When he accepted an offer to attend a graduate program in Sciences Po Paris, Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos, an American student, expected the apartment hunt to be easy. Two months and over 500 emails later, he is still virtually homeless, couch-surfing from friend to friend.
Biggs-Chiropolos is not alone. International students living in Paris encounter formidable challenges in their quest to find decent housing, often resorting to shady rent agreements, subjected to scams, and mistreated by landlords. Though most ultimately find a place to live, their journeys are perilous, costly, and time-consuming.
In 2016, France attracted about 325,000 foreign students, ranking fourth among host countries for international students, according to Campus France. Many of these students flock to Paris, whose cost of living ranks higher than that of London, Amsterdam, and Toronto. Numbeo reports that the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city center is €1,194, while a one-bedroom on the outskirts of Paris averages €846 per month. Finding suitable accommodations is the first challenge international students encounter, and the hefty price tag often pales in comparison with endless paperwork.
Renting an apartment in Paris typically requires the applicant to provide a dossier of documents, including proof of identification, proof of legal residency, and proof of income. In many cases, an applicant is not able to view the apartment until the landlord has had a chance to pre-screen his or her dossier and preliminarily approve it. It is at this stage that international students often encounter substantial roadblocks.
Biggs-Chiropolos rarely made it past the screening stage during his apartment hunt. According to him, the proof of parental income his American mother provided for him was not sufficient. A typical dossier checklist a landlord posted on GensDeConfiance—a classified ads website Biggs-Chiropolos used during his search—asks for several France-specific documents that an American national cannot provide. For example, an avis d’imposition is a tax sheet that the French government sends annually to all taxpayers, breaking down the exact amount they owe to the state. This type of document does not exist in the United States. Without it, Biggs-Chiropolos frequently got rejected by landlords before getting a chance to meet with them.
Another crucial element to signing a lease in France is having a guarantor. A guarantor, typically a relative or a family friend, agrees to be responsible for the tenant’s debt if he or she fails to pay the rent. Most landlords require that the guarantor earn a monthly salary at least four times higher than the tenant’s rent; many also refuse to accept non-French guarantors.
“They don’t even accept people to come visit unless you send them a dossier that they verify,” Biggs-Chiropolos explained. “When I’ve gone to visit places, and they see that I’m a real person, they usually are more flexible about accepting a non-French guarantor, but just getting to that step can be tough.”
Parisian real estate agencies don’t offer easy solutions to students struggling to find a guarantor or to provide a dossier that fits all required criteria. “It really varies on a case-by-case basis,” said Jarkyn Messonnet, a booking agent at Paris Attitude. “We know what type of documents we can request from clients of different countries, what they’re able to provide.” For example, most Americans, like Biggs-Chiropolos and his family, refuse to provide their tax returns because they contain sensitive information, including the individual’s social security number. On the other hand, the approximate French equivalent, avis d’imposition, lists only the family’s income without revealing personally identifiable information.
Paris Attitude works with the documents their clients are willing to share, but it is ultimately up to individual landlords’ discretion to accept or reject their dossier. “It is really difficult when a client doesn’t have a French guarantor,” Messonnet explained, since many French landlords refuse to sign a contract without one.
Agencies like Paris Attitude and Lodgis, another popular company that caters to “an international clientele,” point their clients to Garantme, a private company that can act as a French guarantor for a sizeable fee. The company charges 3.5 percent of the tenant’s rent for the period of the lease. For a tenant who signs a 12-month contract on a €900/month apartment, the fees add up to nearly €400 for the year, to be paid in full at the time of signing the lease. Such steep costs are a barrier to many students.
For Biggs-Chiropolos, because of its price, resorting to Garantme would be a “worst case scenario.” Lacking French friends or relatives, he tried to circumvent the formal guarantor requirement and save money, but almost got scammed. One landlord Biggs-Chiropolos found online was willing to lease a room to an international student without a proper dossier of documents. He emailed Biggs-Chiropolos a “fairly informal” half-page contract to sign, stipulating his length of stay and monthly rent. According to Biggs-Chiropolos, the man told him in person that he would accept check payments, but later demanded that all payments be made in cash. He allegedly wanted to avoid paying taxes, and when Biggs-Chiropolos refused to pay in cash, he suggested a scheme in which the tenant would wire money to his uncle instead.
When Biggs-Chiropolos arrived at the apartment, he found that the landlord, who was supposed to be his only roommate, had sublet the living room to a third man without informing him. Biggs-Chiropolos moved out and is still fighting to get his €900 deposit back.
Another catch-22 that international students encounter is the pervasive emphasis on having a French bank account prior to signing a contract. Kirstie Adjei, a graduate student at the Queen Mary University of London in Paris, was searching for housing online, but could not join a student accommodation because her bank was British. When she attempted to open a French bank account from abroad, she learned that she would have to provide proof of accommodation—in France—in order to qualify. Unable to resolve this dilemma, Adjei, too, opted to rent an apartment under an informal contract and ended up arbitrarily evicted a month after moving in.
Unlike Biggs-Chiropolos, Adjei never signed any written agreement. Through a circle of acquaintances, she met a woman who was subletting a room in her state-subsidized apartment. It’s not legal to rent out subsidized housing in France, so Adjei and her landlady had “a sort of gentleman’s agreement” about the terms of her stay.
Without a contract, Adjei felt immediately insecure about her housing situation, but felt that it was her best available option. “She could literally decide to kick me out at any point,” Adjei said.
Her landlady’s house rules were fluid, changing arbitrarily and making it impossible for Adjei to comply. Adjei was told she couldn’t use the kitchen to cook in the evening, though what constituted “evening” was never made clear and shifted weekly. On multiple occasions, Adjei returned home late only to find her landlady entertaining guests in the room adjacent to Adjei’s sleeping area, without having informed her in advance. Adjei’s shower had no curtain: She had to mop the bathroom floors every time she used it. One morning, Adjei failed to mop up some of the water, and was reprimanded by the landlady for being inconsiderate and sloppy. Finally, at the end of Adjei’s first month in the apartment, on a Saturday, the landlady asked her to move out, by Tuesday.
Not every Parisian landlord abuses their power without a formal contract. Isabella Dourado, a Brazilian graduate student at Sciences Po, found her accommodation through word-of-mouth on Facebook and speaks highly of her landlady. Dourado, too, has an unofficial verbal agreement with the owner, who insisted that she would not provide a formal contract but never explained why. Nonetheless, she’s proven accommodating and even offered to give Dourado an official document confirming she’d be staying with her, which Dourado needed to obtain her French visa.
Still, the lack of contract puts Dourado in an awkward position. Her landlady sometimes calls Dourado during class to ask if she wants to see a movie with her and shows up at her apartment unannounced. Dourado finds her landlady’s constant presence overbearing but doesn’t feel that she can say anything because her living situation depends entirely on the woman’s good will.
Though each student’s housing horror story is different, one common thread runs through them all—the French bureaucracy. It is disorienting and hard to navigate, making it hard for international students to avoid common pitfalls and easy for landlords to exploit.
This article was written for my Reporting & Writing course at the Sciences Po School of Journalism.