“The government’s desire is to give local authorities more tools in their housing policy. This is the objective of the decree published today which gives 2000 additional municipalities the possibility of increasing the tax on secondary residences”, thus expressed the Minister of Housing Patrice Vergriete on his account X. This Saturday August 26 is indeed appeared in the Official Journal the “updating and extension of the scope of application of the annual tax on vacant housing”.
“With this decree, in these municipalities, vacant housing will now be taxed to encourage their owner to put them back on the market,” continues the minister.
This text – which must thus enter into force the day after its publication – is intended for municipalities which, “without belonging to a zone of continuous urbanization of more than 50,000 inhabitants, are confronted with a marked imbalance between supply and housing demand”. This results in their territory “serious difficulties of access to housing on the whole of the existing residential stock”. Concretely, rents are very expensive there, and real estate prices are much too high for those who live there year-round.
Asked about housing policy in France this Saturday on France Culture, Patrice Vergriete announced that “the decree on the increase in housing tax on second homes and vacant housing” had just “been published” according to the “Prime Minister’s Commitment”. And to specify that “more than 2,200 (new) municipalities” were going to “enter into this device for increasing the housing tax on second homes and vacant dwellings”.
Among them, tourist towns in the south of France such as Saint-Tropez, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus or Menton, or even Corsica, such as Appietto and Sarrola-Carcopino, but also all the islands on the Atlantic coast, -de-Sein to the Ile de Ré via the Ile-aux-Moines or even Groix, Houat and Hoëdic. But also certain municipalities of the DOM-TOM, such as Le Diamant in Martinique or La Désirade in Guadeloupe. They thus join the list of major French cities such as Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nice and Toulouse.
In all these municipalities, it is up to the mayors, and therefore to the municipal councils, to choose whether or not to increase the housing tax. Knowing that according to the law, it will be possible for them to “increase by a percentage between 5% and 60% their share of the housing tax contribution on second homes and other furnished premises not assigned to housing principal due in respect of furnished accommodation”.
The Minister of Housing also said he was “favorable” to the establishment of new regulatory tools in the hands of local authorities, “to respond territory by territory to the challenges of the housing crisis”. Some municipalities are interested in having furnished tourist accommodation, which in particular helps in the development of tourism in their territory, while others, on the contrary, want to regulate the number of them, to avoid withdrawing accommodation from the so-called classic market.
