Paris: 550 euros rent for 4.7 square meters – the city takes action against renting a mini apartment

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View of Paris: Inadmissibly tiny apartments

Photo: FREDERIC SOLTAN / Corbis via Getty Images

The case of the Algerian waiter Massi, who lives in a 4.7 square meter “apartment” and has to wait in line with six other candidates, shows how tough things are on the Paris housing market.

In the French capital, one-room apartments are rented out again and again, which are unimaginably and often unacceptably tiny.

In the case of the waiter in the 20th arrondissement, the city is now taking action against the rental.

Especially since Massi also pays a proud monthly rent of 550 euros for the apartment, as the newspaper “Le Parisien” reports.

When the 42-year-old climbs onto his loft bed, acrobatics are required because there is only 50 centimeters of space between the mattress and the ceiling.

"I only come here to sleep, otherwise it's depressing," he said, according to the newspaper.

The city has now declared the room uninhabitable and wants to assist the waiter under civil law.

58,000 rooms less than eight square meters in Paris

The law actually stipulates that an apartment must consist of at least one main room with a surface of at least nine square meters, a ceiling height of at least 2.20 meters or a volume of 20 cubic meters.

In this case, the landlady had simply written a volume of 24 cubic meters in the lease, twice the actual size, the newspaper wrote.

Waiter Massi, who comes from Algeria, paid 300 euros to a real estate agency when he arrived in Paris in 2018 to even get the room.

To make matters worse, there should also be massive moisture problems in the mini-apartment.

The case of Massi's room illustrates the housing crisis in the French capital, said the spokesman for the association "Right to Housing" (DAL), Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, the "Parisien".

Landlords take advantage of this and offer impossible quarters.

As a person responsible for the city's housing authority explained, there are 58,000 former servants' rooms in Paris, the so-called chambres de bonne, which are less than eight square meters in size and are sometimes rented out.

apr/dpa