Sans Logement Rue de la Banque I
Monday October 15th, 2007
On Saturday October 7th, I saw on Television that a group of immigrants had set camp on the sidewalks in front of the fake "Le Ministère de la Crise du Logement" [Ministry for the Housing Crisis], an office created by activists groups to call attention to the critical lack of housing. After watching the short clip of this on TV, I decided to go to the site.
It turns out that since the beginning of the year, the building (close to the Bourse) has been taken over or “squatté” (as the media and activists call this activity) by three associations called “Droit au Logement” DAL (Right to Housing), Macaq a group of artists-activists trying to make ends meet, and an association of students without housing Jeudi Noir (Black Thursday since it is on Thursday when many of the housing postings appear in publications such as “de particulier à particulier”).
Chronology of Contentious Events
Amongst all the people participating in the camp that day, these two guys seemed the most willing to talk to anyone curious about their action. They talked for at least an hour with three young French women, one of which was writing a note on the protest. I tagged along and listened to the conversation and asked some questions. They told us what they stood for, and what they wanted.
After dawn, food started to be distributed. After many of the people living in the sidewalk of de Rue de la Banque had eaten, an African lady, who was part of the protest, told us, “Come on the line, and eat with us because we are all the same. Are we not? Things have to be equal. Come eat our food.” The French women dismissed her politely. The activist said he had already eaten. I thanked her and assured her I would.
We continued talking next to where the food was being distributed. A long line of immigrants of African origin formed but even after the line became smaller, none of us made the line. After a while a North African man came and gave food to one of the activists. He took it but after the guy left, he said he had already eaten and then offered the plate of couscous to us. The French young women rejected it, so I gladly took it, since I had not eaten in the whole evening. I went and thanked the woman who had offered us food. Afterwards another woman of African origin offered me a drink based on maize and milk. I drank it and we chatted about the housing situation.
So, even among a group of progressive French, full of solidarity, I was the only non-African who had eaten with them. People of African origin appeared to appreciate that and started talking to me. I did not want to ask where they came from because when they talked about their cause, they were quick to point out that they were all French citizens. For strategic and political reasons, they were presenting themselves as French so that the media would not portray them as immigrants asking for rights “they were not eligible for.” A woman told me, “People think we are undocumented but no, we all have our papers. There are all French amongst us. The undocumented people do not have a right to public housing.” So in pushing their agenda, as political refugees or having recently received their legal residence or citizenship papers, they reproduced the division between documented and undocumented immigrants.
So, instead of asking where they were from, I asked a black woman where the drink originated from, and she answered “Mali”. It turned out that about 80% of the hundred people that had taken to sleeping in the streets in protest happened to be women from Mali and their children. None of the newspaper repots I read pointed this out, they just said “women and children from African origin.” Using a widespread practice of categorizing people by continents.
While most of the people sleeping in the street were black, the official, and the de facto spokespeople, were not. They spoke in the name of many of these immigrant/French families who cannot find housing and have been living in shelters, hotels, and in the streets for many years, after paying high amounts for temporary and precarious housing and always having felt insecure about their housing situation. A woman from Asian origin told me she lived in a hotel some blocks away. She paid more per month than the monthly rate of regular apartments I had found in my search of apartments. She said she had to pay daily, or by week at the least. But she was a couple of weeks behind in her payments, so she would have to go back to her hotel room soon, because if the hotel manager found she was not there, he would confiscate her belongings and put her in the street.
Sans Logement Proteste Rue de la Banque II
October 8th, 2007
I approached a group of women who seemed to be having a good time. They said this was “like a picnic”. One of the French women had come from the supermarket, with chocolate, bananas, yogurts, etc. She asked me what I was doing there and was somewhat distrusting of me, saying that Sarkozy had agents observing them and she cautioned the others not to talk to me. I said I was studying migration, and that in the shorter term I would write a blog about the incident.
It is interesting that the woman who was the most willing to talk to me turned out to be a Kabyle woman from Algeria. She told me about her migration story. She came to France eight years before with her older children so that they could go to school there. But she left her husband, who had a good job, as well as her younger children behind. She has not been back since. Her husband has been trying for years to get a settler visa for family reasons; so far he has not been able to get the visa. The woman’s brother is a book writer and sketch artist. He has combined these skills and written books about Kabylia for children. He has a tourist visa and often visits France but only for short stays since he says he has a better life in Algeria that in France.
This Algerian migrant arrived to France with no knowledge of French and now she speaks it rather well after eight years of “doing anything I could to learn the language” as she told me. “I have been here for eight years and I have not been able to find housing. I have applied many times, and I am still in line to get some housing. I live in a ‘foyer’ (emergency housing/long term homeless shelter) the problem is that they do no let my children stay there with me because they say they are too old to live there.”
“So what do they do?” I asked.
“They are students. They are getting ready for their exams in order to get into a good college, and get a diploma and then get a good job. Not like me… My oldest son was here yesterday, he slept in the street with us and he told me he would work hard to get me and himself a house in Paris. I said that all I wanted was a modest house in Kabylia. He said that he would prefer to stay and succeed in France and that we would only go to Algeria for vacations.”
“And what do they do about their living situation?” I asked.
“Well, I sneak them in. But I if they find me they would kick me out.”
“They gave us a two bedroom apartment. But another woman lives in the other room. So me and my three children sleep in one room. My older son said yesterday. I am glad we are here because I am f* tired of sleeping in the floor for all these years.”
Then, our conversation was stopped because a middle-aged French man came and started talking to us. Asking what “we” were doing. What was the purpose of being there? Until when were the people planning to be sleeping in those streets? It turned out that he was the owner of the car parked next to the woman. And he was worried about people sitting in it, breaking the windows or worse putting it on fire. The French women assured him that they meant no harm, that they clean the street twice a day in order not to leave any trash (which was indeed the case since they would clean the area at least twice a day). And they would take care of his car and make sure nobody did anything to it. He thanked them and offered to bring them coffee the next morning.
The woman who had brought the goodies from the supermarket said that she had had better times but that lately she had found herself without housing. She was wearing very nice clothes, as were her co-squatters.
The French woman then offered me some chocolate and talked to me for 45 minutes about Sarkozy, police abuse, and their housing problems. After the initial reluctance of one of the French woman to talk to me, now she would not stop talking to me about the issues that brought her to protest.
Then more police arrived and the closed the street and this woman asked me to photograph the police actions, in order to document them. I did so. We said goodbye and left for the night around 10 p.m. The next time I came on October 10th, they were gone, forced by the police to either go to a shelter, “to drink coffee” with the police or to take the subway as Le Monde reported, and they later confirmed.
Housing Policies
There is something wrong when there is such a lack of housing for all types of people, and the government is doing nothing about it at the same time that apartments in the areas next to Paris are left burnt without any visible plans to fix them. The neoliberal logic must have already influenced France too much make it least likely to have active state financial participation to solve the issue. At the same time many state solutions have been tried, including public housing, projects, cites, incentives to build mix housing, 1 or 2% employer taxes dedicated to housing for immigrants, etc.; nonetheless, all these state policies have had unintended consequences. It seems that now the government prefers inaction.
Videos from Le Monde online:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/video/0,47-0,54-963697,0.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/panorama/0,11-0@2-3224,32-965131@51-952250,0.html
Monday October 15th, 2007
On Saturday October 7th, I saw on Television that a group of immigrants had set camp on the sidewalks in front of the fake "Le Ministère de la Crise du Logement" [Ministry for the Housing Crisis], an office created by activists groups to call attention to the critical lack of housing. After watching the short clip of this on TV, I decided to go to the site.
It turns out that since the beginning of the year, the building (close to the Bourse) has been taken over or “squatté” (as the media and activists call this activity) by three associations called “Droit au Logement” DAL (Right to Housing), Macaq a group of artists-activists trying to make ends meet, and an association of students without housing Jeudi Noir (Black Thursday since it is on Thursday when many of the housing postings appear in publications such as “de particulier à particulier”). Chronology of Contentious Events
On the 4th of October, a number of families slept in red tents in the middle of the small street in front of the squatted building, blocking traffic. There were around a hundred people. The next day, the police evacuated them from the street around 5 a.m. The tents that were not taken by the police were then hung up from the balconies of the taken building.
The next night people slept on the sidewalks without tents. I visited the camp on the 8th and 9th of October and talked to some of the participants. On the 10th of October a large number of anti-riot police cleared the streets again around 5 a.m. in the morning. When I passed on the morning of the 10th, many buses, full of policemen, were parked in the area to prevent the families from camping again. Nonetheless, they went back to the streets and as of today (15th of October) they are still there.
Some of my informants told me that they are “not afraid of the police” and that “they know their rights” nonetheless they accept that it is “hard on the heart” to be woken up at 5 a.m. and been asked to disperse while they were half asleep. A woman told me, that after the first time they were asked to leave their tents and blankets, she was demoralized all that day.
Collective Conversations
On my first visit I talked to a young French man originally from Rhône. It turns out that he used to work as an engineer in large firm making electric equipment but one day he was fired for wearing Bermudas at the factory! He became an activist afterwards. He was accompanied by another person from the same area, a working class man who had lost his work and was evicted and since then lived in the streets.
Amongst all the people participating in the camp that day, these two guys seemed the most willing to talk to anyone curious about their action. They talked for at least an hour with three young French women, one of which was writing a note on the protest. I tagged along and listened to the conversation and asked some questions. They told us what they stood for, and what they wanted.
After dawn, food started to be distributed. After many of the people living in the sidewalk of de Rue de la Banque had eaten, an African lady, who was part of the protest, told us, “Come on the line, and eat with us because we are all the same. Are we not? Things have to be equal. Come eat our food.” The French women dismissed her politely. The activist said he had already eaten. I thanked her and assured her I would.
We continued talking next to where the food was being distributed. A long line of immigrants of African origin formed but even after the line became smaller, none of us made the line. After a while a North African man came and gave food to one of the activists. He took it but after the guy left, he said he had already eaten and then offered the plate of couscous to us. The French young women rejected it, so I gladly took it, since I had not eaten in the whole evening. I went and thanked the woman who had offered us food. Afterwards another woman of African origin offered me a drink based on maize and milk. I drank it and we chatted about the housing situation.
So, even among a group of progressive French, full of solidarity, I was the only non-African who had eaten with them. People of African origin appeared to appreciate that and started talking to me. I did not want to ask where they came from because when they talked about their cause, they were quick to point out that they were all French citizens. For strategic and political reasons, they were presenting themselves as French so that the media would not portray them as immigrants asking for rights “they were not eligible for.” A woman told me, “People think we are undocumented but no, we all have our papers. There are all French amongst us. The undocumented people do not have a right to public housing.” So in pushing their agenda, as political refugees or having recently received their legal residence or citizenship papers, they reproduced the division between documented and undocumented immigrants.So, instead of asking where they were from, I asked a black woman where the drink originated from, and she answered “Mali”. It turned out that about 80% of the hundred people that had taken to sleeping in the streets in protest happened to be women from Mali and their children. None of the newspaper repots I read pointed this out, they just said “women and children from African origin.” Using a widespread practice of categorizing people by continents.
While most of the people sleeping in the street were black, the official, and the de facto spokespeople, were not. They spoke in the name of many of these immigrant/French families who cannot find housing and have been living in shelters, hotels, and in the streets for many years, after paying high amounts for temporary and precarious housing and always having felt insecure about their housing situation. A woman from Asian origin told me she lived in a hotel some blocks away. She paid more per month than the monthly rate of regular apartments I had found in my search of apartments. She said she had to pay daily, or by week at the least. But she was a couple of weeks behind in her payments, so she would have to go back to her hotel room soon, because if the hotel manager found she was not there, he would confiscate her belongings and put her in the street.
Sans Logement Proteste Rue de la Banque II
October 8th, 2007
On my second visit I entered on the other side of the street as before. This time I caught the least visible part of the campers, since they were hidden behind parked cars. In the last set of “beds” I found not black African women and children like in the other side of the street but three white French women and a woman from the Maghreb (North Africa). So, there was racial segregation event at this “sleep-in” to protest lack of housing. The reasons were partly cultural and due to language differences, since the refuges from Mali had a limited knowledge of French.
I approached a group of women who seemed to be having a good time. They said this was “like a picnic”. One of the French women had come from the supermarket, with chocolate, bananas, yogurts, etc. She asked me what I was doing there and was somewhat distrusting of me, saying that Sarkozy had agents observing them and she cautioned the others not to talk to me. I said I was studying migration, and that in the shorter term I would write a blog about the incident.
It is interesting that the woman who was the most willing to talk to me turned out to be a Kabyle woman from Algeria. She told me about her migration story. She came to France eight years before with her older children so that they could go to school there. But she left her husband, who had a good job, as well as her younger children behind. She has not been back since. Her husband has been trying for years to get a settler visa for family reasons; so far he has not been able to get the visa. The woman’s brother is a book writer and sketch artist. He has combined these skills and written books about Kabylia for children. He has a tourist visa and often visits France but only for short stays since he says he has a better life in Algeria that in France.
This Algerian migrant arrived to France with no knowledge of French and now she speaks it rather well after eight years of “doing anything I could to learn the language” as she told me. “I have been here for eight years and I have not been able to find housing. I have applied many times, and I am still in line to get some housing. I live in a ‘foyer’ (emergency housing/long term homeless shelter) the problem is that they do no let my children stay there with me because they say they are too old to live there.”
“So what do they do?” I asked.
“They are students. They are getting ready for their exams in order to get into a good college, and get a diploma and then get a good job. Not like me… My oldest son was here yesterday, he slept in the street with us and he told me he would work hard to get me and himself a house in Paris. I said that all I wanted was a modest house in Kabylia. He said that he would prefer to stay and succeed in France and that we would only go to Algeria for vacations.”
“And what do they do about their living situation?” I asked.
“Well, I sneak them in. But I if they find me they would kick me out.”
“They gave us a two bedroom apartment. But another woman lives in the other room. So me and my three children sleep in one room. My older son said yesterday. I am glad we are here because I am f* tired of sleeping in the floor for all these years.”
Then, our conversation was stopped because a middle-aged French man came and started talking to us. Asking what “we” were doing. What was the purpose of being there? Until when were the people planning to be sleeping in those streets? It turned out that he was the owner of the car parked next to the woman. And he was worried about people sitting in it, breaking the windows or worse putting it on fire. The French women assured him that they meant no harm, that they clean the street twice a day in order not to leave any trash (which was indeed the case since they would clean the area at least twice a day). And they would take care of his car and make sure nobody did anything to it. He thanked them and offered to bring them coffee the next morning.
The woman who had brought the goodies from the supermarket said that she had had better times but that lately she had found herself without housing. She was wearing very nice clothes, as were her co-squatters.
I asked the French man where he lived. He said “around the corner, but in a very small place.” He said he empathized with the woman because he would like to move to a bigger place. He knew that if he moved to a new place he would not be able to afford it. He thanked the woman for looking after his car and left.
The French woman then offered me some chocolate and talked to me for 45 minutes about Sarkozy, police abuse, and their housing problems. After the initial reluctance of one of the French woman to talk to me, now she would not stop talking to me about the issues that brought her to protest.
Then more police arrived and the closed the street and this woman asked me to photograph the police actions, in order to document them. I did so. We said goodbye and left for the night around 10 p.m. The next time I came on October 10th, they were gone, forced by the police to either go to a shelter, “to drink coffee” with the police or to take the subway as Le Monde reported, and they later confirmed.
Housing Policies
There is something wrong when there is such a lack of housing for all types of people, and the government is doing nothing about it at the same time that apartments in the areas next to Paris are left burnt without any visible plans to fix them. The neoliberal logic must have already influenced France too much make it least likely to have active state financial participation to solve the issue. At the same time many state solutions have been tried, including public housing, projects, cites, incentives to build mix housing, 1 or 2% employer taxes dedicated to housing for immigrants, etc.; nonetheless, all these state policies have had unintended consequences. It seems that now the government prefers inaction.
Videos from Le Monde online:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/video/0,47-0,54-963697,0.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/panorama/0,11-0@2-3224,32-965131@51-952250,0.html
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