Berkley Center

Paris: City of Lights, City of Love, City of a Hundred Villages, the Museum City, International City of Fashion, the Illuminated City. The city boasts an impressive list of sobriquets and superlatives of all types, but with one notable exception: nobody’s calling Paris the City of Affordable Living.

From Versailles to the Belle Époque, Paris has long been synonymous with decadence and luxury. During these historic periods, however, it always remained possible to live modestly within the city limits. From the blue-collar neighborhoods of Montmartre and Belleville, to ethnic neighborhoods such as the Jewish quarter in the Marais, middle- and lower-income communities always had a place to call home. Today, however, the city is confronting a different reality as rapid gentrification continually alters the urban fabric of Paris and pushes these communities to the brink.

Gentrification is a well-known phenomenon for those who are living in large cities anywhere in the world. It is a process in which higher-income individuals move into an underdeveloped urban area, and greater investment and upmarket businesses soon follow. Unfortunately, this increases the cost of living and forces out lower-income residents. For some, gentrification represents a positive change, a transformation of gritty sections of town into trendy, easy-on-the-eyes, mixed-use areas.

But this viewpoint doesn’t tell the whole story. While gentrification may increase the economic value of an area, it comes at a very hefty price: the destruction of unique neighborhood identities and the diminishment of a city’s exciting diversity.

The pace of gentrification in Paris really began to speed up during the 1960s and 1970s. Massive public revitalization projects targeted specific neighborhoods that were classified by the state as “neglected.” One of these areas was the Marais, a quarter of tiny streets and ancient palaces; although economically less developed, the area was home to vibrant Jewish, immigrant, and working-class communities.

In 1964, French Culture Minister Andre Malraux began channeling state funds toward the restoration of the Marais, renovating monuments, establishing museums, and designating the entire area as a secteur sauvegardé, or protected zone. In addition to large-scale conservation efforts, the government also sought to transform the secteurs into coherent urban areas by implementing dramatic redevelopment and revaluation.

Wandering through the streets of the Marais, the effects of these policies 50 years later becomes impressively evident. The Marais, now swarming with tourists, has been converted into a quarter of world-class museums, upscale restaurants, bars, shops, and parks. But the policies’ adverse effects are also readily observable; the once thriving Jewish quarter has been reduced to a handful of Hebrew-lettered storefronts along the Rue des Rosiers, and the buildings that once housed blue-collar families have been retooled into high-end loft apartments.

Even my own neighborhood, which is admittedly less centrally located and less picturesque than the Marais, has begun to feel the squeeze of gentrification. My neighbor said that the change is apparent for her at the moment she steps onto the street: men and women in dark business suits are now a dime a dozen, while the large families that once characterized the neighborhood are nowhere to be seen.

Large office buildings were constructed in the 1980s along the Rue de Paradis, sometimes within the skeleton of dilapidated eighteenth century industrial and residential buildings. Upmarket eateries have quickly sprung up and cater almost exclusively to the business lunch rush. Nineteenth century apartment blocks along the Rue de Hauteville are perpetually under construction, being refurbished for the new, wealthier professionals who work nearby.

“It sometimes feels like the area is being slowly swallowed by the chic ninth arrondissement to the east, and the commercial Grand Boulevards district to the south,” my neighbor lamented.

It’s difficult to definitively judge the nature of gentrification, especially in a city as old as Paris. The city has changed and evolved numerous times over the course of its 2,000-year history, but the doomsayers have always been proven wrong as the city becomes stronger after each new transformation. A twenty-first century city needs modern infrastructure and room to grow, so who are we to hold back on what many view as a natural process?

However, the present situation draws its uniqueness from the sheer breadth of gentrification. Unlike in previous centuries, when the aristocracy would abandon one neighborhood for another, leaving the former to be “resettled” by middle- and lower-income residents, the boundaries of upmarket Parisian enclaves have been relentlessly expanding since the 1970s.

So rather than a mere swapping of quarters between classes, the middle- and lower-income populations are simply being pushed further and further toward the outskirts of the city. The displacement of these groups and the destruction of neighborhood identities threaten to irrevocably change the character of the city.

It would be wise to look to Venice as a warning of what can happen when gentrification is unchecked: the city center’s population has dropped by 50 percent since 1966, and luxury apartments and hotels have replaced family homes. The beauty of the floating city remains intact, but it has lost its soul. If the rapid gentrification of Paris is not tempered, the city famed for its galleries may soon find itself as nothing more than a living museum.