Affordable Housing Institute : US

For the last few weeks, my computer’s screensaver has been this image, from the New York Times:

 

 

That photo of a Brazilian youth tells a subtle but deeply important story that will be on display in Saturday’s final between France and Italy.

 

The boys aspires, he is looking up, he is concentrating on his technique, and as he does so, he dreams of a better future, of stardom.  He does so amid an open space that has been demarcated for a soccer pitch, and all around him are slums.  His community has spent a huge portion of its capital for that pitch, even though everywhere else, the press of urbanizing humanity trumps all:

 

Shantytowns like this rise above every urbanizing metropolis

 

The promise of a better future is what makes slum life tolerable; for their children’s future people will gladly sacrifice their own lives.  And for those children, there are basically four routes out of the slum: athletes (including entertainers), criminals, entrepreneurs, and scholars.  Of these four, two — entrepreneurs and scholars — are those we most wish to grow, and the hardest to grow, for they require the intersection of education, opportunity, equality and equity for all. 

 

Liberty, equality, and brotherhood … but not if you’re Algerian.

 

The line between criminal and entrepreneur is the thinnest, for both attract the talented, the risk-takers — indeed, ‘organized crime’ is simply entrepreneurialism being expressed outside the mainstream stream.  It’s no coincidence at all that in nearly every society, organized crime is dominated by the most recent large immigrant tribe: they have strong social bonds, they are big enough to be significant, and they are desperate enough to be ruthless.  After a couple of generations, organization overtakes crime in the tribe, as their children now grow up having what their parents for decades coveted.  The arc of America’s mafia spans eighty years, from Lucky Luciano to Meadow Soprano, beginning in tommy guns and ending psychoanalysis in a whitebread New Jersey suburb.

 

The Mafia’s alpha and omega

 

For all this, housing is the hinge, for if, as Century Housing’s Allan Kingston has said, housing is where jobs go to sleep at night, affordable housing and healthy communities are where responsible adults can be raised.  Slums are economically rational, and bad; affordable housing is essential to modern cities.

 

In Saturday night’s final, the eyes of billions of slum youths will be fixed on the World Cup final, and in particular on one remarkable man, Zinedine Zidane.

 

Though his parents are fully Algerian, Zidane was born in Marseilles, and raised in French public housing, habitation loyer moyenne (HLM), those disgraceful isolated high-rise prisons that ring the historic tourist center of many French cities — those places where France hides ‘those people,’ the unassimilated, the wish-they-were-forgotten.  The cites of Marseilles (the pied noirs’ Lower East Side) are especially notorious, known as breeders of lawlessness.  As I wrote back in November:

 

A decade and a half ago I was touring a particularly tough US property with a Tennessee developer client and friend who was describing the new gated and uniformed security he had installed.  Of roughly two hundred apartments, there were about fifteen male heads of household, and about a hundred and fifty overnight gentleman callers.  “Looks like a low-security day-release prison,” I joked, but my developer friend grew quiet and said, “There’s more truth in that than there should be.”

 

Yet, miracle of miracles, out of this terrible environment came this most patrician of footballers.  Stills do not do justice to the poise, the aristocratic grace with which he commands a football and the midfield, a conductor of the fluid offense.

 

Somehow Zidane escaped his environment.  On the pitch and in person he appears a consummate gentleman, the personification of all the values any Frenchman or American could wish.  In 1998, improbably, he led France to its only World Cup, and was cheered from Picardy to Provence, the pied noir with the golden feet, and for one shining moment it seemed as if the nation could overcome its heritage and embrace assimilation.   

 

Against Brazil, Zidane heads home the game’s first goal

 

Since then France has regressed, and many despair of a grimly clockwork future Eurabia.  After the November riots, France’s pathetic politicians promised reform, but of reform has there been none.

 

Now Zidane is back, the aging captain, who by wizardry, preternaturally skillful feet, and ultimate effort — and a well-placed penalty kick against theatrical Portugal — has brought France once again to the ultimate game.

 

A working class hero is something to be

 

We must see affordable housing not as charity but as investment in our nation’s future, in its capacity to assimilate and uplift and transform.   Zidane is a French hero, a model for all those in the cites, and for all the lads who balance a ball atop their foreheads, on soccer pitches cleared amid squalor, and dream of a brighter future.

 

 

This story would be heartwarming if Zidane were one immigrant success story among many thousands, but he is the counterexample.  French Muslims are isolated, marginalized, under-employed (over 30% in the cites), unacculturated, embittered, and potentially violent.  France, and every nation with an immigrant or urbanizing underclass, must do more than merely laud a few superstar athletes — it must tear down the high-rises, build proper mixed-income communities, and make their hope a national promise. 

 

When the Saturday night’s game comes, I will be cheering for France,  for their inspirational captain, Zinedine Zidane, and what he expresses about the value of nurturing and rewarding aspiration.  For one day at least, the immigrant kid from the projects will be the hope of all France.

 

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