Affordable Housing Institute : US

How to fix French urban policy?

 

 

 

As car torchings taper off due among other things to a substantially increased police presence …

 

 

The chart is out of date: just under 10,000 cars torched but a continuing downward trend 

 

… President Chirac’s ninety-day extension of the state of emergency has bought the French government a brief respite — but to do what?  In its Charlemagne essay, the Economist nails France’s problem:

 

But the riots in France point to one particular area in which Europe has been unusually bad: integrating immigrant families from the second and third generations.

 

 

Chart from the Boston Globe

 

Charlemagne accurately describes why:

 

So even if immigrants in Europe raise cultural barriers to assimilation, this is hardly unique.  What matters are the forces that work to overcome those barriers.  Two stand out: work and home-ownership.

 

The work advantage

 

Work is the archetypal social activity.  It provides friends and contacts beyond your family or ethnic group.  If you start your own company, it pulls you further into the society around you.  And here is a striking difference between Europe and America.  Unemployment in France is almost 10%.  Among immigrants or the children of immigrants, it is at least twice [20%] and sometimes four times as high [40%].  In contrast, unemployment among legal immigrants in America is negligible, and business ownership is off the scale compared with Europe.

 

The second big motor of integration is home-ownership, especially important in the second and third generations.  This gives people a stake in society, something they can lose.  Thanks to cheap mortgages and an advanced banking system, half of Latinos in America own their own homes.  Britain, after its council-house sales and property booms, also encourages house ownership.  In contrast, most of the blocks in the French banlieues are publicly owned. 

 

Between them, a job and a house help to create not only more integration but also greater social mobility.  Latinos supported America’s turn towards assimilation because they feared the trap of Spanish-language ghettos.  But the banlieues are full of people who have grown up without jobs, or any hope of getting a better income or a better place to live.  For them, integration is a deceit, not a promise.

 

A job and a house will not solve everything.  The father of one of the July 7th London bombers owned two shops, two houses and a Mercedes.  But if you want to know why second- and third-generation immigrants integrate more in some countries than others, jobs and houses are a good place to start.

 

Indeed, even President Chirac gets that message, although his approach sounds like so much vaporware:

 

“We will respond by being firm, by being fair and by being faithful to the values of France,” Chirac said in his first televised address to the nation on unrest by youths in poor suburbs over racism, a lack of jobs and a sense of exclusion.

 

Chirac, who has been under fire for saying little during the crisis, also announced the creation of a voluntary task force to help young people find work. He said it would provide training for 50,000 young people in 2007.

 

This is a start … but both Chirac and Charlemagne stop short of tackling the tough question:

 

How can the French banlieues be transformed into healthy communities?

 

Before we can tackle the prescription, we must also answer this question:

 

How and why did the banlieues become such ghettos?

 

I’ll deal with both of these in future posts. 

 

 

 

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