10 temporary accommodations have been set up across France, with the aim of relocating the homeless off the streets of the capital. More than 60 associations denounce “ethnic cleansing”.
The French government has implemented a new approach to tackling the homeless situation in Paris. Since last spring, 10 temporary accommodations have been set up across France, in cities such as Toulouse, Bordeaux and Strasbourg, with the aim of relocating homeless people off the streets of the capital.
“The government has revealed that over the past eight months, 2,800 homeless people living on the streets of Paris have been relocated to other regions“, alerts Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the collective “the reverse of the medal” and coordinator of migrant health monitoring and psychiatric duty at Médecins du monde.
“There is an imperative to do what we call a ‘clean city’ and ‘harassment and cleaning work’,” he accuses.
If the person does not tick “the right administrative boxes”, they can find themselves in “a region where potentially there are many fewer associations for the medical, for the social, for the legal”, he explains. Also, it will return to Paris, he says.
According to him, these practices were already common; the Paris 2024 Olympic Games simply accelerated them.
“A bad image”
Faris, a political refugee in France and spokesperson for the squat occupants’ collective, resided in “Unibéton”, what was once the largest squat in Paris Île-de-France.
Located on Quai du Châtelier in L’Île-Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, the site was evacuated in April by the police. Around 400 migrants have lived in this squat since 2020.
Despite “meetings with the prefecture” and “promises” to accommodate all the occupants of the squat, “no word was respected”, regrets Faris. “All these people end up on the streets,” he says.
“I think that refugees are a bad image for the Olympics. And that’s why they decided to expel them. Except that there was no solution for these people who were expelled from the squats” , denounces the spokesperson for the collective of occupants of the squat.
“Far from Paris”
Benjamin Cagan, head of the Salvation Army’s “Humanitarian Stop” day reception center located in the first arrondissement of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Louvre-Rivoli metro station, confirms: “people who live in the streets and in particular the exiled public, are driven further and further from Paris.
“We are regularly informed that people are woken up at night and asked to leave,” he observes.
He is concerned about the difficulties that the homeless will encounter in getting around and accessing “certain places of respite” during the Olympic Games.
Device saturation
“Given the saturation of the Ile-de-France accommodation base, the creation of SAS in the regions since April 2023 constitutes an appropriate response since 3,192 people were referred in the provinces, including 734 people in families and 2,458 isolated men. Volunteering to go to the provinces, these people were able to benefit from support adapted to their administrative situation and from social support,” the Paris Ile-de-France prefecture responded to Euronews.
Nearly 120,000 people are accommodated every night in the Ile-de-France region.
This stock has increased by 30% over the last five years, says the prefecture.
“Despite this increase, demand remains very high and it is difficult to find positive exit solutions for people accommodated, in particular, for Ile de France, given the existing tension on access to housing and social housing”, explains the prefecture in its written response.
“This leads to a saturation of the accommodation park and therefore a more limited capacity to bring new people into the emergency accommodation system. These entries are made on the basis of an assessment of people’s vulnerability, prioritizing those most in distress,” explains the prefecture.
In 2023, nearly 6,000 people were sheltered during 33 operationsaccording to figures from the prefecture.
ADVERTISEMENT“Olympics or not, we would proceed in the same way because it is a question of being able to find a dignified place for these people by ensuring them social and administrative monitoring,” affirms the prefecture.
