Dn the night of December 15 to 16, ten people, including five children, died in a fire in Vaux-en-Velin. This drama highlights an unknown evil: the impossible right to decent and secure housing in degraded private housing.
Faced with the principle of co-ownership and its law of 1965, public action and the means that can be mobilized are very often at an impasse, while private co-ownerships are in a state of sometimes absolute emergency. And the public authorities accuse an eternal train of delay vis-à-vis the multiple difficulties of these joint ownerships.
The drama of Vaulx-en-Velin is a tragic textbook case, and dozens of condominiums seem to be on this slippery slope. A phenomenon on which the Abbé Pierre Foundation has been warning for years, without adequate measures being deployed to fight against this factory of poverty. A steering committee for the “joint ownership initiative plan” nevertheless met on January 16 at the Ministry of Territorial Cohesion.
Under the poverty line
The mechanics are often the same: owners in good faith leave their condominiums with the feeling of paying higher charges for fewer services. They are replaced by impecunious or unscrupulous co-owners. Then criminal chains of rental and subletting set in: while these condominiums are often the last resort before the street, poor housing and slum landlords begin to reign.
Attracted by a system of real estate exploitation with high potential income, white-collar delinquency sets in: real estate agencies with dubious practices are grafted with bank loans at the limits of what is bearable for vulnerable groups who are mired in the spiral of indebtedness at the slightest accident in life. Neighborhood delinquency also sometimes takes hold there, and drug trafficking is encysted there.
Poverty is not the prerogative of HLMs: 600,000 substandard housing units are listed in our country, and 65% of households living below the poverty line live in private housing.
In my city, Grigny 2 – the largest degraded condominium in the country with 5,000 housing units and 17,000 inhabitants – is the subject of special attention from the State in view of its concentration of poverty. On January 29, 2021, during the interministerial committee for the city, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, announced a unique measure in France: 100% coverage of emergency and safety works to avoid imminent human tragedies. Two months later, the demolition of 920 housing units and the transformation of 400 others into social housing by the purchase of the apartments concerned by the Ile-de-France public land State was also announced. This recycling of the most indebted condominiums, up to 250% of the operating budget, is a radical solution but which is necessary, provided that this redemption is at a fair price for the occupying co-owners. It is also the acknowledgment of a failure: that of an obsolete and ineffective management system, powerless trustees and judicial administrators incapable of redressing the bar of the accounts of the co-ownerships.
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