The advertisement on the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance Web site is deadpan and succinct: “For sale: late 19th century prison in the center of Grasse, 1,277.42m2. No garage or parking space. Needs renovating.” Prospective buyers of the site in southeast France are required to lodge a deposit of 50,000 euros (US$56,210).
There are about 10 such notices for defunct prisons on the Web site, testament to a growing trend that has seen many urban jails turned into social housing or concert halls.
Since many are protected buildings they cannot be demolished, but this means those that find no buyer are left to rot.
Reprimanded at the European level for its overpopulated and dilapidated jails, over the past 15 years France has been busy modernizing its prison stock.
This process has been given added urgency by growing fears about the spread of radicalism among the prison population after a string of attacks in the last two years.
Early last month, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the nation needed room for another 10,000 prisoners over the next 10 years.
“Generally, it’s cheaper to build a new prison” than to renovate one, said Laurent Vilbert, who is in charge of urban planning in the western city of Nantes.
The city recently bought the local downtown jail — which fell short of European standards — for 4.9 million euros. By 2018, the complex is to become social housing, complete with a creche and underground parking.
“Local authorities have the right of first refusal for property on their land. In such cases sales take place by mutual consent,” according to the ministry’s Web site.
A prison in the Parisian suburb of Coulommiers, a stone building built in 1851, was bought by the municipal government for 2.3 million euros and turned into a library. Its cells are now lined with books.
Guingamp, a town in Brittany, France, bought its prison back in 1992 and this month began turning the building into a visual arts center with its central courtyard transformed into a 160-seat performance space.
France is not the only country to sell off its disused prisons: one in Slovenia has been turned into a youth hostel; another in Oxford, England, is now a luxury hotel.
And not all French towns can afford to develop old sites. In such cases, the private sector sometimes steps in. This happened in Fontainebleau, another Paris suburb, where a prison was sold at auction for 480,000 euros to a buyer who plans to turn it into housing.
“We are really watching the developer. A whole section of the building is protected,” Fontainebleau mayor chief of staff Pierre Tsiakkaros said.
The ministry was quick to point out that the law is strict when it comes to protected buildings, adding that buyers of old prisons have to promise to respect rules about national heritage sites.
Although two 19th-century prisons in the central city of Lyons have been converted and modernized into a vast university campus and housing, key features such as facades and a watchtower rotunda have been preserved.
Some prisons find no buyers at all, for reasons including contamination, low real-estate prices and the sheer complexity renovation would entail.
One in the southeastern city of Avignon, covering 11,000m2 next to the medieval Palais des Papes and valued at 2.5 million euros for example, has been on the market since last year.
The Marriott group once thought about building a luxury hotel there but abandoned the project when it realized how much work would be involved.
Avignon town hall, which owns the building, has put out a call for proposals with the idea of turning it into a space for artists, housing and shops.
Another Avignon prison, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is now a nightclub that is popular with students.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
PRESSURE EXPECTED: The appreciation of the NT dollar reflected expectations that Washington would press Taiwan to boost its currency against the US dollar, dealers said Taiwan’s export-oriented semiconductor and auto part manufacturers are expecting their margins to be affected by large foreign exchange losses as the New Taiwan dollar continued to appreciate sharply against the US dollar yesterday. Among major semiconductor manufacturers, ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光), the world’s largest integrated circuit (IC) packaging and testing services provider, said that whenever the NT dollar rises NT$1 against the greenback, its gross margin is cut by about 1.5 percent. The NT dollar traded as strong as NT$29.59 per US dollar before trimming gains to close NT$0.919, or 2.96 percent, higher at NT$30.145 yesterday in Taipei trading
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