The Relation between Aging and Housing Prices A Key Indicator for the French Spatial Wealth Reshaping

La relation Vieillissement-Prix immobiliers : un indicateur clé pour la réorganisation spatiale de la richesse en France

Yasmine Essafi (1) , Raphaël Languillon (2) , Arnaud Simon (1)

1 DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management
2 EVS - Environnement, Ville, Société

Using the link between demography and house prices in a life-cycle economy perspective, this article documents the ongoing spatial reshaping of wealth in France due to the elder-boom breaking point. This modification in the wealth circulation across generations is also a spatial modification that carries consequences for the local territories. While the wealth losses are amplified for some departments, others benefit from the reorganization. Metropolization is insurance against important wealth losses, whereas for the nonmetropolitan departments, a combination of second-order factors is required to limit or reverse the negative trend. Our results suggest that these evolutions are mainly structural and that the economic variables are of secondary importance. There is no case of compensation for structural decline by a positive cyclical trend. Gentrification also appears to be a direct and emblematic avatar of this change, in which various macrostructural inequalities are reinforced. As for the unemployment rate, this indicator poorly reflects the shift and can be misleading.

Mots clés: Ageing; Life-cycle; Spatial reshaping; Territories; Metropolization

Domaines: Economies et finances

Yasmine Essafi, Raphaël Languillon, Arnaud Simon. The Relation between Aging and Housing Prices A Key Indicator for the French Spatial Wealth Reshaping. 2017. ⟨halshs-01654445⟩