Logements vacants à Bordeaux : le casse-tête insoluble de la rue Sainte-Catherine
By Nicolas Gosselin
Published on
A Bordeaux more than elsewhere, the estate market is extremely tense. Local elected officials are well aware of this, Pierre Hurmic on your mind. Almost a year after his election, in May 2021, the mayor EELV established a housing plan.
Reinventing construction in the diffuse is one of the priorities of his mandate, in the same way as the struggle against the long term vacation. Exactly, the Saint Catherine Street full ofinhabited apartments. Just look up above the windows to realize it.
As a citizen reflex, we did not fail to report it to Stephane Pfeifferthe deputy mayor of Bordeaux in charge of housing, who has also just taken over the delegation of resilient urban planning with the dissemination of Bernard White.
Shops block habitat
“In the current state, these are not vacant dwellings, retorts the elected official. These premises, located on the upper floors of the shops, are not suitable for housing and are unusable because to access them, you have to go through the shops since the buildings have only one entrance. »
Stéphane Pfeiffer therefore knows the problem but “no one can find a solution”, including in other cities facing the same puzzle. “From the moment the owners of these buildings do not need to rent the whole building for it to be rentable – since the rent for the shops is high enough – we are blocked”, he comments.
For Pierre Hurmic’s deputy, the City must therefore buy back this property in order to do the necessary work on the ground floor to make the upper floors accessible to potential residents. But the check would be huge!
2,000 to 3,000 m2 unoccupied according to Stéphane Pfeiffer
To listen to Stéphane Pfeiffer, it wouldn’t be worth it: “It’s true that it’s a waste to have 2,000 to 3,000 m2 empty but for the moment, we have not put the problem of vacant housing on Sainte-Catherine Street at the top of our priorities. »
It must be said that the empty surface corresponds to the equivalent of a hundred T2 when we know that there would be more than 25,000 vacant homes in the metropolis of Bordeaux, according to a study published by Aurba in August 2021. Suffice to say that the famous pedestrian street represents a drop of water in an ocean.
This same survey by the Bordeaux Aquitaine urban planning agency identifies 5,186 dwellings vacant for at least two years in the whole of the Bordeaux metropolitan area, including 3,185 only in the city center. A tool set up in November 2021 by the Ministry of Ecological Transition spoke in the private stock in Bordeaux of 2,513 unoccupied housing units for more than two years.
The principle of communicating vessels
In short, the long-term vacancy is a monstrous project to carry out for the Bordeaux town hall and it should not start with the longest pedestrian artery in Europe.
“If not, there is another solution, suggests Stéphane Pfeiffer. It would be to create coworking places or offices on the floors that would be open at the same times as the stores. That would settle the issue of entry. And suddenly, it would free up spaces elsewhere in the city center where it would have been made of the office to create housing. This is one of the subjects on which we must work in the coming months…”
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