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 did not decrease much low-income segregation. We investigate their intra-municipal dynamics by running block-level regressions that include municipality fixed effects. Within these treated municipalities, the concentration of public dwellings increased to a larger extent in blocks with below-average income and below-average concentration of public dwellings.