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Housing Tax Credits are a popular tool designed to increase the construction of affordable housing units for low and medium income tenants. Several papers in the US, however, document the lacklustre performance of such programs that represent an important amount of public expenditures. In this paper, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment in France (the removal of the Borloo and Robien policies on part of the territory with the implementation of the Scellier Tax Credit (STC)), to identify the impact of such policies on local housing markets. We find that the removal of these tax credits decelerated house prices and lowered the vacancy rate in new dwellings without reducing the production of new housing units. Finally, the income profile of tenants in new dwellings remained unaffected.
