How Does Paris Stay Paris? By Pouring Billions Into Public Housing
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 living in public housing.Credit...Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times
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.
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.”
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, 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.
“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.
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, 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.
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.