France's Sordid Housing Crisis (Will It Happen Here?)

[NashVegas]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/7290139.stm

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".
...

Sex for rent is the extreme end of an extreme problem which is 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. Of course, sky-high property prices are hardly exclusive to France. "

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I'd be surprised if it weren't already happening here, in some capacity.

[ananda]

1. That is so sad.

Why doesn't the government institute some
kind of rent control policy?

[bryant69]

2. In france? I'd be surprised if they didn't

I don't know what a rent control policy has to do with this though; this seems to be a way to pay no rent at all.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[ixion]

3. watch the movie "Ironweed" if you want a good look at life during depression

there's a scene there, in particular, where Meryl Strep gives a guy a handjob because he let her sleep in his car for the night.

Things like this article mention will most definitely happen here if we go into depression.