For the 22 years I’ve been living here Montpellier has constantly been trying to gentrify itself.
A one bedroom apartment in the best part of the city rents for about 600 euros a month. Obviously the landlords would rather it cost 1,200 euros a month. The city would like that too.
But Montpellier keeps resisting their efforts. And it’s pretty easy to see why.
Every three years the city gets the idea of promoting one type of business so they give tax credits for opening one. For example five years ago it was bagel shops.
Suddenly we had bagel shops on every corner. But there just isn’t enough demand for bagel shops. Plus the landlords have a system where you get your business in for a low rent but then they can raise the rent as much as they want three years in.
So for exactly three years we had a ton of bagel shops. Now we have two.
Currently we are 2.5 years into the city promoting sushi shops. You can bet in five months 95% of them will disappear.
What we do have that is completely unsupported by the government are an ever increasing about of tattoo shops. And they all seem to make money - which is good for the local economy because tattoo artists make more than others - but bad for rent prices.
“You have three tattoo shops on your street,” is never going to make it into a real estate catalog.
Plus because they can’t fire tram workers they keep making more and more tram lines which allow people to move out of the city to newly built suburbs - which is what everyone seems to do as soon as they want to start a family.
So you end up in town with students and young gays and the people who don’t want to start families and those people are never going to pay more than 600 euros a month and gentrification never happens.