page_title: History of Paris (1946–2000)
section_title: The housing shortage
hierarchical_section_title: History of Paris (1946–2000) / Paris during the Fourth Republic (1946–1958) / The housing shortage
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Logements sociaux à Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis (France). English: Housing estate in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis (France).
context_page_description: At the end of the Second World War, most Parisians were living in misery. Industry was ruined, housing was in short supply, and food was rationed. The population of Paris did not return to its 1936 level until 1946, and grew to 2,850,000 by 1954, including 135,000 immigrants, mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Italy and Spain. The exodus of middle-class Parisians to the suburbs continued. The population of the city declined during the 1960s and 1970s before finally stabilizing in the 1980s.
  In the 1950s and 1960s, the city underwent a massive reconstruction, with the addition of new highways, skyscrapers, and thousands of new apartment blocks. Beginning in the 1970s, French Presidents took a personal interest leaving a legacy of new museums and buildings: President François Mitterrand had the most ambitious program of any President since Napoleon III. His Grands Travaux included the Arab World Institute, a new national library called the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand; a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille, a new Ministry of Finance, Ministère de l'Économie et des Finances, in Bercy. The Grande Arche in La Défense and the Grand Louvre, with the addition of the glass pyramid by I. M.
context_section_description: Housing was a particularly daunting problem. The population of Paris grew by about 50,000 persons a year between 1946 and 1954, adding 379,000 residents. However, very little housing had been built in the past twenty-five years to house them. 35 percent of the apartment buildings had been built before 1871. 81 percent of the apartments did not have their own bathroom, and 55 percent did not have their own toilet. 100,000 housing units in the city had been declared unhealthy; 90,000 which had been declared uninhabitable were still occupied. Health was also a major problem, with 100,000 cases of tuberculosis in the city, killing hundreds of persons each year, particularly in the crowded apartment buildings and furnished lodging houses.
  The government tried to improve the lives of working-class Parisians by imposing strict rent controls, the monthly rent of a skilled metal worker came to about four percent of his monthly salary, regardless of inflation or the cost of living. The unintentional result was to stop new construction, create a black market in apartments, and reduce even further the number of available housing units, affecting particularly young Parisians. In 1953, half of young married couples were still living with their parents, and 15 percent were living in a single furnished room. In 1954, 20 percent of housing units still did not have running water, two thirds did not have a toilet in their unit, and three-quarters did not have their own bathtub or shower.
  In 1950, the government began a new large-scale project to construct apartment blocks for low-income Parisians, after 1950 called HLMs (habitations à loyers modérés, or residences with moderate rents), usually on the edges of the city or in the suburbs. In 1952, some 82,000 new housing units were built in France, but this only covered a fraction of the new homes needed in Paris. A new minister of lodging, Pierre Courant, was named in 1953, and he launched a much larger-scale program of construction. The new buildings were called LOGECOS,  or Logements économiques, and they were built largely in the Paris suburbs, where land was cheaper and more available. Prefabricated and mass-produced materials were used, greatly reducing the cost of construction. Money was also saved by building much larger numbers of apartments at the same time in the same location. In the suburban community of Sarcelles, a single project built in 1954 contained 13,000 housing units. These new buildings, to save money, were often far from markets or city centers, and had few facilities or access to public transportation. In the 1950s, they were occupied largely by French-born workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, they became the home of tens of thousands of immigrants.
caption: Public housing project in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the Paris suburbs
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