The two-bedroom penthouse offers sweeping views of the Eiffel Tower and nearly every monument on the Paris skyline. The monthly rent of 600 euros is outrageous.
Apartment tenant Marine Valérie Ladotte, 51, was told last summer that her home was among 253 low-income families selected as tenants in the new Ilot Saint-Germain public housing complex. He said he cried when he received the phone call. The Musee d'Orsay, the Parliament and Napoleon's Tomb are just a short walk away.
“We're very lucky to have this place,” said Valerie Ladot, a single mother who lives here with her 12-year-old son, looking out her bedroom window at the Latin Quarter. . “This is what I'll see when I wake up.”
When you think of public housing, you might think of a bleak boxy tower on the outskirts of a city, but Logiment Social is located in the former French Ministry of Defense building in one of Paris' chicest districts, the 7th arrondissement. . This is part of an ambitious and aggressive effort to keep low- and middle-income residents and small business owners in otherwise hard-to-reach urban centers, and in turn, It is about preserving the indescribable character of our beloved city. People all over the world.
This summer, the French capital will welcome more than 15 million tourists for the Olympics, which will showcase a city designed by government policy to achieve a mix of residents from a wide range of society. become. A quarter of Paris residents now live in public housing, up from 13 percent in the late 1990s. mixi social This policy is most strongly promoted by left-wing parties, particularly the French Communist Party, and targets the economic segregation found in many cities around the world.
“Our guiding philosophy is that the people who create the city's wealth must have the right to live in the city,” said Communist Sen. Ian Brossat, who served as City Hall's housing director for 10 years. Told. Teachers, sanitary workers, nurses, university students, bakers, butchers and others are benefiting from the program.
Turning this idea into reality is becoming increasingly difficult, with waiting lists for social housing in Paris more than six years long. “I'm not saying this is easy or that the problem is solved,” Brossat said.
Paris suffers from the same market forces that plague other so-called superstar cities such as London, San Francisco and New York. It is a sacred place for the world's wealthy to save money and purchase a piece of a living museum. The average price for a 1,000 square foot apartment in the center of the capital is now 1.3 million euros (about $1.41 million), according to the Chamber of Notaries in Paris.
The influential charity Abbé Pierre Foundation unusually highlighted in its annual report published in February that homelessness is on the rise and that between 2 million and 2.4 million households are waiting to apply for social housing. He called France's housing price crisis a “social bomb.'' 2017 Still, the steps Paris has taken to keep low-income residents within the city far exceed the efforts of most other European cities, let alone American cities.
Every Thursday, Jacques Baudrier, the Paris city councilor responsible for housing, scrolls through the list of properties being exchanged between buyers and sellers on the private market. With some exceptions, the city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, purchase the property and convert it into public housing.
“We are in a constant battle,” said Baudrier, who wields an annual budget of 625 million euros.
He said the battle pits forces against forces that make it impossible for anyone but the wealthy to buy real estate in Paris, including buyers who buy up apartments as pied-a-terres and then leave them vacant for most of the year. It is said that it is against The city of Paris has also placed strict restrictions on short-term rentals, with authorities alarmed that its historic center, including the old Jewish quarter of the Marais, appears to be losing residents as investors buy up space to rent to tourists. are doing.
At the same time, the city has built or renovated more than 82,000 apartments for families with children over the past 30 years. Rent prices range from 6 euros to 13 euros per square meter, depending on household income, meaning a two-bedroom, 1,000 square foot apartment can be bought for just 600 euros (about 65,000 yen) per month. In the past 25 years he has also built 14,000 student apartments. Monthly rents for the nearly completed complex in the 13th arrondissement start from 250 euros per month.
For City Hall, social engineering also means protecting petit commerce, the small shops that contribute to the city's timeless feel. As visitors wander through what appears to be a chain of small villages, filled with bakeries, cheese shops, shoe shops, and mom-and-pop hardware stores, it's not entirely organic.
City Hall owns 19 percent of the city's stores through its real estate subsidiary, so it has a direct stake in the types of businesses that take root and survive in Paris. City Councilor Nicolas Bonnet-Orarji, who oversees the city's commercial land holdings, said his office maintains a balance between essential stores and the number of chain stores that may typically pay higher rents. He said he is constantly researching neighborhoods to limit the number of cases.
“We don't rent to McDonald's, we don't rent to Burger King, we don't rent to Sephora,” Bonnet-Olarji said. He acknowledged that in some areas where private landlords are leasing chain stores, they are clearly losing the battle.
The city is being careful about which stores it chooses. City Hall rented a bakery and cheese shop in an area that had a high concentration of hair salons. Other areas are choosing to rent them to bike repair shops as part of the city's efforts to prioritize bikes and reduce the number of cars. We do not rent out to massage parlors because massage parlors can become places for prostitution.
Located a few minutes from Place de la Bastille, this hotel is one of the beneficiaries of the city's retail policy. Emmanuel Faya, a luthier who restores and maintains violins for orchestral musicians, sits surrounded by maple and spruce and the tools of her trade: files, planes and chisels neatly organized. She rents the shop from a municipal property management company for a “reasonable amount.”
“I don't have any knowledge of marketing, and I've never asked myself how to get rich,” Fayyat said on a recent afternoon. “I just want to do my job. I love my profession more than money.”
About a mile away, in a neighborhood rich with cafes and restaurants, Librairie Violette and Co, a feminist and lesbian bookstore, is also a beneficiary of Paris' retail diversity program. When the bookstore's former location was acquired by an insurance company and the original owner retired, a group of women who wanted to keep the business running struggled to find a new home and announced they were closing the store.
City officials provided us with new space at below-market rates. “The bank refused to lend us money,” said Loise Tachon, co-manager of the store. “They didn't think it would be profitable enough.”
Further north, near Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the city rents a storefront to Desiree Fleurs, which specializes in flowers grown in the Paris region. Audrey Venant, co-founder of the shop, sees the program as a necessary and protective mentor.
“Local businesses are very, very vulnerable,” she said, surrounded by eucalyptus-scented daffodils, ranunculus and snapdragons. “We see a lot of bankrupt people.”
Venant and her husband, a painter and sculptor, live in a 750-square-foot loft that is also part of the city's public housing program. She said her monthly rent of 1,300 euros was well below the market rate.
According to a report by the French statistics agency Ince, there are more than 10,000 nurses, 1,700 bakers, 470 butchers, 945 garbage collectors and 5,300 janitors in Paris. The push for more public housing and other programs to make cities more affordable coincides with the ascendancy of left-wing parties, which came to power in 2001 after decades of right-wing domination. .
But urban planning consultant François Rochon says that in France today there is a working agreement on the right and left about the need for public housing that reflects other European countries rather than the United States. Stated. “Living in public housing is not stigmatized,” Rochon said, pointing to its roots in France a century ago, when companies built apartments for their employees.
Benoît Uppal, a former housing minister in the Conservative government, said social housing was “absolutely essential” as a measure of left-right consensus on the issue.
“If a city is made up only of poor people, it's a disaster,” said Uppal, who now works for a real estate developer. “And if it's made up only of wealthy people, that's not all that good.”
Paris's housing program is part of a welfare state trade-off, offering affordable health care and education in exchange for the highest income tax rates and social contributions in Europe. But social housing is increasingly available only to those lucky enough to afford it.
There is also a residual cynicism towards public housing in Paris after a series of scandals in the 1990s in which it was revealed that some conservative politicians were paying bargain rents for luxury municipal apartments. Currently, the city has introduced a system in which the names of those seeking public housing are kept private and priority is given based on a points system that takes into account income and family situation.
Resistance primarily occurs at the local level, Rochon said. For example, residents of the city center often oppose the construction of public housing, and the area remains a bastion of the wealthy. There is also disagreement over the extent to which the government can or should promote public housing in the future. Paris' current goal is to have 30% of public housing for low-income people and 10% for middle-income people by 2035.
Baudrier, a member of the Paris City Council, said he believes that in the long term, 60% of the city's housing should be public and reserved for low- and middle-income households.
But building new public housing is especially difficult because large parts of cities are already very dense and often protected as landmarks.
City planners negotiated with the public railroad to purchase the rights to the old depot and road. They also seize opportunities, such as in 2018, when the French Ministry of Defense consolidated its offices in Paris and the City of Paris negotiated to buy Lillo Saint-Germain at well below market value. The subsequent construction of 253 apartments was financed by the sale of part of the building to a Qatari investment fund that was also building a luxury hotel, and by low-interest government loans with long terms ranging from 50 to 80 years. Emmanuel Cosse, former Minister of Housing;
City Hall also requisitioned the condemned building. Fabrice Chailleux, a father of two who manages a computer network, lives in a public housing building built from the ruins of a dilapidated neighborhood in the northern edge of Paris. A month he pays 980 euros for his three-bedroom apartment, which he got after waiting for his 10 years. His neighbors include a janitor, a teacher, a car salesman, and a police officer.
Thanks to this program, Chail and his wife were able to raise their two children in the city. But he knows that the future of public housing will always face at least one big challenge: “The problem is, once you move in, you never want to leave.”
