More volatile, less equal: housing and welfare in 21st century France

Contributing to analyses of housing welfare and inequality, this article examines how the territorial circumscription of asset-based welfare policies impact the pattern and trajectory of residential inequality in situ. We 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.