When Paris was chosen to host last year’s Olympic Games, one key factor was a noble promise made by the French government. Emanuel Macron’s administration claimed that instead of using the Olympics to spur private development and force out poor people—which is what usually happens in cities where the games are held—the planners would make sure the event redounded to the benefit of working-class residents.
A key part of this plan was the construction of Olympic Village, which includes a forty-tower residential complex in Seine-Saint-Denis, a downtrodden district just outside the city limits. The apartments were needed to house all the athletes, but over the long term, they were also meant to relieve Saint-Denis’s housing shortage. Authorities promised that post-Olympics, 40 percent of the units would become social housing. In the months leading up to the sporting events, advertisements appeared around the neighborhood, declaring, “This is the heritage of the Games” against a backdrop of the towers.
But by then, the same old playbook was already being enacted: police were raiding homeless encampments and abandoned buildings, shutting down at least sixty squats in 2023 alone and expelling more than three thousand residents. The government also bused thousands of homeless people out of Paris altogether, taking them as far as Orléans, 120 kilometers from the city. Since then, the situation has not meaningfully improved. Only 20 percent of the Olympic Village apartments are now set to become social housing, even as the demand for subsidized apartments keeps rising (with more than 140,000 people on the wait list at the end of last year). The mayor, citing the need for “social diversity,” has made it clear that he hopes to lure wealthier Parisians to come live there. “We’re not building anything positive on the accumulation of poverty,” he said after the Olympic Games. “We really want people who earn money to come live in Saint-Denis.”
The transformation of this suburb is just one part of the decades-long process that journalist Cole Stangler lays out in his excellent debut book, Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light. The upshot of these developments, Stangler writes, is that “a city whose working masses were long feared for their capacity for violent revolt” has now been mostly emptied of its working people. And meanwhile, despite Paris’s “reputation as a creative refuge and artistic mecca, a hub for the avant-garde for much of the twentieth century,” it has come to be dominated by “some of the dullest professions that capitalism has to offer.”
Stangler, an American expat (and sometime Commonweal contributor) who has lived in France for more than a decade, sets out to explain how this happened. His book was first published in 2023—at a time when the transformation of Saint-Denis was not as far along. But the Olympics and their aftermath have not made Stangler’s work feel dated; on the contrary, they’ve made it more timely. He makes it clear that unless France enacts sweeping changes in public policy, the working-class exodus from Paris is likely to continue until the city becomes a mere hologram of its former self.
The gentrification of major cities is a familiar story, one that’s playing out across the globe—from New York to Hong Kong to Sydney. In many ways, the dynamics are the same everywhere. But as Stangler demonstrates, there’s a unique irony in what’s happening in Paris, given its storied past. Class conflict, he argues, is “embedded in the city’s DNA.” Over and over, since the storming of the Bastille, Paris has given rise to mass movements centered on radical visions of equality. Each of these, most notably the revolt of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, has been violently suppressed. But sometimes the radicals have made meaningful gains.
The most salient example is the nationwide rent freeze that was imposed in 1919, following an aggressive political campaign by Parisian socialists. It’s almost hard to comprehend how cheap housing became while this policy was in effect. As of the late-1940s, three decades after it took hold, French residents were spending only three percent of their income on rent—compared to 25 percent in the United States, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This was a critical factor in drawing artists and writers from all over Europe and the Americas, from the Surrealists to the Nouvelle Vague, from James Joyce in the twenties to James Baldwin in the fifties. Without affordable housing, twentieth-century Paris as we know it could not have existed.
Stangler may be overstating how much the rent freeze was responsible for the fall in housing prices—he doesn’t say much about the French population loss in this period, nor about the role of global economic conditions. This is important to keep in mind as New Yorkers look to the possibility of a rent freeze in their own future, a policy that mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has pledged to fight for in Albany. In New York, as in the Paris of 1919, pausing rent hikes won’t be enough on its own to make the city truly affordable. But also, as in Paris, public policy has a key role to play in creating conditions where the Baldwins of the world and the working class alike can thrive.
Paris’s rent freeze was great while it lasted. But in 1948, as France recovered from WWII, the national government lifted rent control on new buildings, hoping to encourage more development. By the 1960s, developers had begun transforming the city, taking advantage of public subsidies. And in 1986, when the Socialist Party lost power, a new right-wing majority eliminated the remaining rent controls. From the perspective of politicians and urban planners, encouraging high-dollar investments makes sense, because these investments bring in tax revenue—though they also drive up the cost of living and displace longtime residents. At the same time, in recent decades, real estate has overtaken other commodities, like gold and debt securities, as the world’s most valuable asset class. And this has made Paris, with its undeniable beauty and international prestige, a prime target for international investment.
The majority of foreign buyers, in Paris’s case, come from the United States and China. Most of them are drawn to the “beaux quartiers” in central and western Paris; but with prices in those neighborhoods increasingly soaring beyond their budgets, foreigners are spreading out to places like the eighteenth arrondissement, what Stangler calls “the heart of working-class Paris—or what’s left of it.”
In Paris’s housing market, between 2006 and 2018, the median sales price per square meter rose by 73 percent. At the same time, since 2014, the city has been losing about twelve thousand inhabitants per year, mostly to the banlieues, or the suburbs. Two-thirds of the essential workers who keep Paris running now commute in from other towns, sometimes riding trains for hours before and after their shifts. Much of the creative class has also been forced out, with many artists living in squats like Art Liquide, an old warehouse in Montreuil that was previously used to stock industrial gas. (Stangler brings readers along for a tour of the squat).
To complement this big-picture view, Stangler takes readers into the lives of ordinary Parisians who are dealing with the fallout of gentrification. One of these is a thirty-four-year-old woman named Soumia Chohra, who immigrated to Paris from Algeria at age thirteen and grew up in the eighteenth arrondissement. When Stangler meets her, she’s paying €800 a month for an apartment she describes as a “rathole” (a reference to the huge rats that scurry around the courtyard, just outside her window). Chohra’s husband works in a warehouse, while she herself has quit working because of a medical condition. In earlier generations, the couple’s modest income would have been enough to get them a decent flat; but in present-day Paris, they can only scrape by—and purchasing an apartment is completely out of the question. Chohra’s sister has already decamped for a banlieue, but she herself can’t bear to leave. Portraits like these are sharply observed, and they testify to Stangler’s skills as a reporter.
Overall, his research is not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s no small task to explain this complex situation with such elegance and clarity. Paris Is Not Dead earns comparison to City of Quartz, Mike Davis’s classic 1990 book on Los Angeles. In that tome, Davis takes readers through parts of Los Angeles, showing how the forces of global capital have reshaped its geography, making it more forbidding and less humane. Stangler’s book, at only a third of the length, doesn’t land with quite the same devastating force. But then, it’s not intended to. His narration is more upbeat, his prognosis more hopeful.
Unfortunately, it’s in his case for moderate optimism that Stangler is at his least convincing. In his final chapter, he lays out several policy prescriptions. It might come as a surprise to learn that his highest priority is not to make Paris as it exists now—with its twenty arrondissements, and its borders stretching from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bois de Vincennes—more affordable. Rather, he thinks the solution is to redefine Paris’s borders, integrating the suburbs with the city center. This is the only plausible way, he argues, to tap into a larger money supply and make the city more equitable for the working majority. He envisions massive upgrades to housing stock, transit lines, and green spaces. Even in this expanded form, Paris would be no larger (in terms of acreage) than Berlin or New York, and still smaller than London or Rome.
Stangler grants that this plan is not politically realistic, at least in the short term. Only a “few political outliers” have advocated for it, and even the political parties of the left have expressed some resistance. But these conditions aren’t necessarily permanent. The “flickers of unrest” he sees around the city, including protests and strikes, are enough to make him hopeful that radical change is on the horizon. “If officials think they’re past the era of urban working-class insurrection,” he contends, “they’re almost certainly mistaken.”
Perhaps he’s right. At the national level, France may well be poised for a political transformation. The country is trapped under enormous debt, and the new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, is trying to cut spending on social programs while also increasing the military budget—an agenda that faces intense opposition from both the left and the right. But all told, National Rally, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, seems to have more electoral support than any of its opponents. When Emanuel Macron steps down in 2027, National Rally could well seize the presidency.
More to the point, at the local level, there’s not much evidence that the current residents of Paris’s banlieues—a great many of whom are immigrants—are in the process of becoming an organized, politicized working class like the one that successfully demanded a rent freeze a century ago. On the contrary, voting turnout in the banlieues tends to be among the lowest in France. And when these residents do vote, they often favor parties of the right. It seems telling that in 2024, when the leftist party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon mounted a major campaign to win over these districts, its leaders decided their best bet was to focus not on the issue of class interests, but rather on solidarity with Palestine. They did manage to drive a small increase in turnout, but it was hardly the transformative result they hoped for. Voting patterns don’t tell the whole story, but surely they offer some clues about the political consciousness—or the lack thereof—among the area’s current working class.
Throughout the book, Stangler seems aware of his own inclination to romanticize elements of Parisian life, but he actively resists that temptation. His political assessment at the end seems like a rare lapse. Sadly, Paris’s rich political legacy may not tell us much about the city’s future.
Paris Is Not Dead
Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light
Cole Stangler
The New Press
$27.99 | 304 pp.
