Underoccupied housing: Ian Brossat wants to requisition empty buildings and tackles Marine Le Pen

Rooms remain empty and houses are empty. A quarter of French households live in a home that's too big for them, according to a study by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). This affects 8 million primary residences. These are most often houses inhabited by elderly people whose children have left home. Nearly half of the families moved into these homes more than twenty years ago.

And this rate of underoccupied primary residences is increasing. It was 22% in 2006, compared to 25% in 2022. The reason, according to INSEE, is the aging of the population. But only a minority of these households consider their home "too big," while 9% want to move.

"This study is a bit of a mixed bag," Ian Brossat, a French Communist Party senator and candidate for mayor of Paris, said on RMC and RMC Story this Wednesday. "Retirees who welcome their children and grandchildren during the holidays should not be touched," he asserted.

"On the other hand, in high-demand areas like Paris, there are homes that are completely unoccupied, sometimes for years, and which are owned by institutions and not by individuals," warns the senator, who assures that he has launched expropriation procedures and then acquisition by the city of Paris to transform certain buildings into social housing.

"We need a real fight against housing vacancy for many years," insists Ian Brossat .

This reassured Marine Le Pen , who responded to the INSEE study by asking: "Are you going to force the French to live together? It's starting to get a bit much, if they want to have two more rooms, that's their business, it's their money. It's becoming the USSR," she said on X.

"We can't blame the INSEE for conducting studies; the INSEE has established facts and isn't recommending anything," Ian Brossat replied. "I have the impression that it's the phrase 'when the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger,'" the senator countered.

"What I'm saying is that when we have empty homes in areas that have been under pressure for several years, we have to go as far as expropriation," he insists, while in Paris, "3,000 homes have been empty for more than 5 years and 3,000 people are sleeping on the streets, including 400 children.

Many of the underoccupied homes mentioned in the INSEE study are located in Brittany or Hauts-de-France. Île-de-France and the overseas departments, on the other hand, are the least affected.