Has the Renovation of the Goutte d’Or Neighborhood in Paris Been a Success?

The renovation of La Goutte d'Or, a district near Montmartre (Paris), started in 1985 and continues to this day. Our paper uses the residential housing market as an instrument to evaluate the renovation. We draw on a rich and detailed database on transaction prices, comprising more than 380,000 observations over the period 1981-2001. We can thus study the dynamics of the residential housing market by estimating hedonic price indexes for all of Paris, for the districts under renovation, and for a “control” district. At the district level, we detect a short-term but apparently unsustainable effect of the renovation. At the individual housing level, we provide empirical evidence that the negative externality generated by La Goutte d'Or has been weakening since the start of the project.