Affordable Housing Institute : US

The violence appears to be subsiding:

The first thing everyone mentions is the helicopters: the relentless throbbing of blades cutting through the skies above and the probing searchlights that have kept the residents awake over the last four nights.

 

Helicopter flying over VIlliers

 

The gunfire that echoed off the walls of the tower blocks in a violent outburst of rioting earlier this week has subsided. 

 

 

But the calm, enforced by a thousand officers deployed at sunset every night, had a precarious feel to it today as locals tried to make do with an undeclared state of emergency that has hobbled their daily lives in multiple ways.

 

“It feels like we live in a war zone,” said Nadege Tanier, a 40-year-old mother of two, as she walked by the burned-out hulk of a garbage truck still reeking of burned tires.

 

There is no curfew, but few people go out after dark when rows of shielded officers move in to take position around this town.  Buses, a popular target for firebombs in the past, have stopped running in the early evenings, making it hard for people to come home from work.  Many shops lock up hours before their normal closing time, partly for fear of vandalism, partly because few customers dare shop after dark. The Tunisian owner of a local bakery, Habib Friaa, said his staff was baking only half as many baguettes as usual because business had slumped.

 

Baghdad?  Fallujah?  No, the bucolically misnamed Villiers-le-Bel, France, as reported in last week’s New York Times:

 

President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the recent rioting in harsh terms today, blaming what he called a “thugocracy” of criminals for the violence.  “I reject any form of other-worldly naivete that wants to see a victim of society in anyone who breaks the law, a social problem in any riot,” he said in a speech to police officers west of Paris.  “What happened in Villiers-le-Bel has nothing to do with a social crisis. It has everything to do with a ‘thugocracy.’”

 

M. Sarkozy is correct.

 

The rioters are utterly confident the police will not fire upon them

 

But in interviews with residents today, it became plain that there was little sympathy for rioters claiming to seek revenge for their friends’ deaths.

 

“I don’t like the way police are treating the kids sometimes and I know they have not got many economic opportunities, but there is no excuse for the violence and the destruction,” said Nora Hemmal, a Moroccan immigrant, who had hoped to enroll her 1-year-old daughter next year in the nursery which was destroyed. “Most of us are just caught in the middle.”

 

I have no sympathy for the rioters’ actions, and every sympathy for their frustrations.  Not only was this entirely predictable, its recurrence is even more predictable. 

 

Two years ago, suburban Paris went up into a city of flames.  After an orgy-like week of destruction that I wrote about in L’horloge orange, things finally calmed down.

 

 

Then what?  As I posted in French urban policy: fixing jobs and houses:

 

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

 

 

Charlemagne accurately describes why:

 

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. 

 

What needed to be done?  As I wrote in Fixing French housing policy: tear down the high-rises:

 

With the violence waning under the heavy sedation of a state of emergency, the French have bought themselves a winter of quiet desperation.  But time is useless … unless one uses it to act.  What is the prescription for fixing France’s bankrupt urban housing policy?

 

Tear them all down.

 

Tear down all the high-rises.

 

Clichy-sous-Bois, the morning after

 

Not because of the riots, in spite of the riots.

 

Yet about the French government, I was cynical and skeptical:

 

Watch the feet, not the hands, coaches intone when they teach basketball defense, because while the hands are where the opponent wants you to look, the body goes where the feet go.

 

The French riots are a catastrophe, but does the French government see the catastrophe as mainly political (optical) or policy (substantive)?  Or, said more properly, since all government is comprised of self-interested individuals, do French elected officials see the catastrophe in policy terms — the essential precondition of fundamental reform, which in this case means tearing down the hideous high-rises — or merely political ones?

 

They’re saying the right things:

 

[French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin] 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.

 

Is this political commitment, or political vaporware?  Does the French government tackle its massive problem just with laws, or with money also?  The next few weeks will tell us. 

 

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.

 

“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.

 

“Do or do not.  There is no try.”

 

This might make me more optimistic if I were amnesiac.  Here is French President Jacques Chirac, three months ago, long before the riots started:

 

PARIS — President Jacques Chirac said France must build more public housing and renovate crumbling apartment buildings, an urgent response to three fires that recently burned through run-down Paris lodgings and killed scores of African immigrants.

 

Police, meanwhile, were preparing to evacuate the capital’s most dilapidated apartment buildings and havens for squatters this week.

 

At a Cabinet meeting, Chirac told Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to draw up plans to renovate run-down apartment buildings — a response to the blazes that killed a total of 48 people since spring, most of them African immigrants.

 

Promises, promises, wave the hands, but what are the feet doing?   What action is the French government taking?

 

Evidently, a fair bit, as reported in the Economist:

 

Local (mainly Socialist) mayors have been giving warning for a while that, two years on, tensions remain high. Not that these grim neighbourhoods have been neglected. They have had a huge injection of public cash, primarily for the renovation of the housing projects that ring the big cities. Tower blocks have been demolished, streets have been relaid and lighting has been improved.

 

Even so, the two biggest problems in these neighbourhoods remain. The first is the failure of the French economy to create enough jobs. Unemployment in what officialdom coyly calls “sensitive urban areas” is twice the national average; on the worst estates, it can hit 40%. Mr Sarkozy wants to loosen the labour market to encourage job creation, but negotiations with unions are still in progress.

 

As the New York Times reported it:

 

The events of the past three days, set off by the deaths of two teenagers whose minibike collided with a police vehicle on Sunday, make clear that the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain the same.

 

“We have heard promise after promise, but nothing has been done in the suburbs since the last riots, nothing,” said François Pupponi, the Socialist mayor of Sarcelles, which has been struck by the violence, in an interview.  “The suburbs are like tinderboxes. You have people in terrible social circumstances, plus all the rage, plus all the hate, plus all the rumors, and all you need is one spark to set them on fire.”

 

One random incident strikes the spark

 

In the wake of the unrest in 2005, the government of then-President Jacques Chirac (with Nicolas Sarkozy, now the president, as the tough, law-and-order interior minister) announced measures to improve life in the suburbs, including extra money for housing, schools and neighborhood associations, as well as counseling and job training for unemployed youths.  None has gone very far.

 

While M. Sarkozy is not blameless, responsibility rests with the execrable Chirac (who, by the way, is now virtually under indictment for bribery).

 

A little over a month ago, fire consumed a large swath of greater San Diego.

 

 

The cause may have been frivolous arson, but the cause doesn’t matter.  Alter the environment, dry it out of its natural relief, and it becomes dry and brittle, ready to go up at a spark. 

 

Put human beings in wretched conditions, package them in concrete boxes, toss in subsidy and ignore their aspirations, render them impotent and idle, and as a final provocation, give them cell phones and televisions and internet so they can see just how excluded they are.  Rage grows in the slums inside as surely as California’s sirocco dries leaves into tinder.  Give it a match, and up it goes.

 

Unless France urgently, urgently makes vast changes, Villiers-le-Bel will be just the prelude.  As Villiers-le-Bel was more vicious, more destructive, more organized, more deadly than Clichy-sous-Bois, whatever banlieue goes up next will be even worse.  The French urban phony war is giving way to ongoing urban insurrection.

 

In his six months as president, [Sarkozy] has largely focused on injecting new life into France’s flaccid economy through creating jobs and lowering taxes and consumer prices.

 

Unfortunately, the government factory can manufacture Product 1 (laws) faster than it manufactures Product 2 (money), even though Product 2 is more helpful than Product 1.

 

His most notable initiative in dealing with youth crime has been punitive: the passage of a law last July that required a minimum sentence for repeat offenders and in many cases allowed minors between 16 and 18 years old to be tried and sentenced as adults.

 

Still, there appears to be a renovation plan in the works.  As the Economist puts it:

 

Mr Sarkozy, who was demonised in the banlieues during the election campaign for his harsh anti-immigrant stance, appointed a left-wing Muslim woman, Fadela Amara, as a minister to deal with the inner cities.  By including her, as well as others from ethnic minorities, in government, he sent a message of inclusion to the heavily Muslim suburbs.

 

And the Times adds:

 

Since September, Fadela Amara, his outspoken junior minister charged with drawing up a policy for the suburbs, has been holding town hall meetings throughout France in preparation for what is to be a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs.

 

Let’s hope that it’s in time and substantive.

 

General Marshall announced the Plan at Harvard Commencement, 1947, 2½ years after V-E Day

 

“We’ve been talking about a Marshall Plan for the suburbs since the early 1990s,” said Adil Jazouli, a sociologist who focuses on the suburbs. “We don’t need poetry. We don’t need reflection. We need money.”

 

What do you think the Marshall Plan was?

 

Rebuiling Germany one buck at a time

 

Critics of the Sarkozy government complain that many areas in the suburbs are without a police presence, and that the only time there is a show of security is after violence erupts.

 

“Sarkozy promised to send more police to the suburbs, but in so many places there are fewer police than there were two years ago,” said Mohamed Hamidi, the French founder of Bondy Blog, a popular political blog created in the Paris suburb of Bondy after the outbreak of violence in 2005. “He didn’t keep his word. Who suffers from all the violence and the burning cars? The people who live in these neighborhoods.”

 

In 1963, American author James Baldwin wrote his manifesto of outrage, The Fire Next Time. 

 

James Baldwin

 

It was his eloquent plea for change, both from American blacks and from American society:

 

Baldwin advises his nephew on how to deal with the racist world in which he was born. In spite the horrors of America, Baldwin believed the Negro must take the high road and show whites, in their ignorance and innocence, how to live the good life, how to love. 

 

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest since Homer.

One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

 

“My dungeon shook, and my chains fell off.”

 

Watts, 1965: when rioting made the cover

 

Baldwin’s plea was timely, but action did not arrive until after America’s cities went up three years running, in 1965, 1966, and 1967.  I still remember the horror of watching burning cities on black-and-white television from one’s living room.  Only then was there change in American urban housing policy.

 

Mr. Sarkozy has less than two years.  I hope he uses the time well.

 

The clock is ticking