Draft:Kalliste

The park district of Kalliste (or Kallisté) is located in former rural areas around the bastide Valcorme, built in the nineteenth century, of which there is still a brick pavilion around a pine forest. The district was designed to rehouse French returnees from Indochina, following the Geneva Accords ending the Indochina War in 1954. It was a program established on the private funds of Indochinese colonial timber companies. Feasibility studies began in 1955 and architect Claude Gros played an important role in the design of the district.

The property is located at the foot of a hill on a 7.5-hectare site that is part of the greater Kalliste-Granière-Solidarité, a priority district of Marseille, located in the northern end of the city, within the northern districts. The district spreads over 32 hectares and had nearly 7,600 inhabitants as of 2018. It is located in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille, and it is part of the large Notre-Dame-Limite district, on the border with the commune of Septèmes-les-Vallons..

Living conditions
The various housing complexes that make up this priority district have always welcomed people from elsewhere. First inaugurated in 1958, the Kalliste Park provides emergency accommodation for French exiles leaving the former colonies, especially pieds-noirs fleeing Algeria at the end of the war in 1962. Many of them then became tenants of the developer of the project, and only a few became owners. Many worked at the North Hospital or at the Post Office. They will gradually be replaced by poorer immigrant newcomers

In 1980, the major owner of Kalliste withdrew and the apartments were sold to their tenant or to investors. In his article “In Kallisté, gros sur le cœur”, the journalist Olivier-Jourdan Roulot describes a crooked co-ownership association, which associated with the insolvency of many owners, would lead to a progressive deterioration of the whole, since the maintenance is no longer insured. Some owners are slumlords, profiting from poverty but refusing to invest in renovation. A vicious circle then begins: the reputation of the neighborhood deteriorates, the new arrivals are ever poorer, the sums allocated to maintenance ever lower and the debt of the co-ownership explodes.

Criminal networks are taking over the neighborhood, with the proliferation of drug trafficking and squats. In Kallisté as in Corot Park, degraded condominiums then become “de facto social housing”, where insecurity and poverty are more extreme than in social housing estates. In a 2022 investigation, Mediapart describes Nigerian gangs, who forcibly recruit their youngest members, practice sexual slavery and rent out squats for substantial sums to the most vulnerable populations, who have been unable to find accommodation elsewhere. Traffickers are spreading terror in the neighborhood to the point where dozens of threatened people are sometimes urgently rehoused.

First Program (2005 - 2015)
Even before the creation of the National Agency for Urban Renewal (ANRU) in 2004, the city undertook a major redevelopment of the Cité de la Solidarité in 1993, due to its excessive density, even though it was the most recent of the sector. Two blocks of buildings were demolished, leading to the removal of 190 social housing units and allowing the creation of green spaces. Carried out from 2005 to 2019 with a budget of 53 million euros, the first Anru program (PNRU) resulted in the destruction of two other building blocks in 2019, leaving only one.

As compensation, 86 new social housing units are built. “Les Hauts de Carraire” was inaugurated in 2017 on the outer limits of the district, with 38 housing units spread across four small buildings. The same year, the Hauts de l'Étoile residence was added in the heart of the district with 48 housing units, on the site of a former bar. In addition, 600 housing units were renovated and made residential and the new rue Élie Kakou was opened.

The renovation of the Kalliste park is more complicated for the authorities, given the private nature of the ownership of the buildings, which requires the agreement of many owners or their very expensive repurchase, via long procedures. However, it is one of the most degraded and poor areas in France, facing problems with criminal networks and squats in particular, while some owners are insolvent or interested in the short-term profitability of the apartments. rented. In 2000, a first safeguard plan led to the division of the single co-ownership into nine different ones, with renovation work in the common areas costing nine million euros11.

With the PNRU, state aid enabled the city to acquire two buildings B and H from 2012, respectively the tallest and the longest building. The procedures for declaring deficiency, public utility and expropriations last six years, for a budget of 28 million euros12. Between 2019 and 2021, the two buildings are demolished 5 years late than the initial plan, resulting in the removal of 245 housing units, or a third of the total.

Second Program (after 2021)
The ANRU's second urban renewal program (NPNRU) plans to focus mainly on Kalliste Park, which is one of the 17 neighborhoods in "national monitoring" of the Co-ownership Initiatives Plan, initiated in October 2018 by the government, allowing 80% of the co-ownership deficit to be covered by the State via the National Housing Agency. The program plans to connect the Solidarity and Kalliste districts, as well as to continue the destruction of the most imposing buildings in Kalliste, probably at least buildings I and G. In place of all the spaces left vacant by both plans, 450 new housing units should be rebuilt, 20% of which are social15. The establishment of new schools is also promised as part of the program.