The Impact of Social Mix Policies in France

In France, a Housing Act, called Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain (Solidarity and Urban Renewal), came into force in 2000. Its main aim is to challenge segregation in housing and to strengthen solidarity among citizens. It promotes a tenure mix through legal requirements: in urban areas, every commune should reach a minimum of 20 per cent social housing in its housing stock before 2020. This paper attempts to explain why policy makers believe in the virtues of a tenure mix. The second aim is to assess the discrepancies between the rhetorical level of policy aims and the pragmatic level of policy outputs, raising methodological issues on the relevance of the communal scale for the measure of segregation and social mix. The conclusion raises paradoxical issues: social class segmentation resists social mixing more strongly than ethnic segmentation; the French social mix policy strengthens ghettos and hinders the right to decent housing for the very poor.