Impacts of a French Urban Renewal Program on Local Housing Markets

Abstract

Urban renewal programs have been implemented in many countries to fight housing decay, poverty concentration, and associated social ills in the last decades. In this paper, we propose an evaluation of a large-scale urban renewal program launched in France in 2004. Using a novel estimator aimed at avoiding bias in the estimation of treatment effects heterogeneous across treatment groups or time periods, and complementing its results with a more precise double fixed effects difference-in-differences estimator, we find no significant effect of the program on housing values and transaction volume. However, we do find a significant impact on the social profile of housing buyers and sellers: an increased number of upward transitions of housing units, from blue-collar sellers to intermediate category buyers or from intermediate category sellers to executive buyers, and reduced housing transactions among executives. Altogether, our findings suggest a renewed interest of upper socio-professional categories to invest or keep their property in the renovated neighborhoods.