A Massive Project

If the reflex response to reform in France is often protest, just imagine tackling the issues that last fall provoked the worst rioting the country had seen since the upheavals of May 1968. But after nearly four decades of neglect, a major offensive is under way to transform the banlieues, the blighted suburban ghettos that ring many French cities. Leading the drive is the French Minister of Employment, Social Cohesion and Housing, Jean-Louis Borloo. "When you have all of society's difficulties, failings and hardships so concentrated in the same places, you need an audacious, comprehensive plan to address them all," says Borloo, who began devising and implementing his multipronged strategy for the suburbs over three years before the first cars were torched in Clichy-sous-Bois on the edge of Paris. "What we're doing is massive: attacking decades-old problems in housing, unemployment, education, exclusion — you name it!" adds the Minister.

Borloo calls his policy package a "Marshall Plan for the banlieues," and its scale and ambition almost justify the bombast. Since joining the government in 2002, his efforts have mobilized over €35 billion in funding to rebuild or renovate France's most troubled housing projects. In 2005 alone, ground was broken for construction of over 340,000 new and restored housing units. The Minister has also launched new employment-training and job-creation programs tailored to young people that aim to create at least 1.3 million jobs: unemployment among those 25 and under is a steep 23% nationwide, and rises as high as 50% in some suburbs.

Borloo's push for social improvements has won breathing space with the French public for his other — potentially more controversial — reforms. Despite initial grumbling from unions, he introduced closer monitoring of dole recipients to identify possible cheats, and rationalized the state employment agency to offer more positions to job seekers faster. Last summer he even piloted a work contract, designed to encourage small companies to take on staff by allowing them to fire new workers within two years without risking legal reprisals or severance costs. That's remarkably similar to the law Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin championed to stimulate youth employment by making young workers easier to dismiss — and look how that ended up. But as Villepin's proposal was shelved earlier this month, an independent agency monitoring the Borloo-sponsored measure reported it had generated over 400,000 new jobs since September.

Great results — but they were not enough, or soon enough, to prevent last fall's riots. "When you're trying to catch up on nearly 40 years of wasted time in five short years, it takes a while for the machine to start, warm up and pick up speed," says the Minister. "We're like a new business: it takes time for the first results to start showing." That's a motto that could apply to his own career. Unlike Villepin or Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, who have changed positions in and out of government over the past four years, Borloo has stayed fixed on his single — but substantial — brief. That focus has kept him near the top of popularity polls for the past year, while he's watched his colleagues' ratings fluctuate, and it means that he won't even contemplate failing in his task. "Failure isn't an option. Not for them," he says, motioning to a looming Paris area housing project. "And not for the rest of French society, who will have to answer to them if things don't improve."

That message was evident in the street battles last October and November when more than 10,300 cars, scores of businesses and dozens of public buildings went up in smoke. And 82% of respondents in a recent poll were skeptical that the government's plans would be enough to fix the problem; 86% expect future outbursts of violence. That sense of futility is what consigned the projects to slow decay in the first place. "People make the mistake of talking about a banlieue problem; it's really a problem of French society as a whole," says Marie-Louise Fort, mayor of Sens — where one-third of the town's 38,000 population lives in public housing. "The ills of the banlieue are French ills."

It's in the projects themselves that the symptoms are the most severe. In Sens' Champs Plaisants project, school-age youths roam the tenements or fake calls on street-side phone booths while working as scouts for local drug dealers. "Dealers pay kids between €20 and €30 per 15 minutes to keep a watch for police patrols or strangers in the area," says Fort, who, like many municipal officials, is implementing Borloo's measures and augmenting them with policies of her own. She has made a tough anticrime drive central to her efforts. "It's hard to convince a kid or even entire families making twice or three times as much as they would working legitimate jobs to reject dealers."

That's why in Epinay-sur-Seine, a suburb to the north of Paris, reform means cracking down on dealers. Jean-Michel Genestier, chief of staff to the mayor, says, "Each time there's been any letup in police pressure on dealing, we've seen related crime and general insecurity rise as thugs figure the coast is clear." Keeping kids in schools and off the streets would also help. School attendance and educational attainment levels in many deprived areas are dismal. Fort says only 38% of Sens students entering secondary school have mastered reading, writing and math. That's a severe disadvantage for any pupil, but it's worse for the children of the projects. "Many children live in broken homes or ones where neither parent has ever worked, where ambition is minimal, and intellectual activity revolves around daytime television," says Marie-Claude Vitali, founder of the Tremplin (Springboard) social association, which assists residents of the projects in Blois. "Kids aren't just failing in school; they're culturally feral."

The vicious circle is completed by the widespread view that good and studious behavior brings no better rewards than truancy. Says Djillali Achab, a 31-year-old resident of the Champs Plaisants project in Sens: "Why are kids going to work hard in school, study at home and apply themselves when everyone they know left school at 17 and hasn't been able to find work since?" Leaders of municipalities such as Sens and Epinay think small, grassroots initiatives to change attitudes are part of the answer. Both cities have established organizations where parents can come for instruction as well as support from others trying to raise tearaway kids. This complements a nationwide program offering families of 2- to 16-year-olds with learning difficulties multidisciplinary aid; from tutoring to intervention in the home to observe and possibly modify family behavior. Though limited by tight funding — only 150 students in Epinay receive such attention, for example — officials see glimmers of hope. "If nothing else, these are 150 kids who are getting attention and staying off the streets," Genestier says. "The street is where we're losing our youth today."

Borloo himself identifies the mean streets — and meaner projects — as sources of unrest. One solution: knock down some of those dehumanizing tower blocks. The whole of central Epinay would be a candidate for this treatment; a patchwork of massive concrete blocks, it is instantly intimidating and crushingly ugly. And the center of Epinay isn't the worst; at the town's western end lies Orgemont, whose mix of towers and low-slung apartment structures provide a rat run for dealers and a dangerous maze for visitors. The minister believes the first step to breaking down "real and psychological walls" is to reshape the landscape by replacing towers with human-size structures interspersed with open space.

It's a formula that worked for him in the 1990s, when, as mayor of the job-starved and crime-ridden city of Valenciennes, he tackled the projects and freed up land for social housing in the city center. Expanded to a national scale, Borloo's plan originally identified 500,000 complexes — housing around 2 million residents — for renovation or reconstruction. To help meet that target, Borloo has boosted new construction rates in all sectors across France from around 50,000 units completed annually over the past decade to over 80,000 now. "When people see monstrosities like these coming down in a really big urban reform, requiring lots of funding and commitment, they say, 'Wow, this is serious,'" Genestier says, pointing to one of central Epinay's monolithic towers. "In Epinay, things are serious."

That's true in plenty of other places in France where reform has taken hold. A good job, too; France needs to be serious about changing its old habits of social policy. But will change come soon enough? Standing with a group of fellow residents in Champs Plaisants, Achab isn't sure. He wants to believe the Borloo plan will work, because he fears what will happen if no progress is made. "Next time," he says, casting a glance around the sprawling project, "it's really going to blow."