I'm surprised how shabby this neighbourhood is. It's all small, crumbly, older houses, and any stores and such are in houses, not in their own buildings. When you get near the big shiny government buildings, there are food courts full of every type of fast food, small chain clothing stores selling generic business-casual clothes, and a street life full of tiny bistros and cafes, but this looks like it's all for the government employees. On the weekends, it's a ghost town near the government buildings, and even in the neighbourhood there aren't many people walking around. I'd thought that a neighbourhood so close to the government buildings would become somewhat yuppified, but that hasn't happened yet (I don't know how long the gov't buildings have been here). What I see here is poverty. Not student poverty. Not "young professionals living with a roommate in a tiny apartment in a gritty neighbourhood because of housing costs" poverty. Not gang war poverty. Not new immigrant poverty (surprisingly, most of the low-level service jobs here are not filled by immigrants, but rather by locals of all ages who look like they've been here a while). It looks like the poverty of the uneducated, although my French is not good enough to confirm this. It looks like a shabby neighbourhood of those who, despite probably being fluently bilingual, never completed enough education to work in the big shiny government buildings and live wherever the local yuppies live. It's the kind of poverty that has always scared me the most, because I've always interpreted my main marketable skill as bilingualism. So why can I earn a living doing what I do and these other people can't? I can't answer that question.

Of course, I might be wrong about the whole thing. This is just my interpretation of what I see, and I don't know enough about the local politics and culture to read this correctly.