Mathilde Chaboche, deputy mayor of Marseille in charge of urban planning.
The latter also insisted on the need to “break down and distribute” this supply of affordable housing across all sectors of the city, which is not currently the case.
“For years, we have been sailing on sight”
The second city of France also conditions these objectives on a “territorial justice” on the scale of the 92 municipalities of the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, and this in terms of social housing “but not only”, insisted the elected representative of the “Marseille Spring”, a broad union of the left.
However, we are witnessing, according to her, an “unequal distribution of the constructive effort on the scale of the territory”, with “small municipalities around, very attached to the preservation of the living environment of their inhabitants”, who have contracted a “form of symbolic and ethical debt vis-à-vis Marseille”, whose proximity guarantees them an economic and cultural dynamism that they would not have otherwise.
“The metropolis has no PLH, it should have had one since its creation (in 2016), and unfortunately, for years, we have been navigating on sight on this housing issue, which is nevertheless eminently political and strategic”, added Mathilde Chaboche, stressing that this future PLH, which should be adopted by the metropolitan council at the end of 2022, will commit the territory for six years.
We are faced with a “true urgency of the housing issue in this territory” of Marseilles, characterized both “by its poverty and by the legacy of poor development on the urban level, in terms of the production of housing and in terms of its distribution, ”lamented the elected official for urban planning.