Affordable Housing Institute : US

Since early September, even before France’s urban ghettos exploded, I’ve been watching the French urban situation with my desire to hope fighting against my belief.  Will France’s leaders make the right choices, or merely offer political vaporware?   As I speculated would happen, the banlieues have calmed down.  As Newsweek International described it a week ago:

 

Hell was last month, when riots convulsed this and so many other outer-city ghettos across France. Beginning in nearby Clichy-sous-Bois, the violence raged for three full weeks: 10,000 cars and more than 200 buildings were burned, including schools, day-care centers, gymnasiums and small businesses. Thousands of people were detained, more than 400 were jailed, hundreds of others were injured—among them 234 cops and firefighters. The fate of some of France’s leading politicians seemed to be at stake, perhaps the future of France itself.

 

For now, at least, the fires have died out—but an acrid bitterness still hangs in the air.

 

Another France: Life in the projects—vistas of gray broken by football games and a fruitless search for jobs that don’t exist

 

As the Washington Post reported:

 

On Saturday night [New Year’s Eve — Ed.], thousands of extra police were deployed in suburban neighborhoods where France’s subsidized housing projects are located, as well as around famous landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

 

But police said the 425 car burnings recorded around the country Saturday night, though larger in number than last year’s 333 New Year’s Eve blazes, did not amount to the major violence they had feared.

 

So now we have a discouraging new baseline.

 

“Cars burned New Year’s Eve 425, result complacency.”

 

The quietude was aided in no small measure by the heavy visible hand of the French government, which, in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, had banned the sale of gasoline in cans the days leading up to New Year’s Eve:

 

Fears of a new outbreak of street violence in France have prompted many areas to ban the sale of petrol in cans.

 

Setting fire to cars on New Year’s Eve has become a tradition among lawless youths on estates with large immigrant populations in the Parisian suburbs and Strasbourg.

 

With the New Year ushered in, President Chirac announced a return to normalcy:

 

PARIS, Jan. 3 — The French government on Wednesday will end the state of national emergency it imposed eight weeks ago during the violence and arson that erupted in more than 300 cities and towns across the country, President Jacques Chirac announced Tuesday.

 

So France is now quiet.  Permanently, or temporarily? 

 

My morning commute involves a walk through Harvard Yard.  In January, it’s a white and largely empty space, but in spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of protest.  In a college-campus phenomenon as predictable as daffodils, the decades come and go, but with the regularity of a circadian rhythm, the primaveral theatrical uprising returns, to take over a university hall (April, 1969), protest an investment policy (April, 1972), denounce investment in South Africa because of apartheid (March, 1989), demand higher pay for university workers (April, 2001), or pass a toothless symbolic resolution condemning a university president (March, 2005).  Every spring, there is a cause, some new, some reliable standbys.

 

Cause marches and rallies never happen in winter, for a simple reason — it’s cold.  The appeal of milling about in large groups listening to speeches rapidly palls amid foot-stamping visible breath.  Cold shuts down feelings: we have cold-hearted misers versus hot-blooded lovers.  We speak of having one’s blood up, acting in the heat of the moment, being hot-tempered.  Heat brings passion.  Cold hibernates anger, slowing down its metabolism but in no way curing it. 

 

Few riots start in winter.  Many start in summer.  Some, like France’s famous May, 1968 city strike, start in spring.

 

 

I ought to be cheered by the relative calm, but I am not. 

 

“Something will always turn up.”

 

My hope and judgment clash.  Right after the riots, promises were strewn about:

 

So much land, so many promises

 

For a brief moment, in the immediate aftermath of the riots, genuine change seemed possible. As if to make up for lost decades, French officials rushed to propose new initiatives designed to address “root causes” of the unrest. The government is stepping up plans to knock down the soulless housing blocks that make life in France’s banlieues so oppressive and alienating, and to replace them with smaller-scale housing surrounded by greenery. It injected an additional 100 million euros into the 2006 budget for social-support organizations in troubled communities. And it promised, yet again, to focus laserlike on unemployment, which ranges from 20-40% in many ghetto communities — two to four times the national average.

 

Yet, as Newsweek cynically documented, upon examination the promises turn into so much air:

 

The 100 million euros marked for new community associations sounds sensible, for instance, but the government is simply reinstating funds and programs cut since 2002. A similar sleight of hand is at work with the “new” monies for education. Additional funds for the nation’s worst schools, it turns out, will simply be diverted from other schools that have recently been removed from the list of the “worst” educational institutions. In effect, they are penalizing those schools for improving. Such shell games do little to restore confidence in the ghettos.

 

Where are the appropriations?  Where’s the money?

 

Yes, everyone agrees that the new measures are badly needed. But such palliatives have been announced so often in the past three decades that, to many Frenchmen — especially those who should be the prime beneficiaries — they feel like little more than window dressing. “The French people don’t believe that the solutions are on par with the problems,” says political scientist Stephane Rozes at the elite Institut d’Etudes Politique in Paris.

 

Under pressure from Brussels to rein in public spending, the French government is often reduced to giving with one hand and taking with the other, building its policies on promises that simply cannot be kept. It’s no wonder there’s such a pervasive sense of betrayal in the banlieues.

 

I believe, based on the profundity of their inactivity and the complete absence of genuine political action, that no member of the French leadership has the political capital and political moxie to tell the electorate that things must change, and change dramatically.  Tearing down the high-rises is easy to write, expensive to do, and politically courageous.  Unfortunately, courage is a quality I seldom associate with French politicians.

 

Trumpeting such measures, [Prime Minister Dominique] de Villepin (himself a presidential candidate) summed up the national mood. Though France had been “sorely tested,” he declared, “we have before us a real opportunity.”

 

An opportunity the French government is ignoring.

 

 

Look for the urban high-rises to go up again sometime around Walpurgisnacht. 

 

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