A school, a crèche with 45 cradles, a car park, 80 social housing units, 25 of which are intended for the homeless. All in rue Erlanger, right in the middle of the very bourgeois 16th arrondissement of the capital. A real estate project that could only create sparks between the left at the helm of the city and a district anchored to the right resistant to any social mix. More surprisingly, it is also within the progressive Parisian majority that this group, launched in 2017, is causing trouble.
At the origin of the bickering, a tweet from the local group of EELV Paris 16 welcoming the cancellation of the building permit by the administrative court on the grounds that it would undermine “ecological balance”: ” Preserving breathing spaces is the environmentalists’ project. Hopefully the Town Hall will abandon the Erlanger islet densification project to offer an Oasis courtyard to schoolchildren.», Write environmentalists. Response from Ian Brossat, Communist Housing Assistant to Anne Hidalgo: “To congratulate oneself on having blocked 80 social housing units in one of the districts which lack them the most… A whole program…“Antoine Alibert, elected EELV of the 20th arrondissement, replied that”the need for diversity cannot be achieved at the expense of the climate emergency“. Several exchanges followed without a point of agreement being found.
A textbook case around a debate, still largely unresolved and therefore a source of tension, which is rife within the French left: how to reconcile environmental preservation with the imperative of social justice? Either a central issue in Paris, a very dense city, where the mayor intends to reach 25% of social housing by 2025, as provided for by the ALUR law. However, the 16th arrondissement has only 7% while the 19th is 40%. Hence the need for the 9,000 square meters of rue Erlanger.
“In this case, ecology has a good back. We can repaint social selfishness in green, it’s still social selfishness, judge Ian Brossat.To respond to the environmental emergency, it is better to build in dense areas. Otherwise, it is because we accept urban sprawl to the detriment of agricultural land.“He received the support of many Communist and Socialist politicians (Audrey Pulvar, Rachid Temal, Jacques Baudrier …) but also from the former Minister of Housing and former National Secretary of EELV Emmanuelle Cosse:”I am ashamed to see that “environmentalists” join the deleterious appeals of the conservative right of the 16th against social housing and access to housing for the homeless.“
The elected PCF assures that he “do not give up»The real estate complex:«We will rework to take into account the remarks of the court. There will be social housing there.»A location«200 meters from the Bois de Boulogne ”, the largest green space in the capital.
On the EELV side, we are trying to minimize a controversy that is part of the “simplistic positioning“By Ian Brossat and the”caricature»That he would have done environmental training. “We are not fundamentally against this project but we want it to be developed“, Tempers Fatoumata Koné, head of the environmentalists on the Paris council. She identifies two main problems: the size of the building (8 floors) and “a schoolyard that will accommodate three times more students than today with half the space“.
“It is necessary to make a catch-up between the districts of Paris but it is not because it is the 16th that it must be done anyhow“, Slips Fatoumata Koné who assures to want to go beyond the objective of 25% of social housing by 2025 to reach” 30% “. “We don’t have to build systematically. In Paris, there are a lot of unoccupied housing and offices», She concludes.
Still, this new dispute does not calm an already tense atmosphere within the majority of Anne Hidalgo. Since the start of the second term, the municipal team has experienced ups and downs, but above all debates, sometimes lively: the Christophe Girard affair and its consequences, declarations of the Parisian councilor on the “ambiguities“Supposed Greens on”values of the Republic“, Autonomous lists of socialists and environmentalists for the regional ones in Ile-de-France … A climate which can be explained by an EELV group replaced in the last municipal ones which gives more weight to environmentalists and which also fueled by the presidential ambitions of ‘Anne Hidalgo.
