French Letter: That pied-à-terre in Paris you’d like comes at a price
One of the observations often made by visitors to Paris is a realisation of the sheer volume of people who live in the downtown area – that is to say, the arrondissements from 1-11, inside the Périphérique, in which tourists spend most of their time.
When Baron Haussmann first demolished, then rebuilt Paris in the nineteenth century, he wanted, above all, to construct an imperial capital to rival Vienna. But along the way, he created avenue after avenue, boulevard after boulevard and street after street of grand Haussmanien residences, some of which were individual homes for the rich and powerful, but the great majority of which were apartments that at ground level provided space for bars, cafés, shops and offices.
But today, 150 years on, the occupancy rate for such apartments is falling. More and more of the trademark buildings, with their concierges and windows overlooking either the street or the cobbled courtyards hidden away behind the elegant facades, have been bought up by foreign “investors,” mainly from Russia, Asia and the Gulf states.
Putting their money into bricks and mortar seems to work for the oligarch and princely classes. They generally are not interested in finding tenants but prefer to wait a few years until they can sell out again, with no questions asked.
This weekend marks La Rentrée when Parisians return from their four-week annual leave in Brittany or the Riviera. When night falls, it will be interesting to see how many more lights go on the buildings opposite where I am staying in the Rue Constantinople, just up the road from Saint Lazare.
Last night, I would say that at most half of the apartments I could see were occupied, which is true across the inner city. Airbnb has played its part, of course. Parisians who in past generations would have lived in the same one or two-bedroom flats all their lives have in many instances given into the temptation of renting out what they own and moving to the suburbs. Either way, the result is the same, a gradual decline of “real” Parisians living in what outsiders like to think of as the “real” Paris.
The irony is that properties for sale or rent in the central area have risen in value even as they diminish in size. Looking in estate agents’ windows yesterday, I could see dozens of ads for apartments too small to swing a cat in but which cost anything between €250,000 (£215,000) and €400,000 (£343,000). Some were almost comically tiny and more liked extended closets. Even at the top end, well before a second bedroom came into play, they featured hole-in-the-corner kitchenettes and shower rooms no bigger than a decent-sized larder.
It is one thing, it seems to me, to look out from your garret over the rooftops of Paris, imagining that you are Scott Fitzgerald or Zelda, and something else when the dormer through which you are surveying the scene is less than three metres from your front door.
Larger homes – the sort you would actually like to live in – go, of course, for a lot more than the rabbit-hutches I have just described. You could easily spend a million or two million euros on a 60-square-metre two-bedroom apartment in the Sixth or the Eighth with a terrasse and parking space, and above that, the sky is the limit.
Living in Brittany, my wife and I often fantasise about moving to Paris. The trouble is, if we were to sell up, empty our bank accounts and cash in all our investments, we could, if we were lucky, end up with quite a stylish pied-à-terre in an up and coming district – Belleville, say, or Caulaincourt – but no money with which to pay the bills or buy lunch in the corner brasserie.
And I haven’t even mentioned the taxes!
Our compromise – honed over the years since we left New York – is to live in the countryside, which definitely has its compensations (especially when the sun is shining), and then to spend eight weeks or so in Paris each Spring and Autumn, staying in one of the apartments that twenty years ago would have been home to a French family.
Given that we have obligations in New York, London and Belfast and that we also, whenever possible, get to visit different parts of the country, we should probably consider ourselves extremely fortunate. But I still regret that, unlike Bogart and Bacall, we won’t always have Paris.
The good news is that, with the scourge of Covid starting to fade, the City of Light is coming back into its own. If you have a Passe Sanitaire, the world can be your oyster again. The bars are jumping, the restaurants are full, and the Tuileries Gardens are once more the place to be seen. Even the weather has taken a turn for the better.
And, whisper it softly, the tourists aren’t back yet so that you could close your eyes and still believe you were in a foreign country. Come now before the spell is broken and everything is as it was before.
Next stop, Lyon.