Toulouse

Cooperative housing in Toulouse takes three forms. The first is the coopérative d'habitants (residents' cooperative), revived by the 2014 ALUR housing law: members own shares in a company that owns the building, and each household rents its flat from that company. The second is the coopérative HLM, a cooperative social landlord that lets homes and helps modest households buy them. The third is newer. Under the bail réel solidaire or BRS (a solidarity ground lease), a household buys the walls while an organisme de foncier solidaire or OFS (a non-profit land trust) keeps the land and caps every resale price. A guide to urban community land trusts treats the OFS as France's version of the CLT.

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Urban Community Land Trust in Europe

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The tradition runs deep. The city's HBM office (habitations à bon marché, the forerunner of HLM) was founded in 1921 and built the Croix de Pierre garden city, 1,800 homes between 1925 and 1939. After the war, some 100 families of workers from the aircraft maker SNCASE built their own houses at Bagatelle as Castors (self-build cooperators), with the state advancing the money. A cooperative founded in 1949 grew into Les Chalets; in 1966 a change in the law turned it into a company, which took over 3,316 cooperative homes. The residents' cooperative itself had no legal footing between the 1970s and 2014.

The sector now clusters into three camps with different troubles. The HLM cooperatives are large and professional: Groupe des Chalets manages more than 17,000 rental homes, and nationally 162 cooperative HLM societies manage 208,744 social homes. Their problem is scale and cost, like any social landlord. The land-trust camp is growing fast: Les Chalets' Occitalys Foncier and STON, a cooperative OFS, sell BRS homes. The planning agency's BRS study counts nearly 400 homes put on sale at a median €2,900 per m², about 30% below the open market. Its challenge is awareness among buyers, banks and notaries.

Organisation in focus

STON — organisme de foncier solidaire

STON, a community land trust (organisme de foncier solidaire).

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Bail réel solidaire : une solution pour l'accession abordable

Toulouse's own study of land-trust homes and their prices

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The smallest camp is the residents' cooperative, and it depends on the other two. Toulouse's pioneers build through a social landlord, then buy the building back or co-own the project. They draw on Habicoop, the national residents'-cooperative federation, and on Hab-Fab, the Occitanie resource cooperative for participatory housing. Nationally, Habitat Participatif France sits at the centre of a movement that a 2023 review of how cities can promote collaborative housing sizes at roughly 400 inhabited projects. Very few combine with social rent, which is exactly what Toulouse's examples try to do.

The Métropole has started to treat this as policy rather than curiosity. Its land-strategy team promotes the BRS as a secure first step into ownership, because the OFS buys the home back if a resale stalls. Development zones reserve plots for participatory groups. How far those tools reach depends on the choices the new council makes.

Toulouse kept its mayor. On 22 March 2026 Jean-Luc Moudenc won the run-off with 53.87% against the united-left list of François Piquemal. In April he was returned as president of Toulouse Métropole for a third term. His housing answer is a programme for building more at controlled prices. In development zones, 70% of authorised homes would be price-controlled, half social rent and half subsidised ownership. He also promises to retrofit all of Toulouse Métropole Habitat's stock, close to 20,000 homes, by 2030, and to scale up the BRS.

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Each level of government holds a different lever. The state writes tenancy law, funds HLM building through the Caisse des Dépôts and its Banque des Territoires arm, and sets the SRU quota (the Solidarity and Urban Renewal law's social-housing minimum). Toulouse meets that quota comfortably, at 22.07% against a 20% target. The 2026 budget added the statut du bailleur privé (a private-landlord tax regime), which ties relief to nine-year lettings. The Métropole holds the plan. Its PLUi-H (combined planning and housing plan), adopted on 18 December 2025 after the courts annulled its predecessor, sets nearly 60% of the decade's homes at controlled prices, with 35% social. The region's audit court warned in May 2026 that the social-housing system is running out of breath, with waits lengthening from 13 to 16 months since 2021.

For cooperatives, the instruments are land and the BRS. Development zones let the Métropole reserve plots for participatory groups and set the tenure mix, and the planned rise in subsidised ownership leans on OFS sales. Housing Europe's review of cooperatives cites the BRS as one of the hybrid models Europe is watching. What Toulouse lacks is a dedicated funding line for residents' cooperatives; each one still assembles its money project by project.

Empty space gets a mix of carrots and rules. Toulouse Métropole joined the national plan against vacant homes in 2021 and uses the Zéro Logement Vacant tool to contact owners. France also taxes homes left empty in its tight markets, a model the EEB's response to the European Affordable Housing Plan cites for other countries. Since November 2023 a new tourist let must be offset by a home of equal size returned to long lease, and the 2024 Le Meur law lets communes cut the annual cap further. For offices, a June 2025 law eases conversion into housing. A Banque de France study of conversions shows why expectations stay modest: before the pandemic they supplied about one new French home in a hundred.

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Climate goals now run through the same buildings. France stopped the letting of the worst energy-rated homes in 2025, with further steps due in 2028 and 2034. The ZAN rule (zéro artificialisation nette, net-zero land take) obliges the Métropole to cut its consumption of farmland and nature by 50% over ten years, after the first plan fell precisely on that point. That pushes growth onto brownfield sites and existing stock, where public and cooperative landlords do most of the retrofitting.

Rent control divides the city's politics most sharply. In 2020 the Métropole declined to join the national rent-cap trial, saying it did not meet the decree's conditions. During the 2026 campaign, Piquemal promised to apply it; Moudenc's camp replied that capping rents shrinks supply and that only building brings rents down.

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Rent control in Toulouse, promised by Piquemal and refused by Moudenc.

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Neither camp disputes that the answer must be built somewhere. The places where that is already happening sit on former arsenals, office parks and 1960s estates.

La Cartoucherie is where Toulouse tested its ideas at district scale. Launched in 2006 on the former GIAT munitions works west of the Garonne, it plans some 3,900 homes, and its first residents arrived in December 2015. Oppidea, the metropolitan development company, reports 2,500 already delivered and at least 25% social across its two big districts. The site's past was costly: the city sued the arms maker over pollution clean-up, and the case was settled only in 2018 (Wikipedia summarises the dispute).

Abricoop is the building that made the cooperative form real here. Created in 2014 by the association La Jeune Pousse, it is Toulouse's first residents' cooperative: 17 households at 3 rue du Docteur Suzanne Noël, 15 of the homes classed as social. Seuil architecture designed the timber-framed block, Les Chalets built it and Abricoop bought it back off-plan. Each family holds shares worth 20% or so of its home's cost, and some pay in more to help others. The route was long, running from the group's early years in the late 2000s to occupation around 2018, and it still relied on a social landlord's balance sheet. Abricoop sits on the board of Habicoop, a sibling of Villeurbanne's Village Vertical.

It belongs to Les 4 Vents, the participatory block that Oppidea calls the largest in France. Les Chalets built most of its homes, delivered in 2018, and small groups shaped the rest.

La Hutte Finale carried the model to ZAC Guillaumet, the former aeronautics test centre in the north-east. Its association signed a co-development agreement with Les Chalets for 19 homes with a common room, shared guest rooms and laundries, delivered in 2023. The architects were D'une ville à l'autre and PROJET 310. The district around it splits housing 45% social rent and 55% ownership, and the scheme shows the partnership's limit: groups still need a landlord willing to share the risk.

L'Eclat, on rue Blanchard in Saint-Michel, opened in January 2022 as the first BRS residence in Occitanie. Its 19 land-trust homes sit beside rent-to-buy and social flats. Les Chalets' land trust, Occitalys Foncier, now shares the market with STON. The trade-off is the same for both: a BRS home is cheaper because its owner gives up most of any resale gain. Similar trusts in Lyon and Lille, the Foncière Solidaire du Grand Lyon and the Lille metropolitan OFS, face the same trade-off.

Tersud is Toulouse's answer to empty offices. The Montaudran block was left empty and looted around 2018. Vinci Immobilier began converting it in January 2026 into 232 homes: studios for young workers let by In'li Sud-Ouest, and social and subsidised-ownership flats for Promologis. Both are subsidiaries of Action Logement, the employer-funded housing group. Delivery is due in 2028. A BPIE report on office conversions argues such projects can cut carbon sharply against new build, though French costs often run higher.

Toulouse Métropole Habitat is the public landlord carrying the heaviest load. Founded in 1921, it lets 19,128 homes, which it describes as almost a third of the conurbation's rental stock. Much of that stock stands in Le Mirail, the new town Georges Candilis and his partners designed in 1962 for 100,000 people and never finished.

Grand Mirail's renewal is the most contested project in the city. The programme is budgeted at €1.05bn. Les Chalets began pulling down the empty Messager block, 260 homes, in January 2026. Residents' and architects' collectives are demanding a moratorium on further demolitions and have already saved the Cambert building. Whether Toulouse renews its estates by rebuilding or by retrofitting what stands is the open question these projects leave behind.