Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP17535
Authors: Guillaume Chapelle; Laurent Gobillon; Benjamin Vignolles
Abstract: We study the effects of the SRU law introduced in France in December 2000 to support scattered development of public housing in cities and favor social mixity. This law imposes 20% of public housing to all medium and large municipalities of large-enough cities, with fees for those not abiding by the law. Using exhaustive fiscal data, we evaluate the effects of the law over the 1996-2008 period using a difference-in-differences approach at the municipality level. We find that the law stimulated public housing construction in treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings. Within these municipalities, it decreased public housing segregation but it barely decreased low-income segregation. A mediation analysis actually shows that the construction and dispersion of public dwellings generated by the SRU law did not affect much low-income segregation. We investigate intra-municipal dynamics by running block-level regressions that include municipality fixed effects. Within treated municipalities with a low proportion of public dwellings, public housing concentration increased to a larger extent in blocks with below-average income and below-average public housing concentration.
Keywords: Housing; Prices; Policy Evaluation; Construction; Public Housing
JEL Codes: R31; R38
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| SRU law (K29) | public housing construction (R31) |
| public housing construction (R31) | low-income segregation (R23) |
| SRU law (K29) | low-income segregation (R23) |
| SRU law (K29) | public housing segregation (R28) |