<
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/realestate/paris-france-housing-costs.html>
"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.”
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."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-invasive-fish-smart-densification/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
