Best deal for grim public housing.
Posted on 11/23/2005 11:52:16 AM PST by libertarianPA
MANTES-LA-JOLIE, France - A warning whistle pierces the air, followed by a deafening roar. Two gray housing project towers come crashing down, replaced by a yellow dust cloud that blots out the horizon.
Applause, whoops of excitement, and a hint of sadness is heard among the throngs of mainly North and West African residents who have gathered to witness the demolition in this town 30 miles west of Paris.
Along with torched cars and Molotov cocktails, France's grim housing projects have come to symbolize the discontent that erupted in recent riots across depressed, mostly immigrant neighborhoods.
The violence has awakened France to the need not only for strategies to combat inequalities in employment and education — but also for new approaches to urban renovation in disadvantaged areas.
Mantes-La-Jolie's Val-Fourre district, known just a decade ago as France's meanest suburb, has been engaged in an urban renewal program that encourages home ownership.
The bleak Ramon Towers that went down over the weekend will be replaced with new residences built on a more human scale of a few stories — compared to past French housing projects which tended to reach close to 20. Crucially, many will be sold at a price yielding mortgage payments of about $700 — similar to rent in the housing projects.
The idea, still uncommon in France, is to give residents a sense of having a stake in society — something that has been woefully lacking in derelict publicly run residential complexes.
"When you are the owner of your own property, you take better care of it," said Pierre Bedier, who launched this town's urban renewal program a decade ago as mayor and who is now a conservative member of parliament.
Experts agree that homeownership among North and sub-Saharan African immigrant families is very low in France, although figures are unavailable because France does not compile statistics on ethnic minorities.
There is relatively high home ownership for minorities in the United States and Britain. According to official figures, nearly 50 percent of Hispanics and Blacks in the U.S. own their own homes, while in Britain, the rate for the nation's two biggest ethnic groups — Indians and Afro-Caribbeans — is about 75 percent and 50 percent, respectively.
Val-Fourre's brand-new Residence Sully, a gated housing community, lies on a site once occupied by a housing project. Its neat rows of brick-walled homes with garden plots are gradually filling up with former residents from the projects.
Ela Kredar, a 59-year-old North African immigrant, was moving into the new three-story house that he'll share with his wife, son and two daughters.
"It's the same size as my apartment in the projects, but the difference is it's my own home," he said, breaking into a proud smile. "It has a garden, too!"
The notion of encouraging home ownership for people in the projects is gaining currency in the government. Social Cohesion and Housing Minister Jean-Louis Borloo recently launched an initiative to replace some projects with affordable "100,000 euro (dollars) homes."
In response to the riots, the government has also announced it will accelerate programs for building more compact and attractive social housing with greater access to job training and leisure facilities.
Officials are also seeking to break the cycle of ghettoization by mixing middle-class areas with housing projects. President Jacques Chirac this month urged communities to adhere to a law that requires townships to have at least 20 percent social housing among their residential properties.
But the law will probably continue to be flouted if wealthier communities are allowed to get around it simply by paying a fine.
"From a political point of view, it poses problems if you have an upper-middle class population ... to bring social housing among them," said sociologist Manuel Boucher.
The great irony of France's housing projects is that they were inspired by the utopian ideas of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who last century championed the vision of functional, organic communities for the masses.
And indeed, during France's postwar expansion decades, the projects were a step up from immigrant-filled slums.
But they never lived up to Le Corbusier's vision of an organic relationship between lodging, commerce, social interaction, leisure and services.
Instead, they tended to be built with separate zones for housing, economic activity, and sports and leisure — all separated by distance and physical barriers such as rivers and the dead-end streets that are common in the projects.
Bedier says the projects ended up as gigantic towers packed with people, surrounded by stretches of wasteland.
In Val-Fourre, urban renewal programs have helped turn around the once deeply troubled area.
The suburb was the scene of ferocious ethnic rioting in the early '90s. During the round of urban violence that abated last week, only 40 cars were torched over the entire three weeks of rioting — compared to dozens a night in housing projects in other cities and towns.
Yeah, but Muslims have Europe in their grasp now. Everybody's too afraid of being called racist or (gasp!) conservative for demanding that they shed the failed cultures from whence they sprang.
I feel the same way whenever I see a flag from a third world hellhole dangling from the rear view mirror of an AMERICAN CAR on an AMERICAN STREET!
Best deal for grim public housing.
The problem is very like Nuclear Fission. If a critical mass of a radioactive substance is allowed to accumulate, self destruction inevitably follows. Damage is widespread.
This is what happens when welfare recipients of any stripe are allowed to accumulate in dense populations (Critical Mass).
Poor people and welfare recipients who are widely disperssed do not cause these conditions.
It's the 'Housing Projects" Stupid!
From a distance I'll bet.
"Encouraging" home ownership is a fool's errand when applied to generations accustomed to being provided everything because they are "entitled" to it.
Isn't insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
The root problem is attitude. The triumph of "rights" over obligations; the abandonment of the simple concept that if you don't work, you starve.
The "for the chil'run" crowd is the eternal scam. If a family is totally on welfare, all but one of the adults must work, or the state feeds the children --- away from "home" --- where the adults can't help themselves to the food. Strange, that we should worry about the children starving, but the "parents" are not obligated to...
A similar story can be told about San Francisco, California. A well-known developer erected two identical high-rise residential buildings. On in Hunter's Point, a sad part of San Francisco, where it would encourage "upgrading" of the neighborhood. The other on Green Street, in a tony neighborhood near Nob Hill.
Predictably, no normal persons would buy the units in Hunter's point (who wants to live in a mugger's paradise?). It then was used as "subdidized housing", aka a vertical ghetto. No expectations were put in place, only "rights". Drugs, mayhem and vandalism were rampant.
The building was demolished less than 20 years later.
Meantime, the identical Green Street units are all worth in excess of $1 million.
It's not rocket science.
Yes they do, just not as visibly. here in California it's known as "Section 8" housing. If you spread the misery it's simply less visible.
Every one of these "section 8" homes have a circle of misery around them which is experienced by only a dozen or two unlucky normal, unsubsidized families.
Not worth making the national news...
Same thing happens here in Philly. Every 20 years, housing projects are demolished and new ones built. Why? because they deteriorate into criminal and social leech Utopias. Then the Democratic mayor steps in and uses public money to tear them down and build brand-new pretty housing units, thinking that it's the apartments themselves that are the problems.
We can build these people skyrise penthouses for chrissake! It still doesn't change who they are and what their principles are!
It's a fraud. It might work for a while but they're just buying time.
i live in a wood stick house that's OVER 100 years old... and with a little care will last another 100 years. of course nobody gave me my house either, i had to work for it!!! hummmm... now there's a concept the frogs might try.
That's why they are in your country -to put a stake in your infidel society. - Tom
Does this graffiti mean that it's time to move?
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