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Paris Is Burning
If Berlin's Mayor is having trouble convincing Germans that his city needs a leather makeover, his counterpart in Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, stands accused of allowing his capital's public housing to crumble into deadly disrepair.
Another seven immigrants died in a fire in Paris on Sunday night, bringing the total number of deaths to 24 this week - and 48 since April. All three fires have occured in run-down buildings used to house mainly African immigrants. The first, in April, killed 24 people staying in a cheap hotel near Opera. Last week, 17 - mostly children - died in a blaze in the 13th arrondisement. Sunday's blaze started in a building housing "sans papières" Africans in Paris's swish Marais quartier.
This month's fires have followed months of complaints from housing and immigrant groups, not to mention warnings that the buildings were unfit for habitation. The building hit by Sunday's fire had no running water, no electricity, and was infested with rats and cockroaches. Its five-storey staircase was reportedly fit to collapse at any moment.
There are said to be 1,000 such rundown and dangerous buildings in Paris, housing around 13,000 people. Many, if not most, are legal and illegal immigrants. While the city council is working to repair and renovate nearly half the buildings, it isn't just France's always-angry far left that is criticising the city council for allowing the situation to reach its present, deadly crisis.
Paris faces an enormous housing crisis. According to The Guardian's John Henley around 300,000 people are on waiting lists for accomodation in and around the French capital - and that's just the legal list. Paris itself has become so expensive that few low-income families can afford housing - yet the cities vast, sprawling suburbs are not short of space for new buildings or homes.
Some critics put France's appalling and bloody-minded bureaucracy in the dock. Paris is a relatively small and compact city of just over 2.2 million. Another 8 to 10 million inhabit the surrounding banlieu. However, shifting low-income workers and unemployed immigrants across the Boulevard Peripherique that surrounds Paris proper and into the suburbs would mean forcing rival local councils to work together, to share budgets and, perhaps most difficult of all, to accept that there is a limit to the number of poor people who can live in central Paris.
Mayor Delanoe is highly unlikely to face this latter fact. Even though the Ile-de-France's excellent public transport system would allow workers to reach central Paris from their suburbs in minutes, the socialist Mayor is determined to retain the city's fabric. He has spent €150 million of the city's money upgrading its crumbling public housing - though obviously that has not been enough.
The most controversial aspect of Delanoe's housing policy has been his dedication to spreading Paris' poor throughout the capital's 20 arrondisements. As one might expect, housing in the city's posher western neighbourhoods is significantly more expensive than the equivalent in Paris's north and east (though prices are rising steeply everywhere). Delanoe's team argues that Paris's texture is enriched by having poorer families inhabit wealthy neighbourhoods.
Certainly, little is gained from adding to the poverty of the less attractive quartiers, many of which have already developed into ghettos - no-one wants banlieu-style alienation and violence in the capital. Critics - most, but not all on Paris's right - claim that buying or building in the cheaper neighbourhoods is a wiser way of spending city money. The Marais building that burnt on Sunday night was bought for renovation by the city just six months ago. It stands next door to the Place des Vosges, the most expensive address in Paris. It's true that the council's cash would go further if it concentrated on building in cheaper areas.
But should social engineering and political point-scoring be a priority in Paris, when people's lives are at risk?
For his part, Delanoe blames government spending. France's central government has only earmarked €7 million to the capital's housing, though after this latest bout of fires more cash could be found. But Paris is not France's only priority - a high profile housing organisation reckons that 3 million people live in substandard housing in the country.
Other voices call for stronger action: Nicolas Sarkozy wants the dangerous housing closed down. He added that the policy of taking in immigrants where there are no jobs or accommodation for them must change: Sarkozy claims around 200,000 - 400,000 illegal immigrants live in France.
The most obvious solution is to find cleaner, safer accomodation, outside the boundaries of Paris where space is plentiful and sites are cheaper. Sell off public housing in the beaux quartiers to private owners to raise cash, if they must. France might not enjoy the prospect of creating more banlieus, but this time such projects might be completed having learnt from the mistakes and the totalitarian fantasies of 1960s and 70s architects. It would call for a rethink of Paris's bureaucratic boundaries and social idealism - which could prove to be the biggest barrier to safe housing.
