Man, it is straight-up survival mode out in France right now. The country is hitting its highest temperatures on record, and let’s keep it a hundred: the system is letting the people in the concrete blocks get absolutely roasted. We’re talking about over 44 million people out of 67 million stuck under a red alert. The sun is beaming over 40 degrees Celsius during the day, and when night comes, the heat just sits there in the room, refusing to leave.

If you want to see where this hurts the most, you gotta look at the estates south of Paris, like Grigny and Ris-Orangis. The hood is full of these massive concrete high-rises that were built cheap and never upgraded. A new report from the housing NGO Fondation pour le Logement laid out the numbers, and they’re ugly: half of all the homes in France don’t have what they need to block out this kind of heat, and 66 percent of the people are literally suffocating in their own cribs.

Take Samira, a 35-year-old single mom and former building caretaker living up on the seventh floor in Ris-Orangis. Her spot has no insulation and zero outside window shutters. She’s out here trying to survive in a flat that feels like a literal furnace. She’s crying, dizzy, and exhausted because she only gets two hours of sleep a night. And get this—she can’t even run her fan like she wants to because she’s scared of how much the electric bill is gonna cost. That’s the real trap: you either roast or you go broke.

And you know the kids are suffering too. Samira’s ten-year-old boy, Issam, had his school shut down. He’s one of the thousands of kids locked out because the government had to close 1,800 schools across the country. Issam said his top-floor classroom hit 40 degrees inside, making it way too hot to even think about doing schoolwork. Young brothers in the neighborhood like 22-year-old Noah are keeping it real too, saying there’s no air and they can’t sleep more than four hours a night.

To top it all off, the grid is failing when people need it most. Power cuts are hitting thousands of homes from Brittany all the way down to the south-east. If you’re lucky enough to have a fan or electric blinds, they’re useless once the power goes out. Even the nuclear plants are struggling because the water is too hot to cool the reactors, forcing them to cut back energy production. Out in the country, hundreds of thousands of chickens have died in the heat, completely overwhelming the cleanup crews.

This whole disaster is a direct result of the government falling asleep at the wheel and cutting the bag. They slashed funding for the exact projects meant to fix these buildings and prepare the infrastructure for the climate crisis. Maïder Olivier, who heads climate advocacy at the housing NGO, said it straight: France has a ‘massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.’