With its White Paper on housing, MEDEF aimed to remind us that employment and housing are intimately linked. As a major player due to its economic significance, the construction sector also plays a key role in the energy transition (buildings account for 40% of energy consumption) and in employment.
By proposing pragmatic solutions, MEDEF, FNAIM, FFB, and FPI believe that reviving the housing sector is one of the major levers for economic recovery and employment.
Professional mobility and residential mobility need to be better aligned; and housing should no longer be a barrier for French employees, who consider it their major concern after employment.
For FNAIM, a member of MEDEF and active participant in the creation of the White Paper, housing policy must indeed incorporate the 34 million existing housing units into its vision: construction is not the only solution.
Within the framework of MEDEF’s White Paper, FNAIM focuses its proposals particularly around three major axes:
The renovation of the existing housing stock. For FNAIM, it is notably necessary to improve the existing financial incentive schemes while ensuring their sustainability: maintaining the VAT rate at 5.5% on energy renovation works and the Energy Transition Tax Credit. In co-owned properties, specific measures like the collective eco-PTZ should provide long validity periods to account for decision-making processes imposed by legislation (holding of general meetings).
The establishment of a true status for private landlords with a suitable and sustainable tax regime, long called for by FNAIM, remains just as urgent.
Other measures are equally necessary, such as:
- repealing the most counterproductive provisions of the ALUR law, notably rent control;
- revising the rules for passing charges onto tenants;
- simplifying and shortening procedures against bad-faith defaulting tenants;
- relaxing conditions allowing the owner to regain the use of their property at the end of a lease.
