State monopolistic rentierism and geographically uneven housing development

The production of private housing in France is particularly dependent on tax expenditure for buy-to-let investment by household [Pollard, 2022]. The sharp expansion of these subsidies from the end of the 1990s has coincided with an increase in the share of the private rental sector in the housing stock, a decline in the share of the social sector and a flattening of the ownership rate. This support can therefore be seen as a pillar of the 'rentierisation' [Christophers, 2019] of the French housing sector. The geographical selectivity of these schemes, which have only been available in specific parts of France since 2009, is therefore fuelling a geographically uneven development of property rent. The role of the state in this rentierisation resonates with the thesis of State Monopoly Capitalism (SMC), which was very influential in the 1970s and abandoned from the 1980s onwards in favour of regulation theory. By analogy with the SMC, this article analyses tax support for rental investment as a form of state monopoly rentierism (SMR), which, in interaction with the geographical structures of the rental market, has led to the spatial selectivity of rentierisation. The first part of the presentation focuses on the process by which fiscal support for buy-to-let has become spatially selective. It shows that since 2009, increasing amounts of budget have been concentrated in areas of high rental demand. It then uses public reports and records of debates in the National Assembly, to show how this concentration stems from policymakers' desire to support household wealth accumulation through rental investment. The second part analyses the impact of tax expenditure on housing production. Using a difference-in-difference method, it shows that subsidies have favoured capitalist housing production by private developers at the expense of social landlords (non-lucrative market production) and individuals (non-market production).