Under the sad roofs of Paris

The issue of unsanitary housing has been recurrent in Parisian history for more than two centuries. Various authors have addressed its inclusion in the political and scholarly field, from legal, administrative and technical measures to the means of counting and mapping this phenomenon revealing the functioning of housing markets in large attractive cities that we call today hui global. In 1850, the first law on unsanitary housing made it a “ public problem », generating a fruitful debate on the measurement of housing conditions and their treatment, through the expropriation and demolition of entire neighborhoods, and the rehousing of populations. But what about the inhabitants of these dwellings? ? Are they only the subject of institutional and political strategies? ?

Unsanitary

In 2011, when Pascale Dietrich Ragon published her work, Intolerable Housingat the Presses Universitaires de France, the qualitative aspects of the Parisian slum hardly seem to have evolved. Despite the undeniable modernization of the real estate stock during the XX^e century, Pascale Dietrich Ragon could, by focusing on the most dramatic examples, have taken the language of the hygienists who, in the XIX^e century, denounced the living conditions of working and dangerous populations. But by remaining faithful to her role as a professional sociologist aware of the relative nature of the notion of unsanitary conditions in space and time, her position turned out to be significantly different. Certainly, Paris, his field of investigation, still has 1000 unsanitary buildings and in 2002 developed yet another ambitious plan to eradicate the phenomenon. But at the same time the capital now has 17% of social housing and a powerful institutional infrastructure such as housing companies.HLM and mixed economy real estate companies (including the Mixed Economy Real Estate Company of Paris – SIEMP – within which the author conducted her study). With 100,000 social housing seekers seeking refuge from soaring property prices and private sector rents (more than a quarter of their income), the municipality finds itself faced with a stigmatized, precarious population from immigration, rejected by traditional social landlords and at the mercy of a private housing sub-market “ bullied “.

Faced with this multifaceted demand, the plan developed by the municipality is structured with the support of the SIEMP at three levels: within development operations in which residents are rehoused as a priority, within private condominiums in which the City is present and finally in planned operations to reduce degraded housing in private buildings. These institutional sections constitute the panel of the survey conducted by Pascale Dietrich Ragon among more than 500 households: how do these slums fit into their residential trajectory ; how, while the public authorities seem to be looking into their fate, do households develop strategies allowing them to obtain this rare and coveted good that is social housing ? And, finally, what legal arguments do they develop to justify their priority rank? ?

Become a priority

This last question is not innocent. Pascale Dietrich Ragon rightly underlines how the common feeling of indignation, consubstantial with the situations of life in the slums, has developed in the name of “ humanitarian values » a vocabulary (the law now speaks of housing “ unworthy ” And “ indecent “) and practices which confine public aid to “ most disadvantaged » in a logic as restorative as it is minimalist and above all incapable of making priority choices between emergencies, each as glaring as the other. Faced with these speeches of good intentions rarely followed by concrete effects (as evidenced by the law execution reports DALO), Pascale Dietrich Ragon very pertinently offers a study of the strategies of residents taking note of the positions of public action, as they perceive them.

Thus, the definition of “ intolerable housing » that she describes is neither the result of the confrontation of technical standards, nor the outcome of social weightings but the result of the tension which plays out between several meanings of the notion of justice, coming from social workers, technicians , residents and their owners. It reveals that the definition of unsanitary housing comes from a social relationship between several private and public actors, residents included.

By conducting a participant observation survey with the SIEMP on the one hand and a questionnaire survey of the targeted inhabitants on the other hand, Pascale Dietrich Ragon reveals the logic of the emergency. For institutions like the municipality, pragmatism in the face of situations inherited from previous policies is shared with the imperative of political image and humanitarianism. But faced with the management of the shortage, the municipality is led to limit rehousing in the buildings it has acquired and which are inhabited by the most disadvantaged, even if it means admitting exceptional rehousing, in particular for charitable reasons. On the side of residents, like associations, the errors of such policies lead to the development of logics of the worst, leading them to behaviors labeled as “ deviants » by public authorities: deterioration of the apartment, refusal to pay rent only to end up on the street, rejection of precautions against childhood lead poisoning, etc. The inhabitants, who therefore develop a detailed knowledge of the institutional arrangements, are led to consider on a symbolic level the elements which make visible the urgency of their case. The result, as Pascale Dietrich-Ragon shows, is a “ poor game » which can lead those best endowed in priority points to integrate protesting associative structures and the least endowed to express their loss of confidence in public authorities and associations, the non-recognition of their merit and their status, the legitimacy of their (academic) aspiration or even the health emergency (cases of lead poisoning in children in particular).

From this role play and “ fight for places ” results in a contrasting assessment: 44% of the people met by the author are still in their apartments which have sometimes been the subject of “ palliative work », 19% moved on their own and 37% were rehoused and “ reclassified » in the social sector.

The sustainability of a notion… and a situation

This result is certainly interesting. Without doubt, the reader will be curious to know even more about what has become of these different households, dispersed today in the name of “ social diversity » in neighborhoods that are foreign to them. Pascale Dietrich Ragon’s book therefore encourages other surveys on the same households ten to twenty years later, like the American studies on “ desegregation “. Likewise, it shows that the durability of the notion of unsanitary conditions over the last two centuries can be explained less by a delay in practices than by the constancy of an urban scene revealing the attractiveness of the city for the richest and the richest. poorer and the commitment of public actors to make it more or less acceptable for all. Finally, he shows how the emergence of a “ humanitarian thought » in the field of housing leads to reducing the role of social housing to the most “ deprived “, to the detriment of a more rigorous policy more concerned with perpetuating the general model of French social housing, which, given the extent of its range intended for middle and low incomes, allows 60% of French households to live there. pretend.