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Posted Nov 6, 2015, 7:03 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 2,102
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The stupid-article-of-the-day, in the Wall Street Journal, and the comment I left them. 
Quote:
Finding a Paris Apartment: It Was Definitely Easier for Hemingway!
By Matthew Dalton
Wall Street Journal
November 5, 2015
When Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, arrived in Paris in 1921, he was a struggling writer without a steady job. Though poor—Hemingway strangled pigeons in the Luxembourg Garden and cooked them for dinner when cash was low—they took only a month to find an apartment, in the Latin Quarter no less.
After months of my own search for an apartment to rent in Paris, I’ll say this about the Hemingways: If they had arrived in the city today, they would have stood no chance of finding one. As a foreigner without a contrat de travail à duree indéterminée, or C.D.I.—a work contract of unlimited duration—Parisian landlords would have viewed the great American writer as an unacceptably risky tenant. He might have been forced to return to the U.S. Hemingway’s moveable feast would have ended before it had begun.
Paris is a beautiful but unwelcoming city, and its landlords are the forbidding gatekeepers. You can’t just show up here with some cash in your pocket and a dream—unless you’re prepared to stay with friends indefinitely, if you have any who are willing to tolerate your extended presence on the couch or in the guest bedroom. It’s no longer the Bohemian city that drew Hemingway and his circle of artists and writers: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others.
When I moved to Paris with The Wall Street Journal at the beginning of July with my wife and two children, I enjoyed considerable advantages over Hemingway. I had a C.D.I.; and I was able to use a company to help me find an apartment in Paris.
Yet landlord after landlord rejected my dossier—the thick stack of documents that prospective renters must assemble to reassure jumpy French landlords. The usual reason, when I was told why, was that I didn’t earn enough money to afford the apartment we wanted. The rule of thumb here is that renters shouldn’t pay more than a third of after-tax income in rent.
This skepticism persisted even though I said I was prepared to do something demanded by many Parisian landlords: place an entire year’s rent into a bank account that the landlord can seize if I stop paying the rent. By the time we found our apartment after nearly three months, we had moved four times, like frogs hopping from lily pad to lily pad.
Paris has a problem shared by the world’s most glamorous and attractive cities: Demand for housing far outstrips supply. Beside Paris, the clearest examples are London, New York and San Francisco, but there are others.
The problem in the French capital is particularly acute, for several reasons. The weight of history is perhaps heavier here than anywhere in the world. All those beautiful stone buildings are pieces of art in their own right and will never be torn down to make way for taller buildings that would increase the supply of housing within the city. That has effectively turned Paris into a museum, frozen in time since the early 20th century. There’s not going to be many new places to live in Paris, maybe ever.
Thus the Parisian property-owner is sitting on a goldmine. But French law makes it difficult to evict renters who stop paying their rent, sowing paranoia deep into the psyche of the city’s landlords. Stories abound of people keeping their apartments vacant for years rather than allowing tenants they suspect might not be able to pay in the future to live in their apartment.
This attitude is a problem for Paris, and for France. It makes living in Paris difficult for entire classes of people, particularly those who don’t have a C.D.I. These often include newly minted entrepreneurs, freelancers, starving artists, marginally employed dreamers, future Hemingways, etc.In short, the kinds of people who make major metropolises the interesting, economically vibrant places they are supposed to be.
For now, though, the global appeal of Paris only grows. It is among the world’s most popular tourist destinations, most recently drawing rapidly increasing numbers of people from Asia eager to lay eyes on the French capital and splurge on the marquee names of French fashion.
In September, I was interviewing a refugee from Iraq in a small town southeast of Paris. This man had fled Mosul, a city now controlled by the militants of Islamic State, travelled thousands of miles over land and sea and arrived recently in Munich, where he had accepted an offer announced by French officials at Munich train station to come live in France.
Why, after reaching the promised land in Germany, had he decided to keep going?
“I have dreamed of Paris since I was little,” he said. Paris—or at least the idea of Paris—had prompted this man to make aesthetic decisions even as he fled for his life.
The French capital was only an hour’s train ride away. But I knew that the road for him to an apartment here would be considerably longer than that.
Matthew Dalton has been reporting from Europe for the past seven years for The Wall Street Journal, based previously in Brussels. He has covered the eurozone debt crisis, trade negotiations, European economics and terrorism, among other things. Matthew was born and raised in New York City.
http://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2015/11/0...for-hemingway/
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Brisavoine
"There’s not going to be many new places to live in Paris, maybe ever." Uh... there is already more housing per sq. mile in central Paris than in the central areas of any other Western city except perhaps Manhattan. So the problem here is not that it's not possible to build taller in central Paris, whose density is already way way higher than central London, Tokyo, Berlin, Montréal, you name it. The problem, I'm guessing, is that like many foreign journalists, you've been looking for an apartment only in central Paris, and did not venture into zone 2, 3, 4 or 5 of the Paris Métro, where most Parisians live, and where housing is more accessible.
Now my question is: if you were posted to London or Tokyo, would you be looking for an apartment only in zone 1 of the Tube or just around the Imperial Palace of Tokyo? Probably not. You, like 99% of people, would have looked for better opportunities in farther areas of London and Tokyo. So why, when it is Paris, foreign journalists only look for housing in the most central areas, as if there was no life beyond? Zones 2 to 5 of the Paris Métro contain some absolutely charming areas with great quality of life and much cheaper and more accessible housing than central Paris, such as for example Sèvres, Montmorency, Marly-le-Roi, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Sceaux. It's not like there's a lack of choice of wonderful neighborhoods where you could live not just in a cramped apartment, but in a house with garden and park or forest nearby for your kids!
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New Axa – New Brisavoine
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