Ghetto-over-it
Tuesday 21st April 2026
The French Government declared Paris an ‘open city’ on 12th June 1940 and two days later the German army marched unimpeded down the Champs Élysées.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the British might say.
We can tease but the capitulators were wise.
Many lives were spared and Central Paris is beautifully preserved.
Like London, post-war Paris has attracted immigration, putting huge pressure on housing.
Unlike London, there were no bomb sites on which to build social housing and new housing was built outside the core.
Certain Parisian suburbs are now known as ‘ghettos’, notorious for their high unemployment, poverty and crime.
In the UK in 1990, at the peak of Thatcher’s sale of council properties to their tenants, a new legal mechanism, called Section 106, was set up to make property developers contribute to the public interest in exchange for their planning gain.
There was a further obligation to provide ‘affordable’ housing as part of any development, supposedly aimed at key workers who could not afford full market prices. Social housing by another name.
Maggie forbade councils to build replacement social housing themselves, so they were (rightly) keen to ensure their own Boroughs benefitted from the Section 106 obligations.
Left wing councils, keen on social engineering, insisted the affordable housing was intermingled within the new developments themselves, using the argument they did not want to push poorer people out of the core of London, creating ‘ghettos’, like Paris.
All understandable in the context of the time when publicly funded housing was being sold off cheaply into private hands for political gain.
However, it has become baked into thinking generally that the ‘affordable’ housing must be within development schemes. Some councils demand as much as 50% contributions leading to protracted negotiations over new home building, often for years.
I suggest we ghetto-over-it and abolish Section 106 entirely in our capital city.
London is much bigger and, because of the Luftwaffe’s efforts, more mixed in terms of housing than Paris. We need not worry about creating ‘ghettos’ or pushing less well-off working people out of the centre.
If we drop the Section 106 concept altogether and allow developers to build without impediment, we will naturally create a fluid market and more supply.
In turn, the extra supply will keep a check on prices, making housing generally more affordable.
Do give me your views on the topic.
Until next time……….
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