Emmanuel Macron concluded his three-day marathon visit to Marseille on Wednesday with a long-awaited action plan to fight against unsanitary housing and asked the question “without taboo” of possible EPR needs to develop the port of the 2nd city ??in France.
“We must be able to expropriate the sleep merchants much more easily and in a more punitive way”, hammered the head of state, surrounded by dozens of inhabitants, in the heart of the degraded condominium of the city “Benza”.
He promised for this a change in the law, which “protects too much” currently those “who do not play the game”. In fact, slum merchants buy dilapidated accommodation for a pittance and rent them again at a high price, most often without paying any charges or renovating anything.
“Degraded condominiums, unsanitary housing” is “one of our priorities”, insisted the president, who came to launch Act II of his “Marseille en grand” plan. “It’s really a national cause that we take up,” he noted.
With 40,000 slums and eight people dead in the collapse of two unsanitary buildings in the city center in November 2018 rue d’Aubagne, Marseille is particularly affected by the housing crisis.
Provisions will be made in the law to “accelerate emergency work” and “to be able to expropriate much more easily (…) bad payers”, detailed the president.
City “Benza”, the head of state found himself at the foot of a set of faded pink buildings with tired iron shutters, where a thousand inhabitants live. This private condominium, which has 1.3 million euros in debt, has been placed under judicial administration since the end of 2017.
Mahieddine Bouguessa, 24, says she lives with her family of six in a “very small” T3 for 680 euros/month. “Here the elevators have not worked for years, the buildings are nine stories tall, the system in the common areas dates from the 1960s,” he told AFP.
Among the 13 private condominiums targeted by “Marseille en grand”, an exceptional rescue plan will be launched for four of them extremely degraded, via a requalification as an operation of national interest (ORCOD-IN).
This ORCOD-IN system, launched since 2017 in Ile-de-France, allows public authorities to expropriate or buy more easily to destroy or renovate, to finance work in common areas and to better take charge of issues of security.
The president concluded this new three-day visit — the second in less than two years, a record in his agenda — at the port of Marseille-Fos, one of the largest in the country, now chaired by his former minister of Interior and macronist of the first hour, Christophe Castaner.
While the mayor of Marseille denounces “a state within a state”, Emmanuel Macron called on the port to “take a turn”, by being “much more ambitious” to open up to the city as well as to the Rhône and the Saône and “as far as Bavaria”, while developing its industrial activities.
For this, there is a need for energy, the equivalent of four EPR according to the president, who called to “look, in consultation, if the whole of this economic basin is ready to welcome nuclear units”.
“It’s a land that has a vocation in this area, and in particular because we also know that we have a huge subject of cooling the power stations, and the power stations to come will have to be much closer to the sea” .
“We will have to ask this question without taboo”, he insisted, while recalling that “the law does not currently provide for the development of EPRs outside existing sites”.
Idea immediately rejected by the mayor of Marseille Benoît Payan, at the head of a broad alliance of the left and environmentalists: “We are in a submersible zone, in an earthquake zone, if there is a place in France where we cannot not make an EPR, it’s in Marseille”.
But on the rest, Benoît Payan welcomes the announcements, on the need to open the port, to change its governance, and more generally, on the extension of 250 million for transport to open up the northern districts and the fight against merchants of sleep which “are metastases”.
Emmanuel Macron will return by the end of the year, thinks the mayor, who will then perhaps offer him to “make a small Élysée office annexed to the town hall”.
28/06/2023 16:42:31 – Marseille (AFP) © 2023 AFP