Marseille

Ask where Marseille's housing cooperatives are, and the honest answer is that most of them are companies rather than tenures. A société coopérative d'HLM is a cooperative enterprise that builds, sells and lets social housing. Its members own the firm. They are not necessarily the people living in its flats. A younger family sits beside it. The loi ALUR of 24 March 2014 restored two citizen-led forms. In a coopérative d'habitants, residents buy parts sociales, shares carrying a right to occupy rather than a title deed, and hold the building collectively. In a société d'attribution et d'autopromotion, a group self-develops and then divides the result.

A third device has grown faster than either. The bail réel solidaire (BRS) is a solidarity ground lease. The household buys the walls, an organisme de foncier solidaire (OFS, a non-profit land holder) keeps the ground beneath, and the resale price stays capped permanently. That pulls the purchase well under the open market. It is France's version of the community land trust, arrived at independently.

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Community Land Trusts in Europe: State of the Sector Report

Where France's solidarity ground lease sits in the European community-land-trust family.

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The habit here is old, and it was broken on purpose. On 13 January 1908 some 50 cooperatives of habitations à bon marché (cheap dwellings, forerunner of the HLM) founded their national federation in Paris. By 1940 there were 437 of them. Their signature product was location-attribution: a household rented from the cooperative and owned the flat outright once the loan was repaid. More than 400,000 families became owners that way. Laws in 1965 and 1971 abolished the mechanism. The movement then spent three decades recovering its powers, in 1983, in 1992 and finally through the SRU act of 13 December 2000. Nothing in the sector today reaches past that interruption without having been rebuilt around it.

What exists now is large, professional and almost invisible. Nationally, 162 cooperative HLM societies manage 208,744 social rental homes, count 107,758 members and produced 7,724 new units in a year. Around Marseille the live actors fall into three clusters, and they do not share a problem.

Grand Delta Habitat is the first kind, a cooperative HLM of collective interest based in Avignon. It holds roughly 20,000 homes across Provence and recently handed over 47 social flats on the avenue du Merlan. Its binding constraint is land. The second cluster is the vehicle such landlords built to relieve exactly that. Grand Delta Habitat, La Maison Familiale de Provence, Axédia and Arcansud created Coop Foncière Méditerranée in 2018, a shared OFS approved by the regional prefect in February 2019. Its constraint is the price of the plots it must buy first. The third cluster is citizen-led and very small. Habitat Participatif France has its seat in Marseille, and groups including Cohabitat 13, CORAIL and L'Annonciade are still finding one another and finding a site. Their constraint is time, measured here in years.

Organisation in focus

Habitat Participatif France

The national federation for participatory housing, run from Marseille.

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The distance left to travel is clearest from outside. The French government's own guidance notes that cooperatives hold 5% of Switzerland's stock, around 15% of Norway's and 40% of Oslo's. Set beside the resilience mature European cooperative sectors have shown, France's citizen-led wing is a rounding error, and the people inside it say so first. What is shifting is where the public levers point. The solidarity ground lease sits in the mayor's programme, the metropolis writes land mobilisation into its housing plan, and cooperative landlords are among the buyers for repaired buildings.

Benoît Payan was returned as mayor on 22 March 2026 with 54.34% of the second round, and housing was the platform he ran on. It has four verbs. Produce, with €30 million of municipal money for social housing, the SRU quota treated as a commitment rather than a fine, and the solidarity ground lease used to widen ownership. Regulate, meaning rents, tourist lets and empty flats. Rehabilitate, which in practice comes first, because as the mayor puts it Marseille is a city that has already been built. Support, meaning rental intermediation, eviction prevention and priority for the most vulnerable. The city has built a housing directorate of 130 staff and referred some 200 cases to the courts.

Three levels hold different levers, and part of the city's recent history is an argument about that split. Paris holds the framework: article 55, the tenancy code, and the money moving through Anah (the national housing agency) and ANRU (the national urban-renewal agency). The Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis has held the housing competence since 2018, yet adopted its first programme local de l'habitat only on 22 February 2024. Nicolas Isnard took its presidency for the 2026-2032 term. The city keeps the powers that matter in a crisis of dangerous buildings: evacuation orders, the permis de louer (a licence a landlord must obtain before letting in designated streets), and its own land. When the prefect raised carence, the mayor's reply pointed at the metropolis for shelving a housing plan in 2019. Prefects must sign the next round of carence orders by 30 December 2026.

The reply to the dangerous stock has no real precedent in France. The SPLA-IN is a state-backed development company set up in 2021 under the Marseille en Grand plan announced at the Pharo that September. It was handed four priority blocks of roughly 450 buildings and a fifth scattered block of about 60, over 500 in all, holding 2,500 homes. By the end of 2025 it owned 76 addresses, with works engaged, compulsory purchases launched and repaired buildings sold on to social landlords.

The money behind it is national. The urban-renewal programme has contracted €164 million of subsidy across 2,050 dwellings. Anah's yearly grant to the department rose from €19 million in 2019 to €75 million in 2025. On 24 December 2025 four decrees created ORCOD-IN operations, the heavy instrument for failing condominiums, at Le Mail, La Maurelette, Les Rosiers and Consolat. Those four cover 2,600 homes and 9,000 residents, with around €600 million of investment from all funders. Detection has been industrialised too, through 20 permis de louer perimeters and the Signal Logement portal, which has taken more than 12,000 reports since 2022.

Tourist lets got the sharper instrument. Since 1 January 2026 a resident may let a main home for 90 nights a year rather than 120. An owner converting a second home into a holiday flat must now compensate the city with housing elsewhere. Registration is compulsory and a breach can cost €50,000. Applications to change the use of family flats have fallen from more than 800 a year to fewer than 100, and about a fifth of those will be granted. The city still counts between 12,800 and 12,900 Airbnb listings. The European Parliament's review of short-term rental regulation describes this exact sequence, with city compensation rules arriving ahead of the EU data-sharing regime that will make them enforceable.

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The regulatory aspects of short-term rentals in the EU

The European Parliament's map of short-term rental rules, city compensation regimes included.

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Climate rules now bite on the same buildings. France has barred the letting of class G homes since 2025, with class F from 2028 and class E from 2034. In a centre of old, poorly insulated stone buildings that is a supply question as much as an energy one. The metropolitan plan sets a target of 16,000 energy retrofits a year. Social and cooperative landlords are expected to carry that load, as they are across Europe. Office-to-home conversion, the fashionable answer elsewhere and a well-evidenced one for carbon, has little to work with where offices are close to full.

The disagreement is not about whether to act. Franck Allisio, whose National Rally list took 40.30% of the second round, put the opposing case to the housing minister in writing months before the election. The government's published reply answered with the inventory of instruments rather than a delivery date. Both readings survive. A metropolitan plan to treat 12,000 substandard homes over ten years is a real commitment. It is also slower than the rate at which buildings are failing. Residents' groups here have signed a pan-European manifesto arguing that people in housing emergencies should co-produce the response rather than be consulted on it.

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Co-producing routes out of the housing emergency - A Manifesto for Just and Democratic

A manifesto for co-produced answers to the housing emergency, drafted in Roubaix in 2025.

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La Cité Radieuse still stands on the boulevard Michelet, the most photographed housing block in France. Le Corbusier built it between 1947 and 1952 as state-funded reconstruction housing: 337 apartments in 23 layouts over 12 storeys, a shopping street halfway up and a school on the roof. UNESCO listed it in 2016. It is also a caution about scale. What followed were the grands ensembles of the northern districts, built fast, funded once and left to age. The projects that carry weight now are smaller, slower and owned differently.

Les Habeilles opened in May 2025 in Saint-Mauron, in the 3rd arrondissement. It is the first participatory building in Marseille let entirely as social housing. It holds 12 flats, from one room to five, over seven storeys on pilotis. Around 214 m² is shared: wide corridors, guest rooms, a laundry, terraces, a rooftop room and two ground-floor rooms open to the street. A two-room flat lets for €385 a month. Grand Delta Habitat carried it as landlord, and ministerial derogations on density and allocation rules were needed to make it lawful. It took 15 years from first meeting to first key, which is the number people quote when asked why there are so few.

Vision d'Aou sits at the other end of the same argument. On the Plan d'Aou plateau in the 15th arrondissement, Erilia, Demathieu Bard Immobilier and Ekinov are delivering 106 homes: 71 houses and 35 flats across 8,700 m². The site is 2.1 hectares of the last land left in a quarter under renewal for two decades. It is the first solidarity-ground-lease scheme sold inside a Marseille priority neighbourhood. The land stays with the solidarity land body. Households buy the buildings only, and the resale cap travels with the home rather than expiring. That is the feature separating this family of tenures from ordinary subsidised ownership.

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Urban Community Land Trust in Europe

How urban land trusts hold land out of the market permanently.

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Coco Velten put both halves of the problem inside one building. From 2019 a disused administrative block on the rue Bernard du Bois ran 80 emergency accommodation places beside 40 workshops, a canteen and an open garden, run by Yes We Camp, Plateau Urbain and Groupe SOS Solidarités on a temporary-occupation agreement. Of 186 residents, 115 left for a permanent home, and families stayed an average of 380 days. It closed in December 2023, and Marseille Habitat, the city's own landlord, bought the building. Its €10 million conversion keeps the 80 places and adds 16 social flats, a 250 m² solidarity canteen, social-economy workspace and a day centre for women and children. Reclaiming vacant space for people in housing emergency is a European practice. Here it produced a permanent building rather than a pilot.

La Friche la Belle de Mai has run the same manoeuvre on a bigger box since 1992, turning the old Seita tobacco works into a cultural quarter governed as a cooperative of collective interest. Its housing chapter is around 20 participatory social rental homes with the social landlord La Maison Familiale de Provence and the architects Kristell Filotico and Cécile Gaudoin. Belle de Mai is also where the Marseille Fairville Lab works, where residents, Un Centre Ville Pour Tous, APPUII and researchers from Aix-Marseille Université try to co-produce a local housing plan instead of being consulted on one. The barriers that stop such labs scaling are documented from the inside, and fragmented governance leads the list.

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Fairville - Barriers and Emerging Pathways to Scaling Co-production: A perspective from the Fairville Labs

What stops resident co-production scaling, written from inside nine European labs including Belle de Mai.

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Hôtel du Nord is the city's oldest cooperative habit, and it has nothing to do with tenure. Founded on 1 January 2011 in the northern districts, it is a residents' cooperative in which inhabitants hold at least 51% of the voting rights. It runs guest rooms, walks and a school of hosts around heritage its members define themselves. It owns no homes. It matters because the cooperative reflex already exists in the parts of Marseille the housing debate rarely visits, and has held for well over a decade. Collaborative living in Europe has repeatedly grown out of exactly this kind of non-housing practice.

Euroméditerranée is where public money and climate targets meet. Launched in 1995 across 310 hectares behind the port and extended north by 170 more, it carries Thassalia, the first marine geothermal plant in Europe, heating and cooling buildings from the sea. It is also the one place in the city where housing is built at volume rather than repaired. That makes it the test of whether a city of small, hard-won projects can also do scale, which is the question the European housing sector keeps returning to.

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The State of Housing in Europe 2025: Trends in a Nutshell

The state of housing in Europe, 2025.

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Put these on one map and they do not add up to a housing system. They read as proofs, each one small and each one expensive in years. A social landlord can hand over a building its tenants helped design. Land can be taken off the market on a plateau in the north. A disused office can shelter 80 people while it waits to become homes. A national federation for participatory housing can be run from here. A city founded 2,600 years ago by people arriving from the sea has never had one answer to who gets to stay. It now has more working answers at once than at any time since Le Corbusier put a school on a roof.