Emmanuel Macron led his week-long seduction of economic decision-makers at the Choose France summit. Some €20 billion in international investments in France, and even €40 billion if we include those announced at the AI summit held a few weeks ago.
One of the highlights for our industry was the announcement by Prologis of over €6.4 billion in investments in France. Again, in data centers - four in all - but also in logistics: €1 billion to deploy 750,000 m² of warehouses by 2028. The trade-off is obvious. Clearly, building authorization processes will have to be speeded up if we are to keep to the promised timetable. For the executive, this means tackling the immense task of simplifying standards as quickly as possible.
Some criticize this as a pure communication operation, while at the same time, France's big bosses are paraded in the court of grand demagogy that Parliament has become, and small bosses and other entrepreneurs are struggling in the normative and fiscal hell that France has become.
In the meantime, let's not deny ourselves the pleasure of seeing real estate shed its image of rent - which a certain Emmanuel Macron is doing his utmost to maintain - and become an infrastructure at the service of economic players.
But if we're going to talk about infrastructure, we might as well talk about the infrastructure that everyone lacks: housing! Because if we want to attract new industries, new sectors, new investments and new training, we need to create jobs. A strategy of economic attractiveness cannot do without a housing policy. The reverse is also true. No housing, no jobs. No jobs, no housing.
Although the final decision is taken at local level, it still requires impetus from the highest levels of government. This impetus should take the form of a new tax paradigm for real estate investors, a new strategy for producing affordable housing, and a new social contract between public and private players to adapt and develop the regions to tomorrow's economic reality.
There's no shortage of ideas and proposals. It's the decisions. Unless, of course, we are content to simply line up investment figures like cabbages and carrots.