Chapter 11
Putting the Public Back in Public Housing—France
FROM A MAN WHO ASPIRED TO BE A TRUCK DRIVER BECAUSE HE thought if he was always on the road his life would seem like one big vacation, comes a multidimensional ecologic, economic, and social program of such vision that it is difficult to know where to start telling the story. Francois Marty has created an ecosystem that is hard to describe. Everything he told me about his past, however far afield it sounded from what he has now created, seemed magically to be just what was needed to lead him directly to what he should be doing—which is exactly what he is doing today. His life story gives credence to the saying “Everything happens for a reason.” Each twist and turn of his life has pushed him one step further in the evolution of his ideas. It all started with his desire to help young people whose lives resembled his own youth: poor, not well educated, a little wild, with a cloudy future.
What began as a consumer-oriented lumber business with a profit-making motive turned into a means to create jobs for a disenfranchised community in Northern France. It is now the largest paper shipping pallet manufacturer in France. Along the way Francois realized two important things that he needed to do to have a successful, sustainable business. He needed to mitigate job retention issues by developing a system that would start at the training end for new hires. And he would also have to employ the principle of exovation a term he invented (to signify the opposite of innovation), which involves abandoning materials from outside the area and relearning how to use local materials—clay, straw, hemp, and certain types of wood—that were traditionally used to build homes. The term is a combination of the words exorcize and innovation and it also applies to Francois's facetious wish to exorcize engineers unable to make uncomplicated machines for people who are not complicated.
Francois attributes his ability to accomplish what he has achieved to a simple insight: “I am not here to help the community, I am here to be an entrepreneur with them.” His idea is not to have people follow him but to empower them so they can use his ideas and his methodology to go further than he can. He measures himself by an interesting standard: he knows that he has a good idea when he sees people take it and come up with an even bigger one. He is all about letting the people he works with become the changemakers and dare to jump ahead of him. He loves seeing this happen and delights in giving them the support to flourish. This, he says, works to his benefit as well, for whenever it happens, he always learns something new that he then can apply to something else.
The immense lumber yard that helps produce Francois's pallets and the materials for the eco-houses he builds is always buzzing with activity. Men and women of all ages are sawing, running machinery, driving the tractors, and generally making the place bustle with energy. As Francois teaches and trains groups of socially rejected people in lumber construction and ecological building production, he makes a special effort to treat women as equal to men, as they rarely have chances to work and succeed in this sector. He normally lets women work the afternoon shift, which is, he observes, when they prefer to work:
Women have two different moments in the day. Because when a woman works and her husband is not working (as many immigrant husbands have difficulty finding work), she is even more a slave at home. If the women work in the afternoon until dark, their husbands are the ones who have to first prepare food in the evening and put the kids to sleep before they can watch football. Otherwise the women work a normal day and then come home and have to take care of the meals and the kids and the house and everything falls on them.
Francois came to his innovative and “exovative” ideas in a roundabout way. He was brought up by parents he describes as “extreme ecologists.” In his late teens, the difficult-to-manage Francois went to spend four years in a monastery in the Alps. He attributes everything he learned in those four years—from spelling to reading to history—to his study of the Bible. When he left the monastery, he was ready to realize his dream of becoming a truck driver. But somehow he ended up working and living in a sort of freewheeling hippie community in the south of France, where he met his wife-to-be. His wife's father was a farmworker, and a poor one at that, whose nine children barely had enough to eat. Nonetheless, he made sure that all nine children learned to read and study. He himself spoke four languages, and when he lost his sight later in life, he was able to recite Tolstoy by memory in Russian. Francois's father-in-law became an archetype of sorts for him, demonstrating that even a farmworker could be a genius and manage to bring up nine children who all were educated and positioned to succeed in life.
While Francois was in the south of France, a Catholic priest asked him to come to the north and help work with a community of Iranian refugees. Francois and his wife decided to move to Calais to see how they could best help the immigrants carve out a life for themselves in France.
“If we had had the money,” Francois recalls, “we never would have gotten the ideas.”
Francois started the lumber business as a way of getting intractable youth into meaningful work. At the same time, he knew from his experiences in southern France that lack of affordable and adequate housing was an issue at the root of much immigrant family misery and a large factor limiting the chances for any members of the family to lift themselves out of poverty and into a successful and sustainable way of life. So he decided to combine the consumer-oriented pallet business (the prime source of his incoming funds) with the development of a new type of public housing innovation he calls “Chenelet.” Chenelet (a type of strong, hardy oak that grows in the meadows and also the name of the district where the sawmill was begun) is based on creative ecological design principles and new construction processes with the hope of giving youth a more stable and secure place to grow up.
Francois knew that even though it is more expensive to build, eco-housing dramatically lowers the overall cost for the homeowner or renter, who has to be able to afford not only a monthly house payment or rent but also the ever-increasing cost of water, electricity, and heat. It seemed like a perfect marriage of two complementary businesses. One supplies the lumber, the other builds affordable housing to a new standard. The result is aesthetically pleasing houses, incorporating all the elements clients want, even placing windows so residents can see the neighbors, or using doors that enable the elderly in wheelchairs to see outside. The design for the houses also features wooden floors, superior noise and heat insulation, and clay walls, along with lots of natural light, wood-burning stoves, and rainfall collection mechanisms to minimize utility bills. He then found traditional ecological materials and construction techniques to fulfill these demands. One of Chenelet's prime missions is to shift the perception of the value of such a house, so that its worth is measured over time and not at construction. And now he is working with banks to create new types of loans with longer payouts to give low-income groups access to real estate.
In the process of developing the eco-housing business, Francois never lost sight of his original goal: to help youth with problems find meaningful and satisfying work. He realized that with the expansion of his ecologic vision he could dramatically expand his employment capacity. However, he also realized that his employees would be, for the most part, simple people with simple skills who could not operate complex machinery. So he challenged his engineers to design uncomplicated machines for uncomplicated people. As Francois put it, “I exorcized all the engineers who were developing machines that only highly skilled and educated people could use. And even they had trouble.”
Francois was able to redesign almost all the machines used for the cutting and manufacturing of wood for use as lumber. Though most of the wood used for building materials in this region of France has traditionally been imported because the local trees were regarded as offering inferior height and strength, Francois's equipment magic included one machine that could tightly cut, fuse, and glue planks of the local wood together, making them stronger than most imported quality woods. Hence, Francois was able to demonstrate that his principles of exovation coupled with innovation could sustain two industries where none existed before.
One by-product of the eco-housing business is its ability to train engineers to think differently. Pierre Gaudin is a classically trained engineer who joined Chenelet in 2009 after working at the largest construction company in the world. He is ecologically oriented and always has been, but in his last job, he says,
They were working to develop earth-building construction. They were not working to build for the people. It's a totally different perspective. And that's what I love here. We are not just building with materials from the earth to improve the technique or the process of doing so, but we are using ecology as means to improve public housing options and affordability. It gives my work a new meaning.
Then there was the serendipitous encounter with an influential benefactor that provided Francois with an opportunity to get his MBA when he was at the initial stages of building his businesses. The MBA degree, and what he learned while earning it, helped Francois to write, advocate for, and see the passage of three laws that provided incentives and low interest rates for businesses such as his that had a social purpose attached to them. One of the laws is aimed at reforming the way the government is buying and purchasing services, so that “cheaper” is not the criterion that wins contracts, but ecological soundness is.
The Chenelet brand now covers eight social enterprises, all with different functions but united in purpose and focus. He has made the name Chenelet synonymous with both quality (the highest-quality ecologic housing for the poor) and a methodology that uses local natural materials, mixes ancestral and modern construction techniques, and trains and employs people previously excluded from the workforce. With Chenelet's help and tutelage, impoverished cities and towns all over France are developing their eco-businesses. For example, Revin, a small depressed town in northern France, is co-building houses with Chenelet to learn the techniques to develop its own eco-industry. It recently decided to renovate a large building in town and develop a factory modeled after Chenelet's sawmill so they can produce their own building materials. Between the factory and the housing business, the people of Revin are starting to revitalize the town with new employment opportunities, training programs, and affordable and sustainable housing.
It's Not Like Running a Chain Store
From practical knowledge Francois knows that you can't fit everything into your own experience. You need to try on someone else's experience to grow and to find a new way, a new system. Though he is a great admirer of the McKinsey business model, he strongly feels that you should fit the McKinsey model to the project—not the other way around. As he expands the Chenelet model throughout France and internationally to French-speaking Morocco, his idea was not to do it himself in other parts of his country and the world but to find other groups, associations, and organizations who are dreaming about the same thing. He encourages them to organize as they choose—as long as they limit their salaries and focus on service to the poor related to social housing. In 2010, seventeen organizations representing a capacity of eight hundred employees formed a French network to develop public eco-housing options. One of Chenelet's social enterprises does the investing and contributes the financing.
Francois and his team are wary of growing too fast and losing the values that should always be a priority when working to improve lives. They know that getting people in the network to work together takes time, as does learning what Chenelet does and adapting it to another environment. It's not like building a chain store. The houses, the materials from the local environment, the financing models, and the laws all need to be modified for each region. Francois likens the network to Linux—it's open-sourced with shared experiences.
Francois's spread strategy, like everything Francois does, is simplistic and humble. He doesn't sell a system, he sells brotherhood and a way to think outside people's existing systems, no matter how different their systems are from his own or each other. Everyone will use different materials and different construction methods, but seeing them doing it gives everyone new ideas:
With some partners we have a strong economic link—with others we just want to light their way. We are not trying to build a new product like petrol pumps. We are trying to build a solidarity among people who build for the poor. This will develop the sector and make each organization in it stronger. When you speak with your soul, everyone can understand everything.
Chenelet is shifting the vision of public housing as being ecological and affordable and Francois is demonstrating its economic viability. He is also creating an entirely new sector of social enterprise while creating employment in ecological construction for those most marginalized. In doing so, he guarantees a strong economic return for social housing operators and social construction enterprises while making a powerful environmental and economic impact in low-income areas.
At the same time Francois is increasing construction capacity in a sector that is experiencing a real shortage of workers. And the biggest shortfall is in construction for ecological buildings. Chenelet takes the triple bottom line, which accounts for people, planet, and profit, and expands it to a quintuple bottom line, which also includes sustainable change and personal fulfillment. As Francois says, “When you invest in human value—there are never any taxes. You come out richer no matter what happens.”