Marseille is undergoing a makeover, and there are spacious and beautifully renovated 19th century properties for those who wish to experience French life on the Med, writes Lara Marlowe.
The seed of temptation sprouted the moment I stepped from the TGV high speed train at the Gare Saint-Charles, and grew for two days in the winter sunlight. It was lulled by the sing-song accents from a Pagnol novel, began to take shape in the cafés of the Vieux Port, and found expression in the Haussmannian vista of the rue de la République.
Five thousand new residents arrive in France's second city every year, many of them from northern Europe. I understood what goes through their heads: "I could live here too; another life is possible."
I've spent months on the property trail in Paris and Dublin, and the availability of spacious, beautifully renovated apartments in heritage buildings in central Marseille for prices approximately half those of Paris, and a third of those of Dublin, is almost irresistible.
Marseille lacks the slick glamour - and high prices - of the Côte d'Azur to the east. Its streets can be rough and grimy. It combines the energy of a city being reborn with a slower, Latin pace of life.
The climate, a profusion of fresh produce and flowers, and the most successful ethnic melting pot in France sum up its Mediterranean attraction.
Eric Foillard, the president of the Marseille République property development company, says the project he is overseeing is the biggest renovation of an old neighbourhood in Europe.
Walking the length of the 1.3kms street that cuts diagonally across central Marseille, from the Vieux Port to the new financial district on the Place de la Joliette, it is easy to believe him.
The largest of several developers involved in the project, Marseille République owns one-third of the street. It has already sold 128 of 316 flats. Another 507 will be sold in building-size lots to institutional investors for rental.
The first inhabitants of the new rue de la République are already moving in, while the street remains a construction site for at least another year.
Scaffolding lines many of the facades. No power hoses were used to clean the 19th century wonders, replete with sculpted caryatids, columns and wrought iron balconies. The potion used to clean the stone includes ground apricot kernels and slaked quicklime, Foillard says.
Architecture is the strongest selling point for Marseille République, the French subsidiary of the Texas-based Lone Star investment fund, which claims $150 billion in assets worldwide.
Buildings retain their original winding oak and red tile staircases. Though many interior features have been lost over more than a century of neglect, apartments still have the high ceilings and generously proportioned rooms of the Haussmann era.
Other developers, like Kaufman-Broad, George V and Réal, are building modern housing elsewhere in Marseille, but they cannot compete with the beauty and central location of the rue de la République, just 10 minutes from the main train station and a quarter of an hour from the airport.
Ryanair flies into Marignane, half an hour away.
In the rue de la République, history is repeating itself, after 145 years. Originally called the rue Impériale, after Emperor Napoléon III, its construction mobilised 2,500 workers for 20 months, and it was the first construction site in France to use locomotives, mobile cranes and cement mixers.
Marseille took its cue from the vast demolition and building programme carried out in Paris by the prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène (later Baron) Haussmann. He gave his name to the graceful, late 19th century neo-classical architecture of the triumphant bourgeoisie.
A Parisian financier, Emile Péreire (who also built the rue de Rivoli in Paris), built the rue Impériale between 1862 and 1864, in the hope that it would be inhabited by the wealthy. But its proximity to the port instead attracted the poor and working classes.
Now Marseille République is taking up Péreire's ambition, based on the assumption that the luxurious renovation will attract fashionable shops and restaurants. The grocery and department store Monoprix has already signed a lease for 4,200sq m (45,208sq ft).
"The apartments aren't profitable," says Foillard. "Our margins are perhaps 3.5 per cent. We're renovating the flats to create clientele for the commercial space."
The group believes it will make the biggest profits by increasing rent on commercial space from between €30 and €70 per sq m (€2.7 and €6.5 per sq ft) to between €250 and €1,000 per sq m (€23 to €92 per sq ft).
After the second World War, the loss of France's colonial empire and the decline of the shipping industry sent Marseille into a downward spiral. The grand buildings of the rue de la République were all but abandoned. By 2004, when Lone Star/Marseille République came along, 60 per cent of the apartments were vacant.
Media attention centred on allegations that a company from Texas intended to throw out the inhabitants. "We had three marks against us," says Eric Foillard. "We were a 'pension fund'."
Lone Star is in fact an investment fund whose shareholders include the World Bank, the IMF, Getty, Hewlett Packard, Rockefeller, Harvard and MIT, Foillard says. But because US pension funds demand ever bigger profits from the French companies in which they invest, the words have a negative connotation in France. "We are 'foreigners'," continues Foillard. "And Marseille is a town of Mediterranean traders that doesn't like entrepreneurs. There's an element of, 'they're going to make money! Profit is shameful'!" The police expelled about 100 squatters from the street in November 2005.
Because no one was paying the housing tax, rubbish was no longer collected.
"At number 8, 10 years of rubbish had piled up in the courtyard," Foillard says. "It reached the second floor windows. In one apartment we found 450 ladies' handbags; in another 200 televisions. It was Mad Max. There were gangs."
But 553 of the residents of the rue had valid leases.
Nouredine Abouakil, an activist with the "Un Centre Ville Pour Tous" (Downtown for Everyone) association, says the first stage of the renovation was "horrible" for residents. He accuses Marseille République of using heavy handed tactics to frighten several dozen legal residents into leaving.
"We organised the resistance," he says. "We're not against renovation, but we want the rights of tenants to be respected. We don't mind investors making money. But we didn't want them to make money by crushing others.
"A combination of three tactics - street demonstrations, media coverage and lawsuits - means that Marseille République behaves differently today," Abouakil says. "No one was expelled by force from the rue de la République," he says. "Not even people who didn't pay their rent or lost their lease."
French law requires that 20 per cent of all buildings be devoted to low-income housing. In the event, Marseille République inherited an earlier agreement to reserve 30 per cent of its apartments for the underprivileged. A whole city block, 377 apartments, has been set aside to house the majority of the former legal inhabitants.
"It creates cultural diversity, and they're not in the same buildings," Foillard shrugs when asked whether the well-to-do buyers targeted by Marseille République will want to live alongside welfare cases.
Marseille République is investing more than €300 million in the project. But to understand the scale of the renovation of central Marseille, it must be placed in the context of Euroméditerranée, the French government-backed urban renewal programme that started in 1995. Largely because of the programme, the city's unemployment rate has fallen from 22 per cent to less than 10 per cent.
"It was impossible to leave an impoverished neighbourhood as the central artery between the new business district and the Vieux Port," says Francois Jalinot, the director general of Euroméditerrannée.
Buyers of apartments in the rue de la République benefit from the new environment created at the expense of French taxpayers and private investors. Euroméditerrannée has so far spent half of its €600 million credit line, and Jalinot says this has generated another €1 billion in investment in the area.
At the western end of the rue de la République, a gleaming new financial district has already been built in "Les Docks" complex, the former headquarters of the Compagnie des Docks et Entrepôts de Marseille. A €800 million tramway line will soon open; it runs the length of the rue and continues across the city.
An 800-place parking lot is being built beneath the Place Sadi Carnot, half-way between the Vieux Port and Les Docks. Euroméditerrannée is installing new street lighting and five-metre wide, tree-lined granite pavements.
Within walking distance of the rue de la République, the Euromed Centre will house a four-star Marriott hotel and a 16-cinema multiplex owned by the French film producer Luc Besson. Architect Zaha Hadid is designing the new CMA CGM tower, headquarters for the world's third largest shipping company.
Marseille République also owns the buildings on the quai de la Joliette.
At present, the lovely facades can barely be seen through layers of soot and wire netting. Flats in these 19th century buildings will go on sale next month, for completion in 2009. Instead of the motorway - which is being transformed into an underground tunnel - they'll look onto cruise liners and Les Terrasses du Port, a 40,000sq m (430,556sq ft) restaurant and shopping complex.
Marseille was founded 2,600 years ago by the Greeks, in the neighbourhood now called "Le Panier". Like the Latin Quarter in Paris, this area of winding streets and stairs and small, brightly coloured Provencal houses miraculously survived the furious building spree of the late 19th century.
It's a charming place to get lost, between the rue de la République and the Vieux Port. At the heart of Le Panier is La Vielle Charité, a magnificent 17th century baroque chapel that is now surrounded by a vibrant cultural centre.
www.marseille-republique.com or contact clairedeedman_at_ hotmail.com; tel: 00 33 4 90 92 19 33 or 00 33 6 86 70 63 93.
