A letter from Old Europe

Michael J. Totten writes about a trip he made to Paris around two years ago: bq. The Dark Towers of Paris I went to Europe for the first time on my honeymoon a little more than two years ago. Shelly and I started our trip in France, went south into Spain, and then north up to Amsterdam. She had been to Europe before. I had not, preferring instead to visit Latin America. (I still prefer Latin America. I fight boredom in Europe. It is too much like home.) bq. I remember looking out the airplane window at the vast expanse of farms over France. It was like magic. I would finally see the storybook land of city walls and bridges, ancient churches and castles. I wished, not for the first time, that I could live there. bq. And then I got out of the airplane and into a taxi. bq. The driver pulled onto the freeway and I saw Paris for the first time. It has a sprawling skyline of gigantic concrete block towers. Peering into the neighborhoods I saw a lot of trash and broken glass and little activity. There were no signs of life. Every vista repulsed me. And it went on like that for miles. It didn't help much that the predominant color was gray and the weather was overcast. bq. This can't be Paris, I thought. It looks like a Soviet Republic. Where were the church steeples? The amazing French architecture? The restaurant-lined boulevards? bq. I became physically depressed. Every last drop of excitement and anticipation drained out of me. bq. I have always hated American suburbs with their strip malls, fast food joints, big box stores, and inland seas of parking. They�re hideous and I�m glad I don�t live there. I always wanted to know: why can�t we build cities the way Europeans build cities? bq. That drive into Paris taught me what I should have known all along. Europeans don�t build cities like they used to any more than Americans do. Architectural modernism is a worldwide horror. Everyone who had a hand in building the lovely quarters of Paris died a long time ago. He goes on to describe the inner city which is still quite lovely albeit preserved as a museum and then cites an article from Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal talking about part of the problem: bq. Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has grown by less than 20 percent... Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants... bq. ...A Habitation de Loyer Mod�r� -- a House at Moderate Rent, or HLM -- [is] for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France�s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever... They needed more workers, were faced with the trailing edge of the baby boom so local resources were not there (especially with the ever-present socialist dole -- who wanted to work?) and they did not want to change low work week hours and generous pensions that were built-in to the workers contracts. So, they outsourced without thinking of the social consequences and are now suffering from these policies. Socialist and Marxist government at it's hieght...