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HOW DOES PARIS STAY PARIS? BY POURING BILLIONS INTO PUBLIC HOUSING  
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Thomas Fuller
March 17, 2024
New York Times
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_ One quarter of residents in the French capital live in
government-owned housing, part of an aggressive plan to keep
lower-income Parisians — and their businesses — in the city. _

Even on a gray winter’s day, the Eiffel Tower stands out from the
balcony of the new Îlot Saint-Germain public housing development in
the Seventh arrondissement. The apartment’s resident, Marine
Vallery-Radot, is among hundreds of thousands of Parisians l, Alex
Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

 

The two-bedroom penthouse comes with sweeping views of the Eiffel
Tower and just about every other monument across the Paris skyline.
The rent, at 600 euros a month, is a steal.

Marine Vallery-Radot, 51, the apartment’s tenant, said she cried
when she got the call last summer that hers was among 253 lower-income
families chosen for a spot in the l’Îlot Saint-Germain, a new
public-housing complex a short walk from the Musée d’Orsay, the
National Assembly and Napoleon’s tomb.

“We were very lucky to get this place,” said Ms. Vallery-Radot, a
single mother who lives here with her 12-year-old son, as she gazed
out of bedroom windows overlooking the Latin Quarter. “This is what
I see when I wake up.”

 

[A few people walk toward the entrance of an off-white L-shaped
apartment complex with many rectangular units. ]

The Îlot Saint-Germain public housing complex includes a below-ground
gymnasium and a day care center. The complex was built in the former
offices of the French Defense Ministry.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans
for The New York Times

Public housing can conjure images of bleak, boxy towers on the
outskirts of a city, but this _logement social_ was built in the
former offices of the French Defense Ministry, in the Seventh
arrondissement, one of Paris’s most chic neighborhoods. It’s part
of an ambitious and aggressive effort to keep middle- and lower-income
residents and small-business owners in the heart of a city that would
otherwise be unaffordable to them — and by extension, to preserve
the ineffable character of a city adored by people around the globe.

This summer, when the French capital welcomes upward of 15 million
visitors for the Olympic Games
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it will showcase a city engineered by government policies to
achieve _mixité sociale_ — residents from a broad cross-section
of society. One quarter of all Paris residents now live in public
housing, up from 13 percent in the late 1990s. The _mixité
sociale _policy, promoted most forcefully by left-wing political
parties, notably the French Communist Party, targets the economic
segregation seen in many world cities.

“Our guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the
city must have the right to live in it,” said Ian Brossat, a
communist senator who served for a decade as City Hall’s head of
housing. Teachers, sanitation workers, nurses, college students,
bakers and butchers are among those who benefit from the program.

Making the philosophy a reality is increasingly hard — the wait list
for public housing in Paris is more than six years long. “I won’t
say this is easy and that we have solved the problem,” Mr. Brossat
said.

[A man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair wearing a gray suit and
a dark tie looks to the right. ]

“Our guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the
city must have the right to live in it,” said Ian Brossat, a senator
who served for a decade as Paris City Hall’s head of
housing.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

Paris is being buffeted by the same market forces vexing other
so-called superstar cities like London, San Francisco and New York —
a sanctum for the world’s wealthiest to park their money and buy a
piece of a living museum. The average price for a 1,000-square-foot
apartment in the center of the capital today is 1.3 million euros
(about $1.41 million), according to the Chamber of Notaries of Paris
[[link removed]].

The Fondation Abbé Pierre, an influential charity, was unusually
emphatic in its annual report, published in February, calling
France’s affordability crisis a “social bomb,” with rising
homelessness and 2.4 million families waiting on public-housing
applications, up from 2 million in 2017. Still, the measures that
Paris has taken to keep lower-income residents in the city go far
beyond the initiatives in most other European cities
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not to mention American ones.

Every Thursday, Jacques Baudrier, the Paris city councilor in charge
of housing, scrolls through the list of properties being exchanged by
sellers and buyers on the private market. With some exceptions, the
city has the legal right to pre-empt the sale of a building, buy the
property and convert it to public housing.

“We are in a constant battle,” said Mr. Baudrier, who wields a 625
million euro annual budget.

The fight, he said, is against forces that make buying Parisian real
estate impossible for all but the well-to-do, including buyers who
snap up apartments as pieds-à-terre and then leave them empty for
most of the year. Paris has also sharply restricted short-term
rentals, after officials became alarmed when historic neighborhoods,
including the old Jewish quarter, the Marais, appeared to be shedding
full-time residents as investors bought places to rent out to
tourists.

 

[A person in dark clothing tends to a bicycle that is leaning against
the wall of a stone and brick building. ]

The city converted a police barracks built during the French
Revolution into 70 public housing units. The building is steps away
from the Place des Vosges in the Marais.Credit...Alex
Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

At the same time, the city has built or renovated more than 82,000
apartments over the past three decades for families with children.
Rents range from six to 13 euros per square meter, depending on
household income, meaning that a two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot
apartment might go for as little as 600 euros ($650) a month. It has
also built 14,000 student apartments over the past 25 years; monthly
rents at one complex currently nearing completion in the 13th
arrondissement start at 250 euros a month.

For City Hall, social engineering also means protecting the _petits
commerces_, the small shops that contribute to the city’s sense of
timelessness. When visitors here meander through what seems like a
series of small villages, with _boulangeries_, cheese shops, cobblers
and mom-and-pop hardware stores, it is not entirely organic.

City Hall has a direct hand in the types of businesses that take root
and survive in Paris because it is the landlord, through its real
estate subsidiaries, of 19 percent of the city’s shops. Nicolas
Bonnet-Oulaldj, the city counselor who oversees the city’s
commercial landholdings, said his office is constantly studying
neighborhoods to maintain a balance of essential shops and limit the
number of chains, which can usually pay higher rent.

“We don’t rent to McDonald’s, we don’t rent to Burger King and
we don’t rent to Sephora,” said Mr. Bonnet-Oulaldj. He
acknowledged that in some neighborhoods where private landlords have
rented to chains the battle has been plainly lost.

The city is deliberate in what shops it chooses. In an area that had
become thick with hairdressing salons, City Hall rented to
a _boulangerie_ and a cheese shop. In other neighborhoods it has
chosen to rent to bicycle repair shops, in part to reinforce the
city’s push to reduce the number of cars in favor of bikes. It
doesn’t rent to massage parlors on the grounds that they are
sometimes fronts for prostitution.

 

[A man in a dark jacket, right, leans over to speak to a man in a
white chef’s outfit, with wine glasses in the foreground.]

Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj, right, the city counselor who oversees
Paris’s commercial landholdings, refuses to rent city-owned retail
space to chain restaurants. Instead, he is promoting bistros like Le
Mesturet, owned by Alain Fontaine, left, who called traditional
bistros “a social necessity.”Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for
The New York Times

A few minutes from the Place de la Bastille is one of the
beneficiaries of the city’s retail policies. Emmanuelle Fayat, a
luthier who restores and services violins for orchestra musicians,
sits surrounded by maple and spruce and the tools of her trade: neatly
organized rasps, planes and chisels. She rents her shop for “a
modest amount” from a city-owned real estate management company.

“I have no knowledge of marketing and I’ve never asked myself how
to become rich,” Ms. Fayat said on a recent afternoon. “I just
want to do my job. I like 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 bookshop, is another
beneficiary of Paris’s retail diversity program. When the
bookshop’s previous location was bought by an insurance company and
the original owners retired, a group of women that wanted to keep the
business going struggled to find a new home and announced they were
closing the store.

City officials reached out and offered a new space at below-market
rates. “Banks refused to lend us money,” said Loïse Tachon, a
co-manager of the shop. “They didn’t think it would be lucrative
enough.”

Further north, near the Buttes-Chaumont park, the city rents a
storefront to Desirée Fleurs, which specializes in flowers grown in
the Paris region. Audrey Venant, the co-founder of the shop, sees the
program as a necessary and protective guiding hand.

 

[A luthier with long hair wearing a black shirt and blue smock
inspects an instrument in a shop.]

Emmanuelle Fayat, a luthier, rents her shop near the Place de la
Bastille for a modest rate from a city-owned real estate management
company.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

“Local businesses are very, very fragile,” she said, surrounded by
narcissus, ranunculus, snapdragon, all perfumed by eucalyptus. “I
see a lot of bankruptcies.”

Ms. 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. Her monthly 1,300-euro rent is well below market rates, she
said.

The French statistics agency, Insee, reports that Paris is home to
more than 10,000 nurses, 1,700 bakers, 470 butchers, 945 garbage
collectors and 5,300 janitors. The push for more social housing and
other programs to make the city more affordable has coincided with the
dominance of left-wing political parties, who came to power in 2001
after decades of right-wing rule.

But François Rochon, an urban planning consultant, said there is a
functional consensus between right and left in France today on the
need for public housing that mirrors some other European nations, but
not the United States. “Living in social housing is not
stigmatized,” said Mr. Rochon, who pointed to its roots a century
ago in France, when companies built apartments for their workers.

As a measure of the left-right alignment on the issue, Benoist Apparu,
a former housing minister who served in a conservative government,
described social housing as “absolutely essential.”

 

[A pedestrian in a long black coat walks along a street past a
bookstore and cafe that has a red storefront. ]

Librairie Violette and Co, a feminist and lesbian bookshop, rents a
city-owned storefront and attracts a clientele from across
France.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

“A city, if it’s only made up of poor people, is a disaster,”
said Mr. Apparu, who now works for a property developer. “And if
it’s only made up of rich people, it’s not much better.”

Paris’s housing program is part of the trade-off of the welfare
state: affordable health care and education in exchange for some of
the highest income tax rates and social charges in Europe. Public
housing, however, is increasingly available only for those lucky
enough to get it.

There also is vestigial cynicism in Paris about public housing after a
series of scandals
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the 1990s, when some conservative politicians were revealed to be
paying cheap rents for luxury city-owned apartments. Today, the city
awards public housing through a system that strips the names of
applicants and prioritizes them through a points system that factors
income and family circumstances.

Mostly, resistance comes at the local level, Mr. Rochon said.
Residents in central arrondissements, for example, have often pushed
back against building public housing, and the neighborhoods remain
bastions of the wealthy. There is also disagreement about how far the
government can or should push public housing in the future. The
current goal is for Paris to have 30 percent public housing for
low-income residents and 10 percent for middle-income residents by
2035.

Mr. Baudrier, the Paris City Council member, said he believes that in
the long term, 60 percent of housing in the city should be public and
reserved for low- and middle-income families.

But building new public housing has been particularly challenging
because so much of the city is already so densely packed — and often
protected by landmark status.

 

[Three people in a french flower shop brown floors and blue tiling. ]

The city rents a storefront to Desirée Fleurs, which specializes in
flowers grown in the Paris region.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for
The New York Times

“Local businesses are very, very fragile,” said Audrey Venant, the
shop’s co-founder. “I see a lot of bankruptcies.”Credit...Alex
Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times

City planners have negotiated with the public railways to buy old
train yards and rights of way. They’ve also seized on opportunities
like the one that arose in 2018, when the French Defense Ministry
consolidated its offices in Paris and the city negotiated to buy the
l’Îlot Saint-Germain for well below market rates. The ensuing
construction of 253 apartments was financed by the sale of part of the
building to a Qatari investment fund, which is building a luxury
hotel, as well as low-interest government loans that have durations as
long as 50 to 80 years, according to Emmanuelle Cosse, a former
housing minister.

City Hall has also taken over condemned buildings. Fabrice Chaillou, a
father of two who manages computer networks, lives in public housing
on the northern edge of Paris that was built from the ruins of a
dilapidated neighborhood. He pays 980 euros a month for a
three-bedroom apartment that he waited 10 years to get. Among his
neighbors are a janitor, teachers, a car salesman and a police
officer.

The program has allowed Mr. Chaillou and his wife to raise their two
children in the city. But he knows that the future of social housing
will always face at least one big challenge: “The problem is that
once you get in, you never want to leave.”

_Thomas Fuller [[link removed]], a Page One
Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front
page.  A former European Union and Paris correspondent, he returned
to the French capital to interview public housing tenants and
officials from Paris City Hall._

 

* affordable housing
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* Paris
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* public housing
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