Misleading
A Facebook post from La Gauche m’a Tuer (a Far Right opinion website) accused the Paris town hall of having demolished a lighthouse in order to build studios to house migrants. The lighthouse, built in the 1990s and located on Castagnary Street in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, was demolished early February 2017. It is to be replaced by “council houses for 251 students, young workers and migrant workers”, according to an article by the French newspaper Le Parisien cited by the website La Gauche m’a Tuer. Deceivingly titled “Paris town hall decides to demolish its lighthouse to build studios for migrants!”, this post was shared over 2700 times on Facebook.
Contacted by CrossCheck, the head of housing at Paris town hall, Ian Brossat, explained that the social housing will not be used exclusively for migrants: “It is a mixed residence. Social housing but also student housing. In is not a center for refugees”.
François-Marie Retourné, head of communications at Paris Habitat (the group in charge of this social housing project), explained the distribution of the studios to CrossCheck. A total of 244 studios will be built: 101 studios for students handled by CROUS (the regional center for universities); 98 studios for young people in unstable work to be handled by the occupational integration agency Adoma; and 45 studios to house migrant workers who lost their housing due to the renovation of their former community houses.
Adoma agency clarified to CrossCheck that “it is not going to house newly arrived migrants but rather legal working migrants already housed by the Paris town hall. It is often workers employed in housekeeping, waste collection and the recycling industries”.
The lighthouse had housed the fish shop Samouraïs des Mers in 2001 until its closure in 2012. Since then it had been sheltering old oil tanks belonging to an urban heating facility that later switched over to gas.
This article arose in response to a question submitted for CrossCheck by a web user.
