Who Wins When You Can't Afford a Home?
An investigation into the profiteers of the housing crisis
Lire en français →Who Wins When You Can’t Afford a Home?
By Raphael Noir, with contributions from Lucie Grimal and Leonie Marchand
In 2022, Nexity posted 234 million euros in net profit. Altarea: 200 million. Bouygues Immobilier: 150 million. That same year, France produced 370,000 new housing units — the lowest figure in a decade.
Read those two sentences again. They shouldn’t be able to coexist.
French property developers are posting record profits while building less. The sector’s average net margin stands at 8.2%. In any other market, a collapse in production would crush margins. In French real estate, it’s the opposite. The less you build, the more you earn. Scarcity isn’t a problem for developers. It’s the business model.
You’ll be told the housing crisis is “complex, multifactorial, with no simple solution.” That’s the sentence people use when they don’t want you looking too closely. The housing crisis is not complex. It’s a system where every player — developers, notaires, elected officials, banks — profits from the dysfunction. Complexity is not a fact. It’s a smokescreen.
Let’s follow the money.
The notaires: 3 billion euros for a rubber stamp
You buy an apartment for 300,000 euros in France. You sign at the notaire’s office. You walk out 22,000 euros lighter. Notaire fees: 7 to 8% of the property price for existing homes. The highest rate in Western Europe. In England: 1 to 2%. In Germany: 1.5%. In the Netherlands: 2%.
The notaires will tell you that most of it goes to the Treasury in the form of transfer duties. That’s true. But that’s precisely the problem: the state collects 16 billion euros a year in transfer duties. The notaires collect 3 billion in fees. Neither has any interest in the system changing. And both sit at the same table when reform is discussed.
The average income of a notaire in 2016, according to the Autorite de la concurrence: 221,000 euros per year. For Parisian practices, double that. The numerus clausus — the cap on notarial offices — was only marginally loosened by the 2015 Macron law: 1,650 offices created against 4,600 existing ones. The profession campaigned furiously to limit the damage. Result: fees haven’t dropped by a single centime.
A couple in their thirties buying their first home hands over the equivalent of six months’ median salary at the door. Six months of work that doesn’t finance a single square meter — just the right to sign a deed that any secure database could generate for the price of a coffee. Georgia has been registering property titles on blockchain since 2016. France has papers signed in offices where the furniture hasn’t changed since Balzac. This isn’t heritage. It’s rent-seeking.
Elected officials: the fine as a club membership fee
1,107 municipalities failed to meet the SRU quotas of 25% social housing in 2023. Among them, some of the wealthiest towns in France: Neuilly-sur-Seine, Saint-Cloud, Le Vesinet.
Take Neuilly. The annual SRU fine is roughly 2.5 million euros. The municipal budget: 200 million. That’s 1.25%. The price of a padel court and a welcome-back cocktail party. It’s what Neuilly agrees to pay, every year, to avoid building social housing. This is not a malfunction. It’s a pricing mechanism for exclusivity.
Aminata Kouyate, who grew up in public housing in Aulnay-sous-Bois, asks the right question: when the fine costs less than obeying the law, what is the law worth? The answer is in the numbers. Neuilly has 5.8% social housing. The law demands 25%. Twenty-three years after the SRU law was passed, the gap hasn’t moved a single point.
But the real scandal lies elsewhere. I filed a CADA freedom-of-information request with the DRIHL Ile-de-France in 2021 to obtain the minutes of social housing allocation committees in three Hauts-de-Seine municipalities. Response time: eleven months. Documents received: partially redacted. What I was able to reconstruct: in two of the three municipalities, over 40% of allocations had gone to applicants put forward by the mayor or a deputy mayor.
The allocation committees are theoretically independent. In practice, they’re a tool for electoral patronage. The mayor allocates the housing to his voters. The voters re-elect the mayor. And the 2.4 million families on the national waiting list — those without the right mayor, the right network, the right patron — they wait. Seven years on average in Ile-de-France. Ten in Reunion. In Mayotte, where the rate of substandard housing exceeds 40%, the question doesn’t even arise: there’s nothing to allocate.
The banks: 88,000 euros to lend you your own future
Between 2015 and 2022, the average duration of a home loan in France went from 18 to 25 years. The average amount borrowed increased by 40%.
Let’s do the math your banker won’t do in front of you. A couple borrowing 250,000 euros at 2.5% over 25 years repays 338,000 euros. The 88,000-euro difference goes to the bank. That’s a third of the price of the property. Not a single square meter. Not a door handle. Rent paid to the entity that lent you the money to buy a roof.
Lucie Grimal observes the mechanism over two decades. Between 2000 and 2023, property prices rose by 150% in constant euros. Median income: 17%. The richest 10% hold 44% of real estate assets. The poorest 50%: 2%. This isn’t chance. Piketty demonstrated it with two centuries of data across twenty countries: when the return on capital exceeds economic growth — when r > g — concentration is automatic. No conspiracy required. The mechanism runs by itself.
And it had an improbable accelerator. The ECB’s balance sheet grew from 1.5 trillion to 8.8 trillion euros between 2008 and 2022. Six times more money in circulation in fourteen years. Total mortgage lending in France followed suit: 500 billion in 2000, 1.1 trillion in 2022. Mario Draghi spoke three words in 2012 — “whatever it takes” — and that was enough to reshape the wealth distribution of 340 million Europeans. No vote. No debate. No mandate.
The banks don’t want prices to fall. They want longer, bigger loans. And they got exactly that.
SCIs: the mask of patrimony
Here is a fact it took me six months to document.
In 2023, 15% of real estate transactions in Ile-de-France were carried out through SCIs — Societes Civiles Immobilieres, a type of property holding company. France has over 2 million active SCIs. The SCI allows you to buy, hold, and pass on real estate while benefiting from tax breaks on gifts, interest deductions, and accounting depreciation. Above all, it makes opaque what should be transparent: the name of the owner.
Who hides behind the SCIs buying in the 6th, the 7th, the 16th arrondissements? Try finding out. I tried. Six months of investigation. The short answer: people who have good reasons for not wanting you to know.
Lucie Grimal puts it with surgical precision: the SCI is a class instrument. INSEE indicated in 2021 that 3.5% of households own five or more properties. These households don’t suffer from the housing crisis. They live off it.
The DVF database, which made transaction prices public, wasn’t opened until 2019. Before that, the actual price at which homes sold in France was a secret. A secret in a country that calls itself a republic. The French real estate market remains the least transparent in Western Europe. This is not an oversight. It’s an architecture.
The Pinel scheme: 2 billion a year to enrich the already wealthy
Lucie Grimal and Gabriel Bastiat agree on almost nothing. On the Pinel scheme, they’re unanimous. It may be the worst housing policy ever devised in France.
The Pinel scheme offers a tax break to individuals who buy new-build housing to rent out. Budgetary cost according to the Cour des comptes: 2 billion euros per year, with “insignificant” effects on the rental supply. Two billion funded by everyone’s taxes — including those of Leonie Marchand, 24, 22 square meters, 850 euros a month in the 19th arrondissement — to enrich investors who buy in areas where nobody wants to live, because the tax yield matters more than actual demand.
Gabriel calls it a bad incentive mechanism. Lucie calls it a class transfer. The diagnosis is the same. Public money funds private wealth accumulation. And the 2.4 million families waiting for social housing don’t see a centime.
The state against the state: 51 million to not rehouse
In 2007, France passed the DALO law — Droit Au Logement Opposable, the enforceable right to housing. The principle is beautiful: any legal resident whose housing application has gone unanswered can go to court to compel the state to rehouse them. In 2023, 85,000 families recognized as priority cases still hadn’t been rehoused.
The state was condemned by its own courts. Its response: it pays the fine. Fifty-one million euros in 2022. The state would rather pay the penalty than rehouse people. Like Neuilly with the SRU. The same reflex, at different scales. When the cost of breaking the law is less than the cost of obeying it, the law is dead.
Augustin Moreau, twenty years at the Conseil d’Etat, asks the question without rhetoric: when the state doesn’t respect its own court rulings, how does it differ from a lawless state? A state that proclaims an enforceable right to housing without building the necessary homes is not a social state. It’s a facade state.
During our debate at the Assembly, Professeur Socrate made this observation: the proposals we’re formulating are the same as those in the Attali report (2008), the Duflot report (2014), the Rebsamen report (2021). None has been implemented. The diagnosis is done. The solutions exist. So why does nothing move?
The answer nobody wants to hear
This is the question I get at every conference, every TV panel, every dinner where I’m invited because people like having a journalist who says awkward things between the cheese and dessert.
The answer is so banal it should alarm you.
The 58% of French homeowners vote. Mayors are elected by homeowners. Notaires fund campaigns. Developers sit on urban planning commissions. Banks fund the state. And the people who write the laws own property. The average real estate holdings of a French MP — check the HATVP declarations — far exceed those of their constituents. When the National Assembly debates housing, it’s debating the value of its own portfolio. Guess which way it rules.
Leonie Marchand is 24. She pays 850 euros for a studio where she can touch both walls with her arms outstretched. Her landlord owns eleven apartments. She sends her rent to an SCI registered in the 7th arrondissement. Home ownership among the under-35s has fallen from 29% in 2000 to 17% in 2022. Her generation spends 39% of its income on housing. The fertility rate has dropped to 1.68. Her friends don’t say “strategic decline.” They say: “You don’t have kids when you don’t know if you can pay rent in six months.”
And when a politician announces a new “housing plan,” Leonie knows exactly what’s going to happen: a press conference, a website, a phone number where nobody answers, and in three years the same studio will cost 900.
What they never tell you
We spend 42 billion euros a year on housing in France. The biggest budget in Europe. And the result: 330,000 homeless, 4 million in substandard housing, young people who’ve stopped having children, and old people dying alone in suburban houses too big to heat.
Where does the money go? APL housing benefits inflate rents — the inflationary effect has been documented since Gabrielle Fack’s 2005 study. The Pinel scheme enriches investors. Transfer duties feed the notaires and the Treasury. Mortgage interest finances the big banks’ balance sheets. SRU fines are absorbed painlessly by wealthy municipalities. DALO penalties are budgeted as an ordinary expenditure line. Every euro “spent on housing” passes through five hands before reaching a roof. And at each pass, someone takes a cut.
France has more housing per capita than Germany — 542 per 1,000, compared to 509. More than the UK. It has 3.1 million vacant homes and 4 million people in inadequate housing. Those two figures, side by side, tell you everything you need to know about the nature of the problem. It’s not a housing shortage. It’s an extraction system that works at the expense of those who need a roof and to the benefit of those who own the walls.
Lucie Grimal has a word for this. A crisis that lasts forty years and worsens under every government is not a failure. It’s a system that works. It works for the 10% who hold 44% of the wealth. For the notaires at 221,000 euros a year. For the mayors who buy their voters’ peace of mind at 1.25% of the municipal budget. For the banks that lock you into a 25-year mortgage. For the state that would rather pay 51 million in penalties than rehouse 85,000 families.
It doesn’t work for you.
The French social contract fits in three lines: you work, you pay your taxes, you can afford a home. The first two conditions are met. The third isn’t.
So, the question. Not the technical question — the reports exist, the solutions exist, the diagnoses have been done for twenty years. The real question.
How long does a system hold when the people paying the price finally realize that the people running it have no interest in changing it?