Housing

Social housing in Paris as of 2012

Paris is the fifth most expensive city in the world for luxury housing: €18,499 per square metre

(€1,720/sq ft) in 2014.[120]

According to a 2012 study for the La Tribune newspaper, the most

expensive street is the quai des Orfèvres in the 1st arrondissement, with an average price of

€20,665 per square metre (€1,920/sq ft), against €3,900 per square metre (€360/sq ft) for rue

Pajol in the 18th arrondissement.[121]

The total number of residences in the city of Paris in 2011 was 1,356,074, up from a former high

of 1,334,815 in 2006. Among these, 1,165,541 (85.9 percent) were main residences, 91,835 (6.8

percent) were secondary residences, and the remaining 7.3 percent were empty (down from 9.2

percent in 2006).[122]

Paris urban tissue began to fill and overflow its 1860 limits from around the 1920s, and because

of its density, it has seen few modern constructions since then. Sixty-two percent of its buildings

date from 1949 and before, 20 percent were built between 1949 and 1974, and only 18 percent of

the buildings remaining were built after that date.[123]

Two-thirds of the city's 1.3 million residences are studio and two-room apartments. Paris

averages 1.9 people per residence, a number that has remained constant since the 1980s, but it is

much less than Île-de-France's 2.33 person-per-residence average. Only 33 percent of principal-

residence Parisians own their habitation (against 47 percent for the entire Île-de-France): the

major part of the city's population is a rent-paying one.[123]

Social housing represents a little more than 17 percent of the city's total residences, but these are

rather unevenly distributed throughout the capital: the vast majority of these are concentrated in a

crescent formed by Paris's south-western to northern periphery arrondissements.[124]

In 2012 the Paris agglomeration (urban area) counted 28,800 people without a fixed residence,

an increase of 84 percent since 2001; it represents 43 percent of the homeless in all of France.

Forty-one percent were women, and 29 percent were accompanied by children. Fifty-six percent

of the homeless were born outside of France, the largest number coming from Africa and Eastern

Europe.[125]

The city of Paris has sixty homeless shelters, called Centres d'hébergement et de

réinsertion sociale or CHRS, which are funded by the city and operated by private charities and

associations.[126]