As Paris’s deputy mayor, Ian Brossat massively expanded the French capital’s public housing stock. He spoke to Jacobin about the left-wing city hall’s record and what lessons it might have for Zohran Mamdani in New York.
Zohran Mamdani won last month’s New York City Democratic primary promising radical solutions to the city’s cost-of-living crisis. But the real difficulties still lie ahead, assuming the left-wing hopeful can clinch city hall come November. As mayor, the thirty-three-year-old democratic socialist will face stiff opposition from more conservative Democrats in Albany, to say nothing of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the many business interests that are making the city unlivable for lower- and middle-class New Yorkers will stop at nothing to resist Mamdani’s agenda.
Ian Brossat is a French senator and municipal councilor in Paris. Between 2014 and 2023, he served as deputy mayor in charge of housing policy, overseeing an aggressive expansion of the public housing stock that has provided an important cushion against the pressures of real estate speculation otherwise remaking France’s capital. A longtime member of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), he is a candidate for mayor in the municipal elections to be held in March 2026.
Brossat sat down with Jacobin’s Harrison Stetler for an extended conversation on Mamdani’s electoral breakthrough, the upcoming mayoral elections in France, and the challenge of governing a global metropolis from the left.
- Harrison Stetler
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Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic primary has galvanized the American left as it struggles to respond to Donald Trump’s return to power. What does this victory represent?
- Ian Brossat
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This is an incredible breath of fresh air. In an international situation where bad news is multiplying, it’s good to see that all is not lost. We’re facing an all-out reactionary offensive in every corner of the globe. Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary is a sign that there are reasons for hope. I’m convinced that amid the rise of the far right, large metropolises can be poles of resistance. And I think that’s the hope that many Americans and New Yorkers have been given in recent weeks.
- Harrison Stetler
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Mamdani’s campaign focused on a very clear message: it’s becoming harder and harder for working- and middle-class people to live in cities like New York. That sentiment is not unique to New York and could well be applied to major capitals in Europe, including Paris. Is the cost-of-living crisis finally bringing politics in major urban areas to a tipping point?
- Ian Brossat
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I certainly hope so. Confronting issues like purchasing power and housing was at the center of his platform because our cities are being hit by a wave of real estate speculation that is reaching absolutely insane levels. It’s shocking how long housing issues have been brushed under the rug in our political debates. Families, working-class people, and students are spending an ever-increasing proportion of their income on rent.
The housing issue raises a fundamental question: Who has the right to live in our cities? With each passing day, the extension of market logic like the law of supply and demand is only creating more exclusion. Those who make our cities vibrant and ensure that public services and economic activity function often no longer have the opportunity to live in the places where they work. The market is not functioning. This requires public intervention to ensure that the right to housing prevails over the right to property. In any case, we need to work toward a new balance between the right to housing and the rights of property.
- Harrison Stetler
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To win the primary, Mamdani managed to build a multiracial, young, and class-spanning coalition — the mirror image of a city as cosmopolitan as New York. But in wealthy global cities like New York or Paris, can a radical coalition like this survive in the long term?
- Ian Brossat
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I’m convinced that it can. In Paris, for example, two-thirds of the city’s legislative districts in the summer 2024 elections were won by the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). Why? Because the NFP was the bulwark against the far right. As far as Paris is concerned, our mayoral elections will take place in 2026 — a year before the presidential elections in 2027, when it’s not inconceivable that the country will fall into the hands of the far right. Against that backdrop, many Parisian voters will be wondering what will become of our city in the event of a far-right victory on the national level. Turning Paris into a pole of resistance against the far right requires radicalism. Half measures won’t suffice.
The far right hates everything our big cities represent. Our large metropolises are melting pots bringing together people from all walks of life and from an array of cultures — the exact opposite of what the far right promotes. As a city, Paris is also extremely committed to ecology. Again, the exact opposite of the far right’s climate denialism. As a city, Paris is committed to anti-racism and the fight against homophobia. Just look at the gigantic Pride march last Saturday. One question that voters will be asking themselves in 2026 is: How can my city protect me against the dangerous forces that are gaining strength nationwide?
- Harrison Stetler
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Your almost ten years as deputy mayor provide a revealing example of left-wing governance of a major global city. What’s your appraisal of Anne Hidalgo’s time as mayor, now that this era is set to come to an end?
- Ian Brossat
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I’m very proud of the work we’ve done, which is not to say that I’d redo everything identically. In any case, there’s one thing that can’t be taken away from our team at city hall: we profoundly transformed Paris, above all on two key fronts.
The first is ecology. Public space has been transformed through the construction of new green areas and the development of a dense network of bicycle lanes. Today three times as many people travel by bike than by car in Paris. We’ve turned squares and streets into parks. This city is converting to ecology. Nobody forced Parisians to get on bikes. It’s Parisians themselves who changed their habits and lifestyle over the last ten years.
The second pillar was social policy and housing, which is Paris’s largest investment budget. Investing in public housing has allowed us to maintain a social mix rarely found in major metropolises — and this despite the fierce headwinds of real estate speculation and the attractiveness of Paris for investors. [Hidalgo] transformed Paris with an extremely clear vision of what she wanted to accomplish.
- Harrison Stetler
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Critics would take aim at that — and say that several long-term trends went fundamentally uninterrupted. Paris is a considerably more expensive city than it was twenty and even ten years ago. Its working-class population has continued to shrink. Meanwhile, gentrification has continued apace, with the professional and upper classes occupying an ever-larger share of the population. What’s your response?
- Ian Brossat
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What would Paris be like today if, for example, we didn’t have 25 percent social housing? If we didn’t double the proportion of social housing? Over the last twenty years, the social diversity of the city would have totally disappeared. When you try to change things in a city, you’re not acting in a vacuum. We’re up against some extremely powerful players, namely business and real estate interests who play their role, sometimes in a harmful way.
And in a country as politically centralized as ours, if the central state doesn’t support a municipality, the battle against these private interests gets tilted even more in their favor. Against the real estate behemoths, we need the national government and the city to work hand in hand to ensure that the public interest prevails. I’m sorry to say it, but when it came to fighting Airbnb, for example, the national government has been extremely weak. It was a considerable handicap for the work we wanted to do.
- Harrison Stetler
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There’s a lot that separates New York City’s government from Paris, but both have to contend with the fact that a lot of the decisions that impact them are made elsewhere: for New York City, that mostly means the state government in Albany. For Paris, as you say, it’s the fact that much of French law and public policy is national. How else did this affect your ability to enact your agenda, and how might you navigate this obstacle in the future?
- Ian Brossat
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To take one example, there are some 130,000 secondary residences in Paris today. That’s a huge share of the housing stock: almost one home out of ten is a secondary home. Throughout Emmanuel Macron’s term as president, we’ve been asking for the power to tax secondary residences in order to discourage real-estate speculation. The government has never allowed us to do so. We need action from the national legislature, and the government has always refused in the name of property rights.
If we want to make further progress on housing, we need to tilt the balance of power in our favor, both vis-à-vis the central government but also against the private sector. For that, we need to get Parisians more involved in housing policy. I’m in favor of municipal referenda on, for example, the idea of requisitioning vacant buildings, or raising taxes on second homes. We’ll lose if policy is just driven by a dialogue between city hall and the government. We need this to be a dialogue between Parisians themselves, the great mass of whom are tenants, and the government.
- Harrison Stetler
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Considering the constraints you’ve faced, it’s hard to minimize the fact that, at least on social housing, Paris’s record has been a success. What made this possible?
- Ian Brossat
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You can’t double the proportion of social housing in a city as dense and expensive as Paris with a snap of the fingers. You need rules and constraints on developers, but you also need the sinews of war: money. That’s exactly what Paris has done. Investment budgets have varied from year to year, but overall today we’re still investing over €600 million in housing, particularly social housing. This is a budgetary and political choice.
That being said, today we’ve reached the 25 percent level required by national law. But it’s clear to everyone that this isn’t enough. In my view, we need to do two things in the coming years. First, we need to move toward 40 percent public housing by 2035. Coupled with that, we need more resolute action than before to regulate the private housing stock, namely vacant or underoccupied homes. Here the difficulty again is that it often requires legislative changes, so we’ll have to find a way to twist the government’s arm.
- Harrison Stetler
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There are exceptions, but Parisians only rarely take to demonstrations on the question of housing. In cities like Paris or New York, there have not been protests to compare with the cost-of-living and housing-rights movements seen in places like Berlin or Barcelona. Why?
- Ian Brossat
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It’s an obstacle. We have seen some actions but on a very sporadic basis. Some of my favorite moments as deputy mayor were spent in demonstrations alongside average Parisians. For example, when there building occupations organized by groups like Droit au Logement (DAL, Right to Housing). I always saw it as a blessing because it put us in a stronger negotiating position with the property owners in our effort to turn the property in question into social housing.
Building occupations, or people protesting on the streets, give us more leverage against property owners. Everyday citizens are scandalized to learn that an entire building is empty while people are sleeping outside just a few meters away. These mobilizations resonate strongly with the broader public. Unfortunately, it still happens too rarely.
- Harrison Stetler
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This spring you launched your campaign for Paris mayor, and it’s not hard to hear a number of parallels with Mamdani’s campaign. You’re running on “ten proposals” for Paris, including things like free public transportation for under-twenty-fives and a new boost to public housing. I know you defend Hidalgo’s record as mayor, but this still sounds like a break.
- Ian Brossat
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The far-right offensive is so powerful that lukewarm solutions won’t work anymore. I’m not saying that what we’ve been doing for the last decade was lukewarm. On the contrary — we transformed Paris. But we can’t slow down in the years to come. Rather, we need to go even further and harder. Just look at the temperatures outside: it’s 100 degrees, and we’re only in June! Any talk of reining in our green agenda is completely mad. Reducing the number of cars in Paris and greening the city is not a question of comfort; it’s a matter of survival. If we do nothing, our city will simply become unlivable. The coming years should be about accelerating the transformation of Paris. And that, of course, will mean lifting a certain number of taboos.
First of all, as far as the role of cars is concerned, we need to double down. For example, I’m proposing that along the entire right bank of the Seine — from the Garigliano Bridge in the 16th Arrondissement in the west to the Bercy Park in the east — we need to pedestrianize everything. Let’s get rid of cars and plant trees on the streets.
We also need to break a few taboos when it comes to the question of property rights. We need to rebalance the scales between the right to housing and the right to property. When homes are left empty for years, when buildings are left empty for years, it’s no longer private property. It’s ownership that aims to deprive. It deprives tens of thousands of people of the housing they need.
- Harrison Stetler
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The Left, namely the Parti Socialiste, has controlled Paris city hall for nearly twenty-five years. But the Right seems intent on reclaiming power with another run by Rachida Dati — minister of culture and president of the wealthy 7th Arrondissement. It’s possible that Emmanuel Macron’s followers will line up behind her candidacy as well. What’s the risk that the city falls into the hands of the Right?
- Ian Brossat
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Frankly, a city is never definitively won over to one side. Just look at a town in the Paris suburbs like Aubervilliers, which fell to the Right in the last municipal elections. So I don’t want to be overly optimistic. We must always remain vigilant. As a city, Paris remains very heavily divided between east and west, where the Right remains very powerful. What’s more, the voting system for municipal elections could soon change at the behest of Madame Dati, who wants to take over the city [France’s parliament is currently considering a reform to the mayoral election system in the country’s three largest cities]. As a matter of principle, changing the voting system within a year of an election is a big red flag. But all the rules of political fair play are eroding.
The risk of a shift to the right does exist. Defending against this threat will require two things of us. One, we need left-wing unity from the first round of voting. Second, we need a sufficiently radical program to mobilize the left-wing electorate.
- Harrison Stetler
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For now, however, the left-wing parties are going around selecting and preparing their own candidates. . . .
- Ian Brossat
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It’s out of step with what’s at stake. In 2026, we’ll be one year out from the presidential elections, when there’s a very concrete risk of a far-right victory. Why toy with weakening the rampart that is left-wing control of Paris? It’s madness. We won’t succeed in 2027 if the Left fails in these municipal elections. If Paris falls to the Right next year, the national-level symbolism would be disastrous.
At the very least, I’m advocating for a unity campaign starting in the first round of voting between the parties who have run this city since 2001 — the Parti Socialiste, the Parti Communiste, and the Greens. We’ll see with France Insoumise. Hopefully there’ll at least be unity in the runoff ballot. In any case, the forces that have worked together to remake this city should run united.
