2008-03-13 07:47:15
By Jonny Dymond
Europe correspondent, BBC News
It took six months for Liberation journalist Ondine Millot to get to the truth
about the most sordid side of France's housing crisis.
Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the
phrase you are looking for is contre services - when a room in an apartment is
offered, sometimes "free", in exchange for services.
Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent - cleaning the apartment or washing
clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property.
But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering
on the perverse. "Sex twice a month," is one blunt demand. Another asks for
someone "open in spirit and elsewhere".
"Flat in exchange for libertine services," goes another.
Property-for-sex
Ondine Millot - who in her day job is the court correspondent for the French
daily paper - spent six months researching these advertisements and the people
who place them, for an article which exposed the trade in property-for-sex.
Most of the ads ... where no amount was specified for the rent, were men that
were looking for sex in exchange for housing.
Ondine Millot, Liberation journalist
"I was very surprised to find out that this kind of thing was going on," she
says.
"We called a lot of men, I made something like 50 phone calls. Most of the ads
that were 'against services', where no amount was specified for the rent, were
men that were looking for sex in exchange for housing."
But the problem is not just hidden away on websites.
Take a quick look through the bookshelves of any decent-sized newsagent, and
tucked between the biographies of the former French First Lady and the former
American First Lady is the extraordinary account of Laura D.
Her book, My Dear Studies (Mes Cheres Etudes), details the anonymous young
woman's slide from being a fresh-faced undergraduate, to a poverty-stricken
student, to a 19-year-old selling her body to pay the rent.
"Laura", when I meet her at her publisher's, is charming, if desperately
concerned to keep her identity secret, to spare her parents the horror of
knowing how their daughter fell.
But she is also angry. It was, she says, the astronomical cost of property that
sent her on to the streets.
"Rent was over 70% of my budget," she says.
"Looking at friends, people I know, they live in places that are unhealthy,
squalid. Or they negotiate with landlords who rent them rooms and who sometimes
abuse them."
Housing Crisis
Sex for rent is the extreme end of an extreme problem which is catching swathes
of France's most vulnerable people - the young and the poor - in its grip.
France, the government admits, is in the grip of its worst housing crisis since
the end of World War II.
Of course, sky-high property prices are hardly exclusive to France.
But some combination of circumstances has left the French - and especially the
Parisian - rental market horribly stretched between supply and demand.
And too many people caught between homelessness and bankruptcy as they struggle
to put a roof over their heads.
There are a far higher proportion of properties empty in Paris than in London.
As the number sleeping rough has declined in the British capital, it has
climbed in the French capital.
In Britain the norm is owner-occupation. While in France rental is seen as the
way to live.
Protests
The French Republic was built on street protest. So, unsurprisingly, a new
generation of housing protest groups have sprung up to campaign in innovative
ways.
Groups such as Jeudi Noir, Droit au Logement and Les Enfants de Don Quichote
have grabbed publicity - and, they say, won political concessions - through
their protests.
Jeudi Noir is the guerrilla wing of the movement, conducting sting operations
on landlords looking for something extra on the side. They also view and film
tiny apartments being advertised for extortionate rents.
Les Enfants de Don Quichote left the French government twisting with
embarrassment with a mass sleep out in Paris last year, as hundreds of
activists and homeless people slept in tents by the Seine.
Droit au Logement, alongside Jeudi Noir, has occupied a former bank right
opposite the old Paris stock exchange, just down the road from the Bank of
France. It has rechristened the building The Ministry of Housing Crisis, and
uses it as both an operational base and a squat.
The groups' actions keep the issue in the public eye.
They know that great stunts are not going to get the million homes that France
needs built.
But they also believe that unless the pressure is kept up on politicians local
and national, then change will never come.
Christine Boutin, the French Housing Minister, has acknowledged the efforts of
the campaign groups and has begun looking at ways to improve the conditions of
the rental market.