#BalanceTonTaudis: this movement is gaining momentum in Marseille and residents are tracking down substandard housing

France: #BalanceTonTaudis, à Marseille, des habitants traquent le logement indigne MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP

David Coquille crisscrosses Marseille, France's second city, by bike. Then, meticulously, posts photos on the social network X with the hashtag #BalanceTonTaudis: here a 9m2 room with walls blackened by humidity, there a staircase that threatens to collapse.

“Once, my foot went through a step. Behind these facades, sometimes, you discover staircases supported by props, buildings that should have already been put in danger. I ended up one day bringing bedbugs home”, says this journalist from La Marseillaise, a historic daily newspaper of the Mediterranean city founded in 1943 by the Communist Party.

“He does a great job of going to see all the orders of danger, putting them on a map with the date, all this information… It's an extraordinary database”, comments architect Thierry Durousseau.

For the journalist, as for many other Marseillais, the trial currently taking place around the collapses of buildings near the Old Port of Marseille, rue d'Aubagne, which left eight dead in 2018, is “a trial for History” as La Marseillaise headlined.

“One day, a lady contacted me. She had rented an Airbnb with her grandson near the Opera. Bedbugs, staircase with props everywhere”, remembers the one known as @DavidLaMars on X. “I ask him for the address. I look in our lists and I tell him: +but Madam, this building is under a serious and imminent danger order, that is to say prohibited from occupation”.

200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000

Political inaction

The case will end up in court. Some 2,300 travelers had passed through this dangerous building. The owner, a mason in his sixties, was sentenced in 2021 to a one-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on buying property with a view to renting it out for five years.

“We were helped by people within the system, people within public organizations who come to tell you: 'have you seen this name there ?' to make cross-references”, explains David Coquille.

Behind these denunciations is also active a network of residents who have become activists, by force of circumstances, in the face of decades of political inaction, in a city housing some 40,000 slums. Nordine Abouakil, one of the founders of the association Un centre ville pour tous, is one of the historical figures of this struggle.

He was “pained” but “not surprised” by the tragedy on rue d'Aubagne. So, shortly after, he arrived in editorial offices with a shopping bag full of documents collected over the years from the mortgage department and a mission: to establish what belonged to the town hall, then headed by Jean-Claude Gaudin (right), or to its satellites.

Because on rue d'Aubagne, of the two adjoining buildings that collapsed simultaneously, one was a private condominium but the other, uninhabited and left in a state of ruin, belonged to the city's social landlord, Marseille Habitat, in the dock today.

The fear of squatting

“We leave the buildings abandoned because we don't want them to be reoccupied by the same poor population”, “the only fear is squatters”, sighs Nordine Abouakil.

A sort of consortium, unprecedented in the local press, was then created, led by La Marseillaise, the local investigative sites Marsactu and national Mediapart and Le Ravi, a local satirical newspaper that has since disappeared. Objective: to examine nearly 5,500 transactions.

They released an investigation at the end of 2019, called “La grande vacance”, which identified some 70 abandoned buildings.

“The town hall had completely lost sight of its heritage”, explains Benoît Gilles, co-editor-in-chief of Marsactu. He had denounced the dilapidated state of 63 rue d'Aubagne in 2016 and the daily newspaper Libération had dedicated a portrait to him, praising his work of “public health”.

Six years later, after more than 600 articles on substandard housing, “we are in the process of taking stock” of the new left-wing municipality which has made it a priority, he explains. But a form of weariness is emerging in the face of this endless fight.

“We, activists, are not required to do everything. We contribute our stone to the building, and it has been substantial. But the rest is up to politicians to take hold of. And for the justice system to condemn”, believes Nordine Abouakil.