"I like going to the Champs Elysees, to see the Eiffel Tower," he said. "But I don't go to Paris often -- something like once every two months -- because I'm afraid of getting arrested by the police. If policemen see a lot of young people together, they will think that something wrong is going on and they will arrest us."
The Nadauds are different from many of their neighbors. During a more prosperous period in their marriage, when Marc had a job producing reggae music, they lived in a $1,500-a-month apartment in northern Paris.
Marc found the apartment. He said the landlady agreed to rent it to him, but when he showed up to sign the lease, she apologized, saying her husband had leased it to someone else. The next day Veronique, a white-skinned Frenchwoman, called to inquire, met the landlady and signed the lease.
The next month, Marc said, he forced the landlady to pick up the rent money in person just to see the look on her face when he opened the door.
His music production group fell apart, however, and Marc and his wife landed in Building 8.
Even within Clichy-sous-Bois, however, life is unequal in Marc's eyes.
On a recent afternoon, he parked his car along a street of trim cottages with auburn-tiled roofs. Lace curtains framed the windows. Fat yellow dahlias and pumpkin-orange marigolds filled the gardens.
A woman with peach-colored skin and curly gray hair shouted at him to move his car.
Nadaud pointed toward the wall of shabby concrete blocks that stretch skyward above the tidy enclave on one side of Clichy-sous-Bois.
"The white man got a house, the black man got a flat," he said. "People are frustrated."
He headed back to Building 8.
Two elementary school girls approached him shyly as he entered the building. They were peddling ink pens with furry animal heads at $3.60 apiece to help raise money for a classmate whose family could not afford to send her on the school's annual ski trip. Social groups and the municipality underwrite much of the outing, but each family has to contribute 150 euros -- just over $180, nearly a month's rent for the families of Building 8.
"If you live in misery, you have to have a dream," said Marc, jabbing the elevator button.
Researcher Gretchen Hoff contributed to this report.
