Julie Pollard
This essay aims to compare public-policy reactions to the property crisis in the 1990swith reactions to the current crisis, based on France as an example. It argues thatalthough this crisis does not have the same origin or the same characteristics as theearlier one, reactions have been similar. The solutions the state has adopted have allprioritized the economic handling of the property crisis over the social handling of thehousing crisis. Support for the market and subsidies for private actors in the sectorpredominate. Current measures are on a continuum with earlier measures: the currentperiod does not seem very conducive to a fundamental review of the instruments andorientations of housing policy. However, one point of difference should be emphasized,namely the political reaction time, which has been much shorter in the early 2000s thanit was in the 1990s. Then, it took nearly 5 years before the most important supportivemeasures were instituted, whereas in 2008 it took only a few months.