The slums inside
In 1970, multi-talented science fiction author Robert Silverberg (who grew up amid the New York City public housing projects)
wrote a haunting novel, The World Inside, that posited 1,000-story high-rises where people did little but
live in close quarters with minimal privacy, spend their nights exchanging sexual partners and their lives churning out as many additional children as possible. Most people are married by 12 and parents by 14.
Out of sight, out of mind became the rule for Silverberg’s dystopian urban policy, and it is the logic that has always tolerated slums.
Those people aren’t like us.
Those people deserve what they get.
Those people are lucky to be here.
Those people don’t know the difference. If they did, they’d do something about it, wouldn’t they?
Wouldn’t they?
Many of the world’s modern cities have a World Inside, Third World conditions that we have unwittingly imported and tacitly tolerated.
In
It was the second deadly blaze since spring to strike poor immigrants in the French capital. In April, a fire at a budget hotel killed 24 people, also mostly from
Some 400 people demonstrated Friday night in front of the devastated building on a main boulevard in southeast Paris demanding that empty buildings be requisitioned to house those in need.
A demonstrator hides her face during a protest, Friday, Aug. 26, 2005, outside the
“More than ever, housing must be a national priority,” Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said after Friday’s blaze.
Words are cheap: indeed, they cost nothing. So we say one thing and do another.
Slums are economically rational. They close the cost-value gap by (1) crowding people together to raise aggregate earning power, (2) reducing maintenance.
The outside walls of the upper floors were scorched, although the building remained standing.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy pointed to overcrowding as a reason for the high death toll and ordered an inventory of dangerous and overcrowded buildings as demands to remedy the situation rose from all quarters.
August 28
To whom can one rent apartments with no maintenance? Those who cannot afford anything more. And who tolerates such conditions, and does not appeal to the authorities for legal or judicial relief? Those who fear such authority because they themselves are illegal:
Alaye Ba, a 46-year-old Senegalese immigrant shows stacks of dried wood in the basement of his building, filled with African families waiting to be placed in public housing, in
Inside is another story. A rickety wooden staircase winds through mildewed corridors that separate small apartments crammed with African families sleeping four, five or more to a room.
“I wake up at night sometimes because I’m afraid for my family. This building is not safe,” said Ba, a 46-year-old Senegalese immigrant. “If a fire breaks out here, we are prisoners. We will die.”
In a neighborhood not too far away, that is what happened Friday when a building crowded with immigrants caught fire overnight, killing 14 children and three adults. Only four months earlier, 24 people died in a similar fire at a budget hotel where African immigrants lived.
The deaths triggered angry calls for action on behalf of the needy and cast light on the plight of
Some are asylum seekers placed in low-end housing while their residency requests are processed. Others are in
Government fiddles while properties burn:
The six-story building, across the street from the Finance Ministry, was supposed to be a stopover pending their application for a permanent state-subsidized apartment. City officials told the family to expect a six-month wait. It’s been four years.
Keep your eye on the promise-to-action time lag.
Like the building that burned down Friday, theirs was requisitioned by the government in 1991 to house immigrants. Such buildings are managed by associations that charge below-market rent and, according to advocacy groups, often turn a blind eye to maintenance failures and overcrowding.
So, while waiting four years for apartments due “in six months,” these families are living in buildings that government has owned for 15 years.
“These are places nobody should live in,” said Antoine Boutonnet of the French Red Cross. “When a building that is unlivable and unsanitary is packed with so many people, it’s a tragedy waiting to happen.”
“We have mice and cockroaches. There are leaks everywhere. Everything is rotting,” said Aissatou Ba, 36. She pointed to crumbling plaster walls in their fourth-floor apartment, cracks in the ceiling and buckling linoleum floors.
Heat and hot water are powered by a rusting gas heater in the kitchen that regularly breaks down and has not been cleaned since they moved in, Alaye Ba said.
All four children, ages 2 to 9, share the tiny bedroom, where clothing is piled on the floor.
The crowding occurs because people flock to the rich cities:
Progress has been made under Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe. Since 2001, the city has refurbished 1,000 buildings deemed unsanitary, bought more than 27 budget hotels to serve as low-income lodging and built 15,000 public-housing units.
Fifteen thousand homes is a heroic local commitment.
But the demand is enormous. France is the world’s leading destination for asylum seekers, with some 65,600 requests in 2004, according to the government.
Where was Jacques? Taking decisive action:
The fire late Monday struck a dilapidated apartment building in the heart of historic
In this photo released by the Paris Firefighters Brigade, firefighters extinguish a fire in a
Police, meanwhile, were preparing to evacuate the capital’s most dilapidated apartment buildings and havens for squatters this week.
At a Cabinet meeting, Chirac told Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to draw up plans to renovate run-down apartment buildings — a response to the blazes that killed a total of 48 people since spring, most of them African immigrants.
“Faced with this situation, we must act,” Chirac said, in comments relayed by government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope. “What’s urgent is to ensure the safety of people living in precarious housing.”
But building new sustainable affordable housing costs money, lots of money.
“Money is not an issue in this affair,” Housing Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told France-Info radio. “We just have organization problems, problems with speed. This takes time, and it’s complex.”
I feel all better.
In a commentary in the daily Le Monde, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe suggested Monday’s disaster could have been avoided because the building was officially classified as “irreparably unfit” in July 2002.
A judge in June 2004 ordered that squatters be expelled, Delanoe wrote, but legal stalling and a law that bars evictions during the winter meant nothing could be done until April 2006.
The building’s previous owner, Joseph O’Dru, accused
When a building is occupied by squatters who pay no rent, it has negative economic value. And when a building has negative economic value, no one maintains it, and it rapidly sickens.
Meanwhile, the race for political cover becomes more frantic:
Politicians discussing the issue also lashed out at their opponents for failing to tackling the issue of the
Delanoe, in Le Monde, said the responsibility for upgrading the housing must be distributed more evenly between the city and national governments.
Delanoe said his [
Even allowing Mayor Delanoe’s clever scaling of the respective numbers, if his figures are to be believed, the City of Paris (of which Chirac used to be Mayor) is spending just under four times as much as the entire rest of the country.
In this photo released Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005 by the Paris Firefighters Brigade (BSPP), the blackened and destroyed entrance hall of a high-rise apartment building in l’Hay-les-Roses, south of
“This is really the kind of event that leaves you flabbergasted,” Mayor Patrick Seve told France-Inter radio. “I’m speechless, revolted,” he said, adding: “we now see it was really more a problem of incivility than of criminal acts. It’s clear it ended in a dramatic way.”
When apartments are fire traps, should anyone take comfort that the cause was mischief? Would accident or carelessness make it better?
The fire was the third deadly blaze in the
Authorities were investigating possible arson in an Aug. 26 fire that killed 14 African children and three adults in a run-down
Political capital and political cover are on full display as the rivals to succeed Chirac jostle for the media limelight:
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy [promised] severe punishment for anyone found guilty of arson.
In response to the fires, the government has announced plans to quickly build more low-income apartments — requisitioning some land to do so — and has begun evacuating buildings considered dangerous.
Requisitioning land as a solution? The building that burned had been requisitioned four years ago.
Public-private partnership would move faster and yield better results … but that requires reinventing public housing, which requires political action, which requires political commitment, and that is scarce.
French President Jacques Chirac, center, is flanked by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, left and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin prior to the start of the a cabinet meeting, at the Elysee Palace in Paris in this Friday, April 2, 2005 file photo. Chirac’s hospitalization Friday, Sept. 2, 2005 for a vascular problem in his eye has been described as minor, but it appears to have galvanized his possible successors and caused a media uproar about the naked ambitions of Sarkozy, who has of late been joined by Villepin. The 73-year-old president, seemingly an eternal presence in French politics, seems less likely than ever to run for a third term. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)
PARIS — President Jacques Chirac skipped a weekly Cabinet meeting Wednesday for the first time since taking office in 1995, as authorities kept France in suspense for a fifth full day about what exactly ails the hospitalized 72-year-old leader.
Officials have cryptically referred to Chirac’s illness as “a small vascular accident” that affected his vision in one eye.
Officials took a reassuring tone about the president’s condition. The government spokesman, Jean-Francois Cope, said Chirac was in “very good form” and would be out of the hospital by week’s end, as expected. Officials have not specified which eye was affected.
Probably the blind one he turns to housing.
