CONFRONTING GENTRIFICATION: THE NEMESIS OF SMART GROWTH 

Matthias Planque      

When we observe the success stories of smart growth, such as Portland, Oregon or Hoboken, New Jersey, we find that when a place earns good grades for improvements in quality of life, investors and wealthier people move in, real estate prices rise, and the original pioneers of the neighborhood or city are soon priced out and forced to move when the rents skyrocket. This is gentrification, the nemesis of smart growth.

What can officials do to resist gentrification in their town, if they wish to do so? That question is a burning issue, especially in the smaller municipalities around Paris which are exposed to an overflow of Parisians with considerable purchase power looking for a better quality of life.

Indeed, in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis (93) for example, many towns have lost the gritty and proletarian image they used to have in better-off Parisian’s eyes in past decades. The completed or planned expansions of the metro and tramway networks, the creation of pedestrian zones, like in Saint-Denis, and, last but not least, the implementation of international company headquarters reaching out for more working space with lower rent have rendered these once scorned suburbs attractive.

The city of Saint-Ouen is one of them. It is particularly well connected to Paris with already five “gates” (entry roads) that can be crossed by foot and plans are drawn for covering the periphery freeway between the two cities in order to create more continuity in the urban tissue. The municipality has just started to build up mixed-use zoning on the Seine’s abandoned docklands. The mayor, Jacqueline Rouillon, boasts of the fact that Saint-Ouen has reached a level where 40 % of all housing are subsidized buildings and projects that help keep rent prices down. This rate, which is double the legal requirement, is also to be applied to the new dockland project.

However, lowering the rents shouldn’t prevent the gentry from buying most of the newly-built real estate. To gain control over real estate prices, the municipality threatens speculative sellers with its priority purchase right over any plot or building that is to be sold. Usually the buyers are specialised companies intending to sell away the real estate to private parties after having improved it. If these companies agree to resell it at reasonable prices, the municipality doesn’t make use of its priority purchase right. If not, the municipality buys it up, which requires considerable amounts of budget monies, but which prevents the uncooperative company from engaging in real estate speculation, and this sets an example for future buyers and sellers of property.

The use that the city of Saint-Ouen makes of its priority purchase right might not quite be in accordance with the original spirit of the law, but at least it represents a creative way for fighting gentrification, something that smart growth municipalities in North America might view as a positive model.