The Minister Delegate in charge of Housing, Guillaume Kasbarian, continues to work on a bill around social housing which promises to be explosive. The manager had already announced in mid-April that the objective of his text, presented in May to the Council of Ministers, was to restrict the criteria for access to HLM and, thus, force a certain number of households to move.
The echoes revealed on Friday evening one of the powerful levers that the executive intends to activate: the evolution of the rules governing the additional rent.
Over-rent, a rebalancing mechanism
The additional rent is officially called the solidarity rent supplement (SLS). This is therefore an additional rent that households in the social housing sector must pay if they exceed the resource conditions. Thus, if their income exceeds the ceilings in force for the allocation of HLM by at least 20%, they must pay an additional sum.
According to the Social Housing Union, 80,000 households are now affected. For the vast majority of cases, these are households who obtained social housing while respecting the criteria before subsequently seeing their income increase.
Exceptions to limit difficult situations
This mechanism was designed to take into account changes in life and not evict a family from social housing when they might need it again. In addition, depending on where your accommodation is located or your personal situation, this rule may not apply.
For example, if you are disabled or if you are in a so-called “stressed” area (where the possibilities of finding other, non-social housing, are very limited), you will not be affected by an additional rent.
On the other hand, if the income earned exceeds the resource ceiling by 150%, tenants are asked to leave their social housing within two years.
What the government wants to do
To believe The echoes, the future bill intends to modify two criteria:
- that of the additional rent applied when income exceeds the ceiling by a single euro;
- that of the maximum excess tolerance rate before expulsion. Thus, as soon as income exceeds the resource ceiling by 120%, tenants will have to leave.
As a result, 120,000 additional households would have to pay an SLS, or a total of 200,000 households affected by the additional rent. The government’s objective is twofold: to recover social housing and to garner additional financial resources.
