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The 2024 Paris Olympics have brought massive investment to the City of Light, including the construction of new housing, sports facilities, and public transportation. 

Yet we shouldn’t let that obscure a more sinister phenomenon: gentrification, which has rapidly transformed many of the city’s former immigrant and working-class strongholds into expensive quarters for the newly affluent. 

On this episode, Commonweal senior editor Matt Boudway speaks with journalist Cole Stangler, author of Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light.

Stangler, who lives in France, explains Paris’s historical transformation, as well as more recent developments in French politics. 

For further reading:

Cole Stangler’s writing for Commonweal

Fran Quigley on social housing

Max Holleran on gentrification and the YIMBYs