Rent control: a two-year extension debated in the Senate from October 21

The extension of rent controls will be debated "from October 21 in the Senate", said Thursday September 3 on franceinfo Jacques Baudrier, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of housing. He assured that the government was committed to renewing the system. “We managed to win this battle,” said the communist elected official, who claimed to have participated in a meeting bringing together “around fifty elected officials”, during which the Minister of Housing “undertook to renew it for two years”.

“We are mobilized with the Housing Foundation and with many other communities on the left, but also on the right. We have obtained the fact that rent control will be extended by at least two years,” added Jacques Baudrier. The socialist deputy Iñaki Echaniz had already indicated to AFP in June that the government intended to include its bill, which initially aimed to perpetuate and improve rent control, on the Senate agenda at the start of the school year.

40% of rental advertisements excluding ceilings

According to the Housing Foundation's barometer, nearly four out of ten rental advertisements exceed the legal ceilings in cities subject to rent control. The situation is experiencing a deterioration considered "unprecedented" in Paris, where 46% of advertisements exceed the ceilings, and reaches up to 61% in certain municipalities of Seine-Saint-Denis.

For Jacques Baudrier, this deterioration is notably linked to uncertainty over the future of the system. “There was a press campaign and a political campaign to call into question the rent control. So, there are a certain number of owners who believed that the rent control was going to stop at the end of the experiment, that is to say on November 26,” he explained.

A “meeting-seminar” on September 11

Beyond the extension of the system, the Parisian elected official asks above all that it be strengthened, in particular to fight against "rent supplements" allowing, according to him, owners to circumvent the ceilings, by citing for example the proximity of a metro station or the presence of a refrigerator in the accommodation.

Jacques Baudrier also announced a "major meeting-seminar" on September 11, bringing together "many elected officials from all over France" and the Housing Foundation, in order to mobilize so that the law adopted by the end of October makes it possible to make supervision "even more effective". “We fought together and we are going to obtain sustainability. If we had not won this battle, it would have been catastrophic: there would have been an explosion in rents in Paris and in all the big cities,” he concluded.