Affordable Housing Institute : US

 After Hitler’s armies made common cause with Stalin’s to carve up Poland, a curious inactivity descended.  Britain and France were at war with Germany, yet there were no shots fired, no troop movements. 

 

A series of casements leading to underground villages, with machine gun emplacements above

 

The French crouched behind their impregnable Maginot Line, waiting — waiting, as it happened, all through that winter and spring.  Many hoped that, having digested Poland, the Nazis would be content, and the war would remain notional. 

 

Last November, many of Paris’s suburbs went up in flames.  For three weeks there was chaos — rampaging youths, wanton vandalism, hundreds of burning cars — in the banlieue housing estates, those wretched high-rises most of France wishes not to see. 

 

 

President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin made brave promises; the high-rises were to come down.  New jobs programs were to bloom.  Change was coming to the Muslim ghettos:

 

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, de Villepin said the government was taking urgent action in the areas of justice, housing, education and employment.

 

He said the government was launching a “very intensive” program to help deprived neighborhoods, including tripling the scholarships to boarding schools given to children from these areas.

 

[…]

 

He said the government wanted to create more tax-free zones in deprived areas, but also wanted people in these areas to accept jobs outside these neighborhoods.

 

I hoped and urged that the high-rises come down.  They should come down because they are socially unhealthy places to live.

 

“We need a social mix in order to have a real equilibrium now in our society,” he said.

De Villepin said the government intended to do away with high-rise housing estates, replacing them quickly with smaller scale buildings.

 

Yet, as far as I can tell, a year later it has not. 

 

Meanwhile the violence has not disappeared; rather, it has settled down to an ominous simmer, with a particular focus, as reported in this Daily Telegraph article:

 

Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared “intifada” against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.  

 

France, November, 2005

 

Leave aside the term ‘intifada,’ which is interpretation rather than observation:

 

Gerard Demarcq, of the largest police unions, Alliance, dismissed talk of an “intifada” as representing the views of only a minority.

 

Mr. Demarcq said that the increased attacks on officers were proof that the policy of “retaking territory” from criminal gangs was working.

 

Still, 14 is the number of police injured daily, mind you.  Not challenges, not clashes, injuries.

 

Police representatives told the newspaper Le Figaro that the “taboo” of attacking officers on patrol has been broken.

 

This isn’t the full-blown insurrection I anticipated; instead we have the echo of phony war — when violence skirmishes with impunity, from there to war is simply a question of escalating the frequency and intensity of clashes.

 

The number of attacks has risen by a third in two years.

 

 

 

That too is a discouraging figure, since it means that this rate of violence and injury isn’t unprecedented; it’s been steadily building.

 

As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were “in a state of civil war” with Muslims in the most depressed banlieue estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.

 

2,500 in a year.  Mind-boggling.

 

It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers —

 

If I were quoting these lines without telling you the country, you might think southern Lebanon.  But this is Paris.  Or rather, a part of Paris that is not Paris:

 

— in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.

 

[…] Officers – especially those patrolling in pairs or small groups – face[..] attacks as soon as they tried to arrest locals.

 

Le Blanc Mesnil, November, 2005

 

This is secession for all practical purposes.  Yet it’s an inward secession, a secession surrounded by the country from which it wishes to secede, a secession of dependency (for those that live in the high-rises receive welfare benefits from the state whose jurisdiction they violently challenge). 

 

What’s the root cause?  There are three candidates:

 

1. Economic despair expressing itself with restless unemployed young men.
2. Organized crime securing its base of operations.
3. Religious jihad fomented by radical Muslims for their own ends.

 

Are these unrelated, causal, serendipitous?  No one knows for sure. 

 

Independent or interlocking?

 

Most people think they reinforce each other.

 

[30-Nov-05] De Villepin said social unrest in the country was fueled by a “feeling of discrimination among young adults.”

 

“Very often you have people coming from the second generation of immigration, they don’t know their country of origin,” he said.

 

“They don’t have the same link with France as their parents who chose to come and work here. So, as Jacques Chirac, the President of the Republic said, there was some kind of a lack of identity.”

 

He said members of minority groups in France “did not want … to be recognized as Muslims, or as blacks, or as people coming from North Africa. They want to be recognized as French and they want to have equal opportunity during their lives.”

 

The systemization of violence suggests that something more than economic despair is the driver:

 

Senior officers insisted that the problem was essentially criminal in nature, with crime bosses on the estates fighting back against tough tactics.

 

Community cannot exist without safety, and the home is a place where business can be done.  Like every other force of economic nature, enterprise abhors a vacuum. 

 

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also the leading centre-Right candidate for the presidency, has sent heavily equipped units into areas with orders to regain control from drug smuggling gangs and other organised crime rings.  

 

 

Prime Minister De Villepin and Interior Minister Sarkozy, last November.

 

Such aggressive raids were “disrupting the underground economy in the estates”, one senior official told Le Figaro.

 

If there are no legitimate businesses in an estate (or any other community), that offers fertile ground for illegitimate ones that wish to hide from the public eye, such as:

 

·         Drug dealing.

·         Drug use.

·         Extortion (of the weak by the strong) and protection rackets.

·         Prostitution.

 

Paris, banieue lobby, a few mornings after the first riots

 

Throughout history, slums have always offered these (making due allowance for the evolution of stimulants through the centuries) in close proximity to one another, not least because they tend to reinforce each other. 

 

However, not all officers on the ground accept that essentially secular interpretation. Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hardline Action Police trade union, has written to Mr Sarkozy warning of an “intifada” on the estates and demanding that officers be given armoured cars in the most dangerous areas.

 

Crime and anarchy can make tacit short-term allies fighting their common enemy.  Each can use something the other has.

 

He said yesterday: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.  This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their ‘comrades’ free when they are arrested.”

 

In the 1950s, Boston built what was then hailed as a model new community: Columbia Point, a slum-clearance relocation public housing project, all mod cons, of immense scale.  Suitably isolated, of course — between the madhouse and the dump. 

 

Columbia Point 1965, when it was the only thing on the peninsula

 

Just one main road in, one main road out, running between neat rows of high-rises whose roofs were accessible to the underemployed and unemployed youth, who soon discovered a wonderful summer-night arcade game.  Pull a fire alarm, then as the trucks roared down the only street, toss Molotov cocktails from above.  Light up the evening!

 

Does it matter what time, place, or city this image comes from?

 

Columbia Point’s Molotov fireworks signaled that property’s secession from the larger Boston society.  When a ghetto becomes a closed place, without people moving to and fro to work or shops or recreation, without police who are welcomed as defenders of the public peace, it might as well be no longer part of the outside world. 

 

He added: “We need armoured vehicles and water cannon. They are the only things that can disperse crowds of hundreds of people who are trying to kill police and burn their vehicles.”

 

When the world inside has become a law unto itself, the world outside is seen as at best irrelevant, at worst despicable.

 

Mayors in the worst affected suburbs, which saw weeks of riots and car-burning a year ago, have expressed fears of a vicious circle, as attacks by locals lead the police to harden their tactics, further increasing resentment.

 

 

 

Undoubtedly so.  Of the two products of the government factory, if you never offer money (Product 2), you must periodically increase the amount of law (Product 1) you impose.  For far too long the French government has verbalized money but not provided it.  Indeed, the evident hypocrisy of last fall’s brave promises, all of which I documented at the time, legitimizes anger in a way that in some sense that anger desperately needs.  Under those circumstances, wouldn’t you be angry?

 

As if to prove that point, there were angry reactions in the western Paris suburb of Les Mureaux following dawn raids in search of youths who attacked a police unit on Sunday. The raids led to one arrest. They followed clashes on Sunday night when scores of youths attacked seven officers who had tried to arrest a man for not wearing his seat belt while driving. That driver refused to stop, and later rammed a police car trying to block his path.

 

The mayor of Les Mureaux, Francois Garay, criticised aggressive police tactics that afterwards left “the people on the ground to pick up the pieces”.

 

Is criminality driving religious fanaticism?  Or is unemployed despair merely borrowing slogans? 

 

Does it matter? 

 

Now that these three forces — despair, organized crime, and jihad — are finding common cause in hating les flics, which came first will not matter when Paris goes up again.

 

People talk about how bad these estates are but they keep moving in here.  They like this life here, it’s adventurous and exciting, something is always going on.  But still this is a hell of a place to live; you can’t keep any kind of order here.  The housing authority can’t keep order, the police can’t keep order — it’s got to a point now where even the city police are afraid to come in.  I can remember last year when the city police tried to come in to get a man here, so many people gathered around that the thing turned into a riot.

Behind Ghetto Walls, Lee Rainwater, 1970, field interview with Thomas Coolidge, 1964

Page 20.

 

In the short run, the French government must establish external law and contact, or else it will face thinking like the following:

 

We are together.  We have got leaders and we have got followers.  The followers listen to what the leader has to say, we plan our action and then we carry it out.  This is not something that just got together overnight, this is a large organization.  Part of it is here, part of it is in other cities.  It is scattered all over and when we begin our program here it will continue simultaneously in the cities I just mentioned.  This is only the beginning of what is going to happen because we are getting things together now, and when it happens, we are going to try to pull all our people in so that they can be ready for what is going to come.

 

The housing estate whose voice we hear isn’t from Paris, nor from 2006; it’s from St. Louis, 1964, in the now-notorious Pruitt-Igoe:

 

Balcony corridor in Pruitt-Igoe

 

We don’t intend to have a mass extermination.  We are going to attack them a little bit at a time in a lot of different places.  That way they will not think that it is an organized group that is doing the attacking.

 

Of course they intend to sacrifice a few people.  It has all been planned out.  What is the life of a few when the whole race is at stake? 

 

The study’s author comments:

 

Hammond [the interviewer] did not know what to make of Mr. Coolidge’s story; it sounded farfetched, yet he had never had any reason to regard his informant as other than a sane and intelligent observer of the world around him.  …  Hammond and I discussed the matter in considerable detail and decided that, although in all likelihood Mr. Coolidge believed what he was saying, the plan did not seem like one that would actually be carried out.  … Therefore we decided not to take any action other than to go back for more information.

 

Four years later, America’s cities went up in a spontaneous wildfire of rioting, looming, and aimless violence.

 

We have in mind, I mean they have in mind, a program of complete extermination of the white race.  We are going to start with the reproducers.  That is, we are going to start with the young people that are able to reproduce the race.  We intend to exterminate all of them.  That will leave only the older ones who are unable to reproduce and eventually the race will die out.  That way we won’t have to worry about them any more.

Behind Ghetto Walls, Lee Rainwater, 1970, field interview with Thomas Coolidge, 1964

Page 31-35.

 

A few years after that, Pruitt-Igoe came down, its demise long overdue:

 

Pruitt-Igoe coming down. 1974

 

For France, it’s too late for insincere promises.  (It’s always too late for that.)  It’s too late simply to assert the rule of law and escalate its assertion.  It’s too late for palliatives.  It’s not too late for dramatic reinvestment action, but of that there’s no prospect in sight. 

 

This is far from over.  It cannot end well.

 

In June, 1940, when it suited him, Hitler’s panzers blitzed through neutral Belgium and into Paris, entirely bypassing the still-unconquered Maginot Line.  The lull in between was as if it had never been.

 

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