Since the recent urban violence, several right and far right personalities have questioned the city’s policy, accusing the state of pouring billions of euros into priority neighborhoods. Yet reports show that the latter remain disadvantaged.
Since the urban violence that erupted after the death of Nahel, 17, killed by a police officer during a road check on June 27 in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), the debate on public money granted to the suburbs resurfaced. For Amine Elbahi, “the state has watered the quarters with public money”. According to this jurist member of the Les Républicains party, “90 billion euros [ont été] invested since the 1990s” to the suburbs. According to him, it would therefore be necessary to stop “justifying the riots with the excuse of poverty”.
“VSthese people are gorged with social allowances and privilegess of all kinds”judges the far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour, whose assertion is however unfounded. “They have been on a state infusion for 40 years”abounds the spokesperson for the National Rally, Julien Odoul, on Twitter. In this profusion of figures and declarations, it is difficult to navigate. Franceinfo comes back in four questions on the aid from which the suburbs benefit.
What aid is dedicated to the suburbs?
To understand the terms of the debate, we must look at the nature of this aid. In the literal sense, the term suburb refers to all urban areas that surround a city center. But in everyday language, it is often used to refer to popular neighborhoods. Since 2015, these districts have been administratively listed under the name of priority district of the city policy (QPV). According to the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT), there are 1,514 in France and overseas. 5.4 million people live there, or about 8% of the population, according to INSEE.
Each year, Parliament votes an envelope allocated to city policy, which is used to carry out public action policies (educational success programs, adult-relay contracts, city contracts, etc.) in these “priority districts “. The objective is to reduce the development gaps between disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and others located in the same agglomerations, as well as to promote social diversity.
How high are they?
The Court of Auditors recalls this in a 2020 report on priority neighborhoods: “The city’s policy (…) cannot be assessed as a whole”because of “width of its field of intervention, of its evolutionary objectives often poorly quantified”. However, according to Thomas Kirszbaum, sociologist and associate researcher at the Center for Political and Social Administrative Studies and Research, it is possible to quantify the aid provided by the State to the suburbs by adding together the sums devoted to urban policy and to urban renewal. So, Ihe draft finance law for 2023 provides for a budget of approximately €597.5 million. Reduced to the population living in a QPV, the envelope corresponds to nearly 110 euros per resident per year, or less than 10 euros per month.
In addition to this system, 450 neighborhoods benefit from aid from the National Agency for Urban Renewal (Anru), which aims to transform and renovate these neighborhoods. The new national program for urban renewal has a budget of 12 billion euros for the period 2014-2030. However, of this sum, only 10% (1.2 billion) is directly financed by the State. The rest comes from Action Logement, the leading social housing group in France (8.4 billion), which derives its income from company contributions, and from the Union sociale pour l’habitat, bringing together HLM organizations (2.4 billion).
According to a calculation by franceinfo, the State has spent 11 billion euros on urban policies since 2004. To this must be added 2.4 billion euros (1.2 billion for the PNRU 2004-2020 according to the Court of Auditors, then 1.2 billion for the NPRNU 2014-2030). That is a total of 13.4 billion euros in 19 years.
Why are these aids controversial?
For certain specialists like the sociologist Dominique Lorrain and the geographer Christophe Guilluy, the suburbs are not so badly off, even favoured, to the detriment of other peripheral zones, located far from the metropolises. Where does this idea come from? In an article published in 2006 in the French journal of political science, Dominique Lorrain compared the districts of Hautes-Noues to Villiers-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne) and “la Cité Verte” to Verdun (Meuse). While the first, classified as a “sensitive urban area”, received 12,200 euros in aid for urban renewal per resident from 2007 to 2012, the second only received 12 euros per resident in 2004, within the framework of a city contract (measure promoting social cohesion, employment and the living environment). An argument taken up by far-right activist Damien Rieu on Twitter.
“The metaphor of the ghetto, of relegation and abandonment spun by the sociological community does not apply everywhere. The Republic holds. The Republic redistributes massively”, estimates Dominique Lorrain with franceinfo. In his works French fractures And Peripheral FranceChristophe Guilluy also defends the idea that suburbs close to urban centers are favored over peripheral France “small and medium-sized towns, rural areas far from the most dynamic employment areas”. A competition criticized by researchers specializing in urban planning.
Is this enough to reduce inequalities?
Asked about the need to abolish the aid intended “to the parents of the rioters”Catherine Vautrin, President of theNational Agency for Urban Renewalgets annoyed: “Maybe we have to stop saying that there are heaps of public money.” “Yes, there are public officials. But, on the other hand, we have a median income in these neighborhoods of 13,000 euros per year”, recalls the former deputy of the Republicans on RMC. “City policy is not very expensive. To say that we have given too much to the neighborhoods is objectively false”also believes political scientist Julien Talpin to franceinfo.
“With its meager means, the city’s policy does not manage to compensate for the under-staffing of these neighborhoods, the structural inequality that targets them. What can we do with 10 euros a month to change life? people? Not much!”
Thomas Kirszbaum, sociologistat franceinfo
And the researcher to temper: “That does not mean that it is useless money. It allows associations to function, as public services are not very present there.”
In Seine-Saint-Denis, where more than a third of the population lives in a priority district, the aid policies put in place remain insufficient to allow equal access to public services, note the deputies François Cornut-Gentille (LR) and Rodrigue Kokouendo (LREM) in a 2018 parliamentary report. According to the document, the justice, the police, education and health are insufficiently equipped, compared to other territories. To this are added recruitment of inexperienced public officials and high turnover.
Another report published in 2018, led by former minister Jean-Louis Borloo, shares the same observation. “In the districts, the municipalities have more needs, but fewer resources: they have 30% less financial capacity”, details the document. Indeed, in these neighborhoods where the population is younger and where the “unemployment rate is almost three times higher” to the national average, the need “school, social, sports support” is more important, say the authors of the report. “What the riots reveal is not so much the failure of city policy as that of all public policies”summary sociologist Renaud Epstein in a forum at the World.