Paris: A new, sordid development has come to light in France’s continuing housing crisis. It took six months for French daily Liberation journalist Ondine Millot to get to the truth about the most sordid side of France’s housing crisis.
Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the phrase you are looking for is contre services — when a room in an apartment is offered, sometimes “free”, in exchange for services.
Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent — cleaning the apartment or washing clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property. But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering on the perverse.
“Sex twice a month,” is one blunt demand. Another asks for someone “open in spirit and elsewhere”. “Flat in exchange for libertine services,” goes another. These adverts aren’t hidden away in the underbelly of the housing market, they seem to be fairly prominent.
The journalist who has now joined in protests to get something done about the housing crisis led and investigation into the trend and said, “Most of the ads ... where no amount was specified for the rent, were men that were looking for sex in exchange for housing.”
In a country where there is a growing housing crisis rooms are in demand, so living rent free is an even more attractive offer. Occasionally the rent is offered in return for help with domestic tasks like washing or cleaning but there is a growing trend of the rooms being exchanged for sex.
Sex for rent is the extreme end of a problem catching swathes of France’s most vulnerable people — the young and the poor — in its grip. France, the government admits, is in the grip of its worst housing crisis since the end of World War II. A combination of circumstances has left the French — especially the Parisian — rental market horribly stretched between supply and demand. And too many people caught between homelessness and bankruptcy as they struggle to put a roof over their heads.
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