Homeless stand in front of their tents in Lyon
©AFP - Jeff Pachoud
©AFP - Jeff Pachoud
Posted on 01/04/2007 12:49:03 PM PST by Stoat
PARIS (AFP) - The French government announced plans to create a "legal right" to housing in response to a snowballing campaign that has seen a tent city for the homeless spring up in the heart of Paris.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told a press conference a bill would be presented to the cabinet on January 17 and hopefully adopted before parliament breaks up ahead of April's presidential election.
The law, if passed, would make France the second European country to guarantee the right to housing, after Scotland which adopted similar measures with its 2003 Homeless Act.
President Jacques Chirac used his New Year's address to promise swift government action on a "right to housing" -- a key demand of protestors who have mounted a headline-grabbing campaign in support of France's estimated 100,000 homeless.
Villepin said the government wanted the right to become legally enforceable by 2008 for "people in the most difficult situations: the homeless, but also the working poor and single women with children."
"That is the time necessary to ensure that all the people concerned can be provided with decent lodgings, whether in a transitional shelter or an individual home," he said.
By 2012, the government wants the right to housing to be legally enforceable for all, with a guarantee provided by the state, or in some cases regional or local authorities.
From that point onwards, "every person or family housed in unworthy or unsanitary conditions" will able to take legal action to have their rights enforced, he said.
Villepin said the law would "make France one of the most advanced countries in terms of social rights". Housing would become the third legally enforceable right in France, along with access to education and healthcare.
Four months ahead of presidential elections, with the homeless issue thrust centre-stage, the housing measure was seen as a bid by the centre-right to underscore its commitment to social justice.
The protest wave started last month when a small group of campaigners -- called Les Enfants de Don Quichotte ("The Children of Don Quixote") -- pitched a 200-strong tent camp along a trendy Paris canal, housing homeless people as well as well-heeled citizens prepared to sleep rough for a few days out of solidarity.
Makeshift camps have since sprung up all over France, including in the Mediterranean port of Marseille, the historic town of Orleans, and the southern cities of Lyon and Toulouse.
On Tuesday a group of eight struggling families, backed by campaigners, moved into a vacant office block near the Paris stock exchange, a giant squat they have dubbed a "ministry" for the homeless and ill-housed.
Politicians of all stripes -- including presidential frontrunners Nicolas Sarkozy on the right and Segolene Royal on the left -- had responded on cue, lining up with pledges to tackle the plight of the homeless.
According to the charity Emmaus, one million people in France do not have a home of their own: 100,000 sleep rough, while the rest live in campsites, hotels or shelters. Another two million people have housing "problems".
The "right to housing" measures come in addition to a 70-million-euro (90-million-dollar) emergency plan for the homeless announced last month.
But a spokesman for Segolene Royal, the Socialist presidential frontrunner, warned the government against making "great announcements", saying what was needed was a massive commitment to build more public housing.
Everyone has a right to housing. The question is, do you have the right to make everyone else pay for yours?
"Monsieur, I have -- how you say -- crapped all over my home. It is ... unsanitary. Please to give me a new house toute suite. I know my rights, Monsieur. I am sure you do not want me to overturn cars in your scenic little streets, eh?"
Correct. The 'right' to housing means the government can't prevent you from having a house.
Yeah, that'll draw just the right kind of immigrants now, won't it? Why don't you just establish a mandatory "adopt a bum" program that applies to all native French households?
Cool! Sign me up. I'd like a house in Paris s'il vous plait!
France has homeless people?
Must be a mistake. I thought France was a socialist utopia that the United States must emulate.
I presume that means is that if I move to France, they'll send over someone in a maid's outfit to clean my flat so I don't have to, right?
I think everybody should have a legal right to whatever housing they can afford. But an "enforceable" right to housing seems overly broad and extremely expensive.
Be careful of what you wished for. The last time I was in Paris, the place smelled and looked like a sewer, there were gangs of intimidating hoodlums openly roaming the streets and I was offered a prostitute by four different pimps in the course of an hour.
Does this mean that I get to claim the Versailles as my summer residence?
(No, I'm not French; but so what? Neither are these "homeless" they're fretting about!)
(Villepin said the law would "make France one of the most advanced countries in terms of social rights". Housing would become the third legally enforceable right in France, along with access to education and healthcare.)
I'm sure the right to food is not far behind. If I had the right to housing, education, healthcare, and food, with no responsibility for getting any of it, what incentive would I ever have to work? Ever?
Values of "You don't work, You don't eat" are being crapped on by France, with predictable results right around the corner. France is not far from the day when the unproductive outnumber the productive. I wonder what business will remain in France.
Didn't France give all Germans a legal right to housing in France back in the early 1940s?
Um, how are they going to pay for that?
A legal right to housing will guarantee that the French tax revenues pay for this housing. In turn, this will guarantee a subsidy for the slums and start a slide into more and more deteriorating property which will provide more slums for French taxpayers to pay for. Liberalism stinks.
Governments cannot "create" rights. As our founders rightly proclaimed, rights come from God, and they are the same for everyone. Rights cannot change, or be added.
They can only be recognized or not recognized. and the government can only enforce them or infringe upon them. But it can't make new ones.
Clearly, if anything is NOT a God-given right in the sense that our founders understood that term, it is housing.
Only if God magically creates a house for each of us when we're born, could a right to housing be said to exist. Then you could argue that taking that house away would infringe upon a right to housing.
But in the real world, government cannot give us rights that God has seen fit to deny us. All the legislation in the world will not create housing for everyone in the long run. It will only destroy the housing market and create chaos. But it will never deliver a house to everybody, and the law will prove unsustainable in the face of economic reality.
Not only that, many supported the German's "public housing" of many of their own who happened to be of the Jewish persuasion.
A "right" to housing creates a new nobility: those who can't afford their own housing. Nobility is defined as a class of people who possess "rights" that are not possessed equally by all (and buying your own housing from your own earnings is not in any way "equal" to having the government use tax money to pay for your housing.)
The rational response is to stop earning money and give away your possessions, and demand that the government provide you the housing to which you are entitled by law.
Socialists are such morons.
It seems the laws of economics aren't nuanced enough for the French's liking.
And at least once before that. Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees?
So the German army can march in the shade.
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