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Paris Fire Highlights Grim Housing Shortage 100,000 in Capital on a Waiting List

Posted on: Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 12:00 CDT

For Korotoum, the fire that killed 17 African immigrants here Friday and laid bare the squalor they lived in was more than an anonymous tragedy: It was an eerie reminder of the perils of her everyday life.

Korotoum and her family live as squatters in a makeshift wooden shack, one of 20 ramshackle habitations inside a former workshop building in northeastern Paris. There is no hot water and only three toilets and two showers for the 68 West Africans who live there. Water trickles down a wall from a leaking pipe.

Like the victims of the fire, most of the squatters have been on the waiting list for subsidized housing for years some since they first illegally occupied the building in 1997.

"From the outside, France is the country of human rights, but the inside is less pretty," said Korotoum, 31, who did not want her full name published for fear her colleagues at work would learn where she lives. "The rights are not for everyone."

Within view of the building is an inconspicuous intersection where the rue de la Liberte, rue de l'Egalite and rue de la Fraternite converge. But the street names celebrating the three pillars of post-revolution France ring hollow for the country's immigrants of African descent as many find themselves deprived of opportunity and stuck in poverty.

As in many other Western European countries, a complex mix of high unemployment, terrorist fears and a long and sometimes bitter colonial history has fed unease toward immigrants in France. Joblessness among Algerians and Moroccans, the largest immigrant groups, hovered at more than 30 percent, about three times the national average, a study by the Paris-based Montaigne Institute showed two years ago. A significant proportion of them live in suburban ghettos of crime-ridden housing complexes and have little hope of employment or job training. The most vulnerable are those caught in the administrative limbo of provisional housing, as Friday's fire illustrated. Many of the 130 people living in the burned-out building had housing applications pending for 14 years. Meanwhile, they were crammed in a rundown building with aging plumbing and electrical wiring. When they moved in, the city authorities had assured them that they would not be staying longer than three years. That was in 1991.

The survivors of the blaze, which killed 14 children and 3 adults and injured 23, are being housed temporarily in a sports complex and are waiting to be given more permanent accommodation, promised to them after the tragedy.

According to an official at the French Interior Ministry, there are about 1,000 provisional housing facilities in Paris like the one that burned Friday, about a third of which are thought to be unsafe. The ministry will publish a report on the state of Paris's provisional housing by the end of this week, the official said, which could result in the closing of buildings that are deemed unfit.

But in the meantime, the everyday reality remains bleak for many.

In Montreuil, a suburb north of Paris, two women, Assa Traore and Maghou Traore, live with their total of 22 children in a dilapidated house of 60 square meters, or 645 square feet. Cockroaches crawl out of holes in the wall and the front door has a pair of plastic scissors as its doorknob.

Assa, 45, and Maghou, 33, both from Mali, were married to the same man, BouBou Traore, who died in 2004, leaving them with Assa's 16 children and Maghou's six. Each shares a bed with four of her youngest children; the 14 older children sleep in the remaining two rooms. Ever since they arrived in this house in 1993, already with seven children in tow, they have asked the municipalities of Montreuil and Paris for larger housing. BouBou Traore was a street sweeper employed by the city of Paris, but their applications were rejected because it is illegal to have two wives in France.

The women pay 534, or $660, a month in rent for the small house and have not been able to get the city to fix the front door, which will not close. "The door hasn't worked in more than six months," said Assa's 21 year-old son, Brahim.

Immigrant families represent about a third of the 102,748 applications for subsidized housing in the French capital in competition for about 12,000 available apartments, said Jean-Luc Mano, the deputy mayor of Paris who is in charge of housing. They tend to wait longer for subsidized housing and endure more difficult interim living conditions.

According to a study published in 2000 by Insee, France's national statistics office, 28 percent of immigrant applications had been pending for at least three years, almost twice as many as the overall average. And of 2,400 families who were moved out of provisional housing facilities over the past four years because the facilities were considered unsafe and overcrowded, 85 percent were immigrants, Mano said.

"We, the city of Paris, have taken on the responsibility of trying to eradicate unfit housing," he said, pointing out that under the Socialist city government that came into office in 2001, the annual construction of subsidized housing had more than doubled. "Paris is a city that must belong to all populations." When emergency housing is not available, the city turns to basic hotels, such as the Hotel Paris Opera, which burned down in April, killing 24 African immigrants.

According to Patrick Doutreligne, director of the Abbe Pierre Foundation for the Housing of the Underprivileged, immigrant applications take longer in part because immigrant families tend to be larger and harder to accommodate. "What few opportunities still exist, they are turned down because of their names or the color of their skin," Doutreligne said. Outside the gym where the families from the burned building have been housed, Amina Sidibe of the High Council of the Malians of France, a federation of Malian associations, could not contain her anger Saturday. "Fourteen children had to die for these people to get a proper roof over their head," she said. "But what about all the others? How do they expect the children to fit in society, when they have grown up among mice?"

Source: International Herald Tribune

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