Grim picture of life in the suburbs

“Depressed neighbourhoods: 43% of young men unemployed.” Le Monde’s headline highlights just one of the damning statistics in the newly published 2009 report of National Observatory for Sensitive Urban Areas (Onzus). Describing the figures as “terrible,” the daily notes that the “situation remains very tense in the 751 sensitive urban areas, characterised by rampant unemployment [on a level that is twice the national average], poverty, poor performance in education, and insecurity.” Little has changed five years after the riots in 2005, “which brutally highlighted the immense gap between promises made and actual conditions,” remarks the Paris daily. “The situation in sensitive areas is as problematic as it always was.”