The law created the secteur sauvegardé: a protected quarter governed by its own plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur, which overrides ordinary planning rules and controls facades, roofs, materials, interiors and uses. Owners undertaking a complete restoration could set the resulting deficit against their income, provided the building was let for at least nine years. Sarlat was the first sector designated; about a hundred followed over four decades before the regime was folded into the sites patrimoniaux remarquables in 2016.
It moved heritage protection from the isolated listed monument to the inhabited historic quarter at precisely the moment when French renewal policy was clearing such quarters as insalubrious. Conservation thereby became an urbanism instrument — and, through the tax deduction, a powerful engine of gentrification in the Marais, Vieux Lyon and dozens of provincial centres.
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