"We wanted to stay" – How a neighbourhood disappears in the middle of a housing crisis

Anyone entering the Cité de l'aéroport directly north of the Air-Rescue Hangar at Findel will immediately recognise which houses are still inhabited: Although the last residents are already packing their boxes to move out, they continue to maintain their front gardens and pavements to the very end, oases between overgrown trees and wild meadows, crammed letterboxes, burnt garden sheds and literal piles of rubbish.

The buildings in the neighbourhood, which were originally built as official housing for civil servants who were supposed to live closer to their workplace for on-call duty and shift work, will disappear in the coming months. This was officially announced in a tender issued by the Ministry of Mobility and Public Works, which is responsible for managing public buildings. In it, the "deconstruction" of "2 apartment blocks, 13 twin houses and 4 buildings with garages" were put out to tender, in other words the entire Cité. The demolition work is scheduled to last 125 days and begin "during the second quarter of 2025", i.e. almost immediately.

Half of the houses – most of them semi-detached houses – were managed by the Agence Immobilière Sociale (AIS) as social housing after 2016, until the Ministry of Finance, which owns the land and houses, informed it that it was not allowed to take in any new people. According to the ministry, the reason for this then and now was the unhealthy condition of the buildings – much to the surprise of the AIS and the residents themselves, who were happy with the houses themselves, as we have already reported.