Mobilization in Lyon to extend rent control

They want to extend rent controls. Around a hundred people mobilized on Wednesday evening in Lyon to defend the rent control system, the experiment of which ends at the end of November, while the new LR president of the Lyon metropolis, Véronique Sarselli, does not want to see it renewed.

Laura, for example, has been living since 2023 in a shared accommodation of seven people in Villeurbanne, the other city in the Lyon region subject to this supervision. Its owner did not respect the law and cheated on the number of square meters: “We saw that it was 123 m2, instead of the 160 written on the lease”. With her roommates, they were able to recover around 4,000 euros in overpayments, she told the audience.

According to the Foundation for Housing in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, co-organizer of the event with the CSF (Union Confederation of Families) and the Bail (Inter-tenant Associative Brigade), 444 households have locally obtained the restitution of more than one million euros in rent unduly collected since 2021. “It is a system which caps the rents of tenants in the private sector based on the levels of the market" and "moderates the most abusive rents", estimates Manuel Domergue, director of studies at the foundation. Knowing that “the tenants of private housing are increasingly low-income households in France, in big cities, young people, students, single mothers, people who have small jobs,” he lists.

Towards an end of experimentation in Lyon?

Currently being tested in 70 municipalities in France, including Lyon and Villeurbanne, rent control could end at the end of November if no parliamentary text provides for its extension. This gathering also comes at a time when the new LR president of the metropolis of Lyon, Véronique Sarselli, has made numerous declarations to demand an end to this system, advocating instead a “clash of offers” of housing.

“We have a metropolis of Lyon which is the only one of all the communities which have adopted rent control in France, and says “we stop” at the moment when the cities of the left and the right, I am thinking of Bayonne, are mobilizing so that there is the perpetuation of rent control”, was indignant to the press a few days ago Renaud Payre, co-president of the environmentalist and related group of the Métropole de Lyon.