Paris Buys Up Posh Flats for Poor to Rent

The Paris city council has quietly bought more than a dozen upmarket apartment blocks in the most well-to-do districts to turn them into council flats, it emerged yesterday.

To the consternation of rightwing councillors and some wealthier residents, the Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, aims to redraw the social map of the French capital by providing up to 20 times more low-rent accommodation in the genteel central and western arrondissements.

"This was an election promise and he's determined to keep it," a town hall spokesman said. "The new administration wants to end the policy of de facto social segregation that has existed in Paris now for decades."

Under a new law passed by the Socialist government, every French municipality with a population greater than 50,000 must ensure that at least 20% of the overall housing stock is rent-controlled.

Of Paris's 20 arrondissements, only four meet that requirement. The most elegant beaux quartiers - the cosseted Left Bank 7th and, just across the Seine, its ultra-chic Right Bank neighbour the 8th - manage just 0.6% and 0.5% respectively.

In the poorer eastern quartiers populaires, such as the 13th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, as many as 30% of all apartments are council flats. Mr Delanoe, whose Socialist-Green administration was elected last spring, has vowed to even out the imbalance.

The city's most recent acquisitions include a stunning 19th-century listed apartment building in the rue de Varenne, a stone's throw from the Place des Invalides, most of the ministries and the National Assembly, where eight new council flats are to be completed soon.

On rue de la Boétie in the 8th, a few yards from the Champs-Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, 12 new low-rent apartments are to be built in a magnificent Haussmann block.

Mr Delanoe's bold attempt at social engineering has sparked furious rows between rightwing and leftwing councillors, with some conservatives comparing it to the excesses of Stalinist Russia.

"It is utter madness to create what amount to new proletarian ghettos," said François Lebel, the conservative mayor of the 8th arrondissement.

But Mr Delanoe's head of social housing, Jean-Yves Mano, demanded: "Who does Paris belong to? We've got to end this divide between bourgeois and popular areas.

"Ordinary people have to be able to benefit from affordable housing in nice areas."