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 […]

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 […]

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.
 
 

Interesting definition of ‘normality’
 
So what is the prescription for fixing France’s bankrupt urban housing policy?
 
 

Paris public housing high-rises
 
Tear them all down.
 

 
Tear down […]

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The chart is out of date: just under 10,000 cars torched but a continuing downward trend 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

If we are to understand what needs to be done in French housing and urban policy, we must see these riots for what they are, which means also distinguishing them from what they are not. 
 

 
They are not a replay of France’s uprising of 1968 (soixante-huit, as the French call it), though in the coming […]