La colocation — The Shared Apartment

Renting a room in Paris

Shared apartments, colocations, are the ordinary way for students and young workers to live in Paris, where rents are among the highest in France and a studio can take most of a student's budget. Renting comes with paperwork that surprises newcomers: a lease, a detailed move-in inspection, the état des lieux, that will be compared with the move-out one when the deposit is returned, and, very often, a guarantor. Landlords and agencies usually ask for a garant earning several times the rent, which is hard for students from abroad; a state-backed guarantee scheme, Visale, exists partly for that reason. The rules on deposits, notice periods and lease lengths depend on whether the apartment is furnished, and they change, so check the current ones rather than relying on any summary. The social rules are unwritten but real. Many colocations keep a caisse commune for shared supplies and a chore rota on the fridge, and the first conversation about rules, the one Margaux insists on, is widely seen as the best protection against a bad year. Noise matters more than visitors expect: older Parisian buildings are rarely soundproofed, and complaints from neighbors are taken seriously. Recycling has its own colors, and they vary from city to city. In Paris, packaging and paper go in bins with yellow lids, glass in a separate container, and everything else in the general waste; in buildings with a gardien or gardienne, the building's caretaker, mistakes do not go unnoticed. Hospital staff working nights, like Margaux, are a common presence in shared apartments, and so is the arrangement she describes: quiet days, earplugs, and a firm rule about the washing machine.