Contributing to analyses of housing welfare and inequality, this article by Renaud le Goix (Université Paris cité / Géographie-cités) William Kutz et Ronan Ysebaert, published in Housing Studies, examines how the territorial circumscription of asset-based welfare policies impact the pattern and trajectory of residential inequality in situ. The authors look to France, which since the 2000s has used asset-based welfare policies as a tool for rebalancing local territorial cohesion throughout the country.
These policies, which once had broad nationwide eligibility, have progressively fragmented into a patchwork of geographically-defined benefits and incentives that seek to catalyze buying and selling in certain places over others.
Drawing on aggregated datasets of individual housing transactions, we map how asset-based welfare policies have redrawn the geography of residential inequality in recent decades. We find a growing bifurcation arising from the reforms: trending at once towards increasingly volatile and unequal outcomes. As this has happened amid explicit governmental efforts to reduce socio-spatial imbalances in the country, we question whether asset-based welfare can meaningfully provide the security and well-being it purports to realize.
Overall, we can say that as opposed to consistency and stability, which is so crucial to the construction of asset-based welfare, residential markets in France display a considerable amount of diverging valorization pathways that are geographically clustered by region. The number of municipalities characterized by risk represents the lion’s share of our sample.
Le Goix, R., Kutz, W., & Ysebaert, R. (2025). More volatile, less equal: housing and welfare in 21st century France. Housing Studies, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2025.2565248
