Photo: Majid Bouzzit/CL
It is a sadly familiar story across much of the Charente.
A village draws up grandiose plans for one or more housing estates – lotissements– in the hope they will attract new people and help the commune grow.
But in the end many of these projects struggle to get completed.
And when they do, they struggle even more to find people who want to live on them.
The result is that in many villages in the Charente there are housing estates that have vacant plots lying empty for year after year.
Perhaps the most glaring example is at Foussignac, which is halfway between Cognac and Angoulême.
Nine years ago the council there had ambitions plans for not one but two new estates, one of 50 plots and the other with 47.
Today, says the mayor Georges Deviges (onright in photo above), barely ten of these plots have been sold and developed.
The rest of the land lies idle.
'No one wants to invest because the work is too expensive, and in the meantime we can't move forward,' says the mayor.
He says that the council went ahead with the plans even though at the time the state had warned that they were too ambitious.
'We didn’t want to believe it,' Georges Deviges admits today.
So instead of this village of 600 residents getting a planned 400 extra inhabitants, it has got barely 40 more.
At Guimps, near Barbezieux, the village developed a more modest estate of just 16 plots.
'Work on it started five years ago and we've only sold three,' says mayor Pierre Ravail.
The lack of interest from would-be residents has hit the commune's finances hard, as they had budgeted for two plots a year being sold.
As a result the housing estate scheme is now €30,000 in debt.
Ravail blames a variety of factors including the delays in getting the estate developed because of the now mandatory archaeological surveys that have to be carried out before any building work.
But he also admits that the poor state of the French economy has had a major impact, even if the plots on their estate are being marketed for €26,000, which is half of what some villages charge, and even though there are zero percent mortgages available for some buyers while interest rates in general are lower than they have been for years.
Unemployment, says the mayor, is a big factor.
'Two years ago we signed a contract with someone but at the last minute he lost his job and his mortgage was withdrawn from under his nose,' says Ravail.
Another problem is the bureaucracy; it can take a year and a half between someone expressing an interest and the deal being finalised.
'We lost two young couples through that,' says Éric Gendron, mayor of Salles-Lavalette which has managed to sell four of the five plots on its small estate in five years.
'They wanted to build here but the administrative process was so long that in the end they went to a neighbouring commune.'
Of course it's not bad news everywhere.
At Esse, near Confolens, the municipal council is confident it will sell all ten plots on its latest estate – the sixth such estate it has developed.
The key, says mayor Roland Fourgeaud, is to have plots that are 'small scale and adapted to the market'.
The commune's also helped by being close to a town with facilities such as Confolens.
Unfortunately, there are dozens of other villages in the Charente who do still find it next to impossible to fill their lotissements.
And who are now stuck with unwanted plots of land.
