How Does Paris Stay Paris? By Pouring Billions Into Public Housing
nytimes.com
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.”
IIRC one of the reasons the housing market in Paris must also be so tightly controlled is due to their zoning controls. To keep Paris' identity intact, any sort of higher density/taller development anywhere inside the city's primary core is strictly prohibited, so housing supply is almost completely static.
Isn’t that common with lots of major cities?
Sure, to some extent. But most cities have the ability to grow upwards and increase density though, which can relieve some of that pressure. Paris cannot. And they usually don't do the rent control tactics and simply price out anyone who isn't top 20%, leaving the service workers with ever-lengthening commutes to stay in housing thry can actually afford.
Skyscrapers don't increase density as much as you might think because they're often required to get skinnier as they get taller in order to not block too much sunlight etc., while mid-rise buildings can take up more of the lot. They also tend to have more overhead in terms of mechanical spaces. They also cost more per unit area to build, which means the rents have to be higher.
I'm not saying that skyscrapers don't provide more density than mid-rise (they do), I'm just saying that the returns -- especially in terms of housing affordability, not just quantity -- diminish at a quicker rate than people might realize.
Like DC
To be over tourism is plaguing a lot of European cities right now.
The original idea of Airbnb was great, to be able to rent out a room from your home or the whole home while you were away, but it slowly turned up part of the problem why rents have increased so dramatically recently.
This combined with the lack of public housing, and sky rocketing building materials made real estates the most profitable investment over time for a lot of people and unfortunately I don't see an end in sight.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.
Paris is being buffeted by the same market forces vexing other so-called superstar cities like London, San Francisco and New York — a sanctum for the world’s wealthiest to park their money and buy a piece of a living museum.
Paris has also sharply restricted short-term rentals, after officials became alarmed when historic neighborhoods, including the old Jewish quarter, the Marais, appeared to be shedding full-time residents as investors bought places to rent out to tourists.
When the bookshop’s previous location was bought by an insurance company and the original owners retired, a group of women that wanted to keep the business going struggled to find a new home and announced they were closing the store.
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