France wanted to ban the rental of poorly insulated buildings. As a result, the housing shortage increased and the government backed down. The left-wing capital Paris is an exception: it is taking even tougher action against landlords.
June 2, 2026, 9:50 p.mJune 3, 2026, 7:27 am
It’s not the only empty house on Rue Saint-Maur in Paris, but it may be the ugliest. On the ground floor, half-torn posters are stuck to blind shop windows. On the floor above, the windows are half-walled up with bricks. The plaster is crumbling, the traces of soot from the unhealthy Parisian air testify to the age of the dilapidated building.
Beautiful facade, poor substance: many Parisian apartments are in need of renovation – and are now empty due to new laws.Image: imago
Why is it empty? The association “Droit au logement” (Right to Housing), which supports the homeless and homeless, is also wondering this. An employee at least knows that some attic rooms in other buildings on the street are unoccupied. These “chambres de bonne”, former servants’ rooms under the roof, are now rented primarily to students.
Or not. In Paris, according to the national statistics office Insee, 274,000 apartments are “vacant,” as they say here. That’s no less than a fifth of the inventory. The reasons are varied: inheritance disputes, need for renovation, speculation, second home. In addition, there is now an official rental ban.
The industry is fighting back
As of January 1, 2025, the National Assembly decided that apartments and offices in France may no longer be rented if they have the worst value of G on the seven-point energy saving scale. From 2028, the second worst level F will also be subject to the ban, followed by level E in 2034.
The real estate industry protested loudly. She admitted that France has a particularly large number of energy producers with permeable walls and windows. However, the National Association of Property Owners (UNPI) claims that the new ban is taking apartment owners by surprise. They are rarely wealthy and are usually older, which is why they hardly receive any bank loans for the thermal insulation of their four walls. And now, with the rental ban, they will also lose their tenants and thus their rents.
This has been happening all over the country for over a year, most often in Paris. The proportion of poorly insulated G apartments there is 13 percent, higher than the national average. The rental ban is therefore applied particularly frequently, which reduces the available living space and increases property prices, which had already reached 10,000 euros per square meter in Paris.
743 inquiries per advertisement
The result: The French middle class can only afford a rental apartment if they want to live in the capital. And the rush is huge: the busy website PAP now records an average of 743 inquiries per advertisement for studios, two- and three-room apartments. Only one receives a positive answer at a time.
Emmanuel Grégoire, the new social democratic mayor of Paris.Image: AP
The rental ban for energy classes E, F and G is putting the real estate market in France under high tension, even though the economy is actually weakening. The government has now drawn the consequences. At the end of April she announced that she would relax the ban on renting unrenovated apartments; Living space can be rented out again under certain conditions. The first condition for the homeowners: They must undertake to install the thermal insulation within three years – if they own condominiums, the deadline is extended to five years.
Theoretically, this postponement could bring up to 700,000 apartments back onto the market. The National Assembly is expected to give the green light this early summer. The parliamentary debate is likely to be heated. The Greens will go to the barricades against rent relaxation. But the real estate industry is not enthusiastic either; She considers the government’s withdrawal to be half-hearted: “It would be replacing a bad law with a complicated one,” complains PAP leader Corinne Jolly. “Building renovation is already paralyzed by incomprehensible rules. The incomprehensible new arrangement with conditional rentals will not stimulate the market either.”
Penalties for empty apartments
The red-green Paris city government is planning a more radical solution to bring the fifth of empty apartments back into the real estate market. Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire, newly elected in March, wants to impose a punitive tax of 2,000 euros per year on empty apartments, and 4,000 euros in the second year. The Paris housing expert Jacques Baudrier made it clear that the government was concerned with climate protection, not financial considerations. “We want to make as little money as possible,” explained the representative of the Communist Party. “The threat of a fine for empty apartments alone should be enough to bring tenants back.”
Whether this will be the case remains to be seen. For now, the city of Paris is losing 20,000 residents every year. Whose fault it is remains a political issue of the first order in Paris. (aargauerzeitung.ch)