The paper suggests that despite the French model of centralized housing policy, different local housing markets have developed where social housing commitment plays a key role. French housing policy has been reoriented in recent decades and is now facing a challenge: implementing the right to housing (recently strengthened through the DALO Act, 2007) and, at the same time, achieving “social cohesion” and “social mix”, which concretely means developing approaches to tackle spatial concentrations of poor and migrant households. The Paris metropolitan area offers an interesting example of how different actors deal with the huge territorial inequalities that result from former housing policies and the recent and ongoing unemployment crisis. Housing construction has improved as well as institutional cooperation, but conflicts of interest and real estate speculation are still able to slow down solidarity at regional level.