The housing shortage in Paris is so great that landlords can also rent out small accommodations illegally.
Old maids’ rooms in Paris are often less than 8 square meters.
(dpa)
Small, smaller, even smaller – in Paris there are numerous one-bedroom apartments for rent that are unimaginably and often unacceptably tiny. In a hair-raising case, the city is now taking action against the rental of a 4.7 square meter apartment for which a waiter pays a monthly rent of 550 euros, as the newspaper “Le Parisien” reports. When the 42-year-old climbs onto his loft bed, acrobatics are required because there is only 50 centimeters of space between the mattress and the ceiling. “I only come here to sleep, otherwise it’s depressing,” he says. The city has now declared the room uninhabitable and wants to assist the waiter under civil law.
The law actually stipulates that an apartment must consist of at least one main room with a surface of at least nine square meters, a ceiling height of at least 2.20 meters or a volume of 20 cubic meters. In this case, the landlady had simply written a volume of 24 cubic meters in the lease, twice the actual size, as the newspaper wrote. Waiter Massi, who comes from Algeria, paid 300 euros to a real estate agency when he arrived in Paris in 2018, and he queued for the room with six other candidates.
The case of Massi’s mini-room illustrates the housing crisis in the French capital, said the spokesman for the association “Right to Housing” (DAL), Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, the “Parisien”. Landlords take advantage of this and offer impossible quarters. As a person responsible for the city’s housing authority explained, there are 58,000 former servants’ rooms in Paris, the so-called chambres de bonne, which are less than eight square meters in size and are sometimes rented out.