Unfit housing: six months in prison requested against the owners of a 13 m2 premises

Six months in prison were requested on Monday, February 3, against the two successive owners of an unfit dwelling in Marseille, a premises of around twelve square meters in the basement of a building whose toilets were visible to other residents.

"I lived like a wild animal," explained the tenant, a 52-year-old man who had lived for six years in this tiny place lit only by a window under the ceiling, at street level, eaten away by mold and invaded by pestilential odors.

While waiting for a response to a request for social housing filed 25 years ago and renewed in 2016, the tenant, with a monthly income of 500 euros, had accepted this accommodation in 2014 because he was homeless.

In 2023, the municipal hygiene and health service concluded that the accommodation was unsanitary and inherently unfit for habitation.

"You would like toilets like that?" prosecutor Marion Chabot asked the two defendants, showing on the screens of the Marseille criminal court the disgusting photos of a toilet installed at the bottom of the building's technical shaft, on which the occupants of the upper floors had a bird's eye view from small windows.

"These slum landlords make the vulnerability of others their business," accused Ms. Chabot, demanding "a firm response and a dissuasive sentence" of 18 months in prison, twelve of which are suspended, against the former owner of the accommodation. Against the former owner's son-in-law, who had bought the premises for 24.000 euros in 2020, the prosecution requested twelve months in prison, six of which are suspended.

The firm part of this sentence may be served at home under electronic surveillance, said the prosecutor, who also requested a fine of 25.000 euros against each of the two defendants, as well as the confiscation of the premises.

"I consider myself a social landlord, I always chose people in difficulty rather than taking on people with money," the retiree, who owned around twenty properties until the mid-2010s, assured investigators.

His son-in-law, a heating engineer, explained that he wanted to redevelop these toilets, installed in the common areas, but that he had not been given permission to do so by the co-ownership.

"Submission means offering someone who has no choice to stay in the premises," denounced Me Jorge Mendes Constante, lawyer for the city of Marseille, civil party, assuring that "only substandard housing allows you to buy a home for the price of a car."

The tenant has claimed the reimbursement of his rent and 10.000 euros in damages for moral prejudice. The judgment will be delivered on March 10.