I think it's totally fair that a program designed to support people of a certain income living in Paris requires those people to live in Paris. If you want autonomy you can have it, just don't take the money/apartment. This feels like a cake and eat it to attitude. Government is totally allowed to have aims and reasons behind programs. Having low income people live in Paris ensures there are people available who can do work that can't afford to pay high wages. This is important to having a vibrant city and something reasonable for a government to aim for. If people could just take the money and screw off to anywhere in the country, then we'd effectively see people take a $30,000/year subsidy and go somewhere they could live entirely on that without working, which would accomplish very much the opposite of what the whole program was trying to do.

This doesn't force anyone's hand. If people don't want to live in Paris, that's their choice. No one is kidnapping them and shoving them in these apartments.

On the other hand, if they want to, they have an avenue to do this (and it's still going to be difficult, supply isn't nearly as plenty as the private market), even if they don't have the income needed to find housing in the same area otherwise.

> They're not some pawn you can use to feel good about yourself

That's not the reason Paris is doing this. There are benefits to encouraging diversity, among which fighting against getthoisation/communitarianism and prejudices, things that France has quite a poor records with in the last 50 years, and that had direct consequences on society cohesion.

Let's not use euphemisms. You're encouraging a certain racial and identity makeup of a city. It's literally the same policies that led to ghettoization. I don't want (often unelected) bureaucrats to put their finger on the scale on who can live in an area. It's not wrong because it was used to exclude [group] from certain areas, it's wrong on principle. And if we allow that power to the state, there's no reason it won't be used by someone with ideals that don't align with yours

First things first, we're talking about income-based public housing attribution. Not racial. Although if policies in the past means ethnic minorities have been disadvantaged all other things considered, then that will overlap, but as a consequence, not by design.

Secondly, Paris' policies are decided by the mayor of Paris and the city council, and they're elected (mayor directly, city council semi-directly). Not by "unelected bureaucrats".

Then your comment makes no sense. Policies favoring social diversity are the exact same policies that led to getthoisation? Do we agree on what getthoisation means? Because those two things are exclusive.

You say you don't want bureaucrats to put their finger on the scale of who can live in an area, that's your opinion. But if you're saying this should be purely left to supply and demand, then somewhat it is still a (non-)decision to put the finger on the scale, at one extremity, and it will have a certain outcome. Whether this outcome is good or bad will be a matter of opinion in certain cases, but not in others, e.g. what impact this has on the local economy for example, whether this leads to a more or less appeased society, and so on.

> Why don't we afford the same respect to people that are less well off?

This has to be facetious. They're perfectly free to go live in the country or move to Italy. I've never seen a desirable apartment I couldn't afford and then thought to myself how much I'm being respected by not being able to live there.

And with regard to the last point, no one is suggesting this as a means to have some peasant zoo in the city, a city needs a labor force. If you price out everyone who isn't a dev or a financier then you're not going to have a lot of the things that make a city nice. To some degree this is a subsidy for employers, because otherwise they'd need to pay more for their employees to afford living nearby.