Fires reveal housing crunch

Salamata Sy, mother to a 3-year-old boy, doesn't have to worry about her home burning, but that's about the only thing she doesn't have to worry about.

Expelled three months ago from the squat where she had lived for a year with her husband and son, she is now camping out on the streets of Aubervilliers, a Paris suburb, along with a hundred or so of her neighbors.

Sleeping in a tent her family shares with her husband's cousin and her two kids, Ms. Sy cooks on a small charcoal grill, fetches water from the mains pipe in the street nearby, and uses the toilets at a public market 500 yards away.

She says she did everything to find a normal home. "We went to five real- estate agents and paid their fees each time, we answered small ads, I looked on the Internet, and we got nowhere," Sy says. "Everything was already rented.

"My husband earns a decent wage as a cleaner," she adds. "I think it was because we are of African origin." Sy's parents moved to France from Senegal, and she was born in this country.

Karamoko, who works as a delivery man, says he doesn't want to get into allegations of racism when he wonders why he couldn't find an apartment he could afford. "I'll leave that to your imagination," he laughs. "But I have residence papers, I have pay slips, I have enough money to pay a rent. What's missing?"

What is missing, says Edwige Le Net, an activist with "Housing Rights," a nongovernmental organization helping the Aubervilliers homeless, is housing units. "We need a massive building program," she says, "and the authorities should stop demolishing subsidized housing blocks just because they are ugly, and stop selling off their housing stock to make money."

At the same time, says Mr. Gilonne, "just enforcing existing laws, like the one that obliges mayors to devote 20 percent of their housing programs to subsidized units, would be a good start."

Ms. Sy's dramatic gesture, living under canvas for three months, has paid off. The Aubervilliers authorities have promised to rehouse 16 of the 20 families which have legal immigrant papers, and her family is among them.

No end is in sight yet for Karamoko. But he shares the hopes of some activists in the housing field that the recent spate of fires may do some good.

"I hope that this will make the general public take notice and understand that there is a real problem," says Ms. Le Net. "We cannot make people live worse than dogs."

"This has to be resolved now," insists Karamoko. "It cannot be left to be forgotten when the drama [of the fires] is over."

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