African immigrants and the housing market in France: segregation, discrimination and mobility.

Summary Despite their great diversity, immigrants of African origin in France experience specific difficulties in accessing the labor and housing markets that make their study as a group relevant: a group with its own geography - a strong urban bias and an overrepresentation in poor neighborhoods dominated by social housing . a group whose relative integration into the French labor market has rather deteriorated over the last decades . a segregated group for which it is crucial to understand the interactions between the labor and housing markets. In this thesis, I develop several microeconomic models that shed light on some of the dysfunctions of the housing market in the face of a population of economically precarious consumers, subject to the possible prejudices of other market actors and of which nearly half are in fact taken care of by a public policy of social housing. The predictions resulting from these different models are then confronted with the situation of immigrants of African origin in France, observed over the period 1996-2006 through the National Housing Survey. The following results are established: the existence of discrimination against immigrants of African origin in the private rental market, which may explain part of their overrepresentation in the HLM stock; the existence of a spatial sorting of HLM tenants of African origin towards housing located in the poorest neighborhoods; and finally, the role of the housing market in explaining the increased unemployment affecting this population.