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At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.
Guillaume Durocher, a thoughtful French nationalist on Twitter, believes that the most likely scenario in the medium-term is akin to Brasil rather than Lebanon or Yugoslavia. His reasoning is that this underclass has no real political aspirations, let alone organisational skills, and their aims are purely criminal and opportunistically short-termist in nature.
So France will resemble Brasil where a small elite hoard all the wealth and a sizable minority of middle-class whites sit just beneath them. Below those two rungs, crime levels and general dysfunction will proliferate, leading to gated communities etc. We could also see a lessening of France's social model with high taxes as elites will be unwilling to shoulder such a high burden. Given that elite migration will be a very real threat, France's institutions may well oblige.
I guess the only real counter-argument to his view is that race relations in Brasil seem to be more amiable. I know relatively little about either country, but my impression is that the resentment in France (perhaps in part due to the colonial legacy, and partly as a result of ethnic French arrogance) is much greater among the non-white groups. If this is true then your more pessimistic view could well win out.
No, you were correct in your first understanding. It is a relatively small section of London, but in say, Notting Hill, you have large estates mostly divvied up semi ethnically e.g. Somali, Carribbean, Moroccan, cheek by jowl with £15m townhouses.
The road David Beckham lives on for example, is less than a 10 minute walk to multiple estates, and less than 20 minutes walk to Grenfell tower itself. This is (as far as I'm aware) a uniquely (West?) London thing, where the houses by Ladbroke Grove station will be £10-20m and yet 1 road next door will be a very poor housing estate. I used to think it was great, as an example of semi-integration (Ghettoisation leading to say bad shops, bad services). Nowadays, I'm ambivalent, but I appreciate its uniqueness.
There are relatively few places in London with $10-20m houses as standard (and as you say those are often concentrated in West and North London - Holland Park, Notting Hill/Westbourne Grove, Little Venice where the best villas border the Paddington Green estates, all the way up to St John’s Wood especially on the northwest side as you get up to Swiss Cottage, then also Belsize Park and Hampstead), but on a lesser scale it happens with $2-5m properties in Islington in the north, around King’s Cross, in Hackney and Shoreditch, and in parts of the south like parts of Wandsworth and Dulwich to some extent. There are relatively few prime and semi-prime parts of London that aren’t close to relatively bad estates. Possibly the Chelsea-South Ken-Belgravia-Mayfair continuum, although even there there are exceptions.
Interestingly, in 2011 the more spread out West London estates contributed much less to rioting than the outlying, arguably more Parisian ones in the south in Brixton/Lewisham and to the north in Tottenham.
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