For the past couple of months, the French government has been working to accelerate the transfer of Paris’ homeless to other parts of the country.
It’s 6.30 a.m. on a late summer morning in Paris. Amid the rumbling coming from the Stalingrad Métro station, in the northeast of the French capital, hundreds of migrants, mostly men, sleep crammed under an overpass. Some rest on pieces of cardboard and old mattresses behind a urine-doused fence, others lie awake by the side of the street.Word is spreading that government buses are about to come and collect them.
Obsa made the perilous journey to France in 2017, traveling from Ethiopia all the way through Sudan and Libya, and then across the Mediterranean to Italy. In any case, the lost hotel rooms are far from being the main problem for France’s homeless population. Around half of the country’s homeless are concentrated in the Ile-de-France region, where they have access to more charities, job opportunities and personal connections.
Even then, however, they won’t be guaranteed a roof over their head. “I can’t leave, I have a one-year job contract,” said Obsa, who works as an IT administrator. “I have to at least stay in the Ile-de-France region.” In a televised interview Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron insisted France was doing its part to help the migrants that arrive on Europe’s shores, spending, among other things, around 2 billion euros each year on emergency accommodation for homeless people. He concluded, however, that the country simply “cannot take in all the misery in the world.”
The Dihal denied to CNN that there was any link between the relocation plan and the upcoming Games, insisting that the scheme aims to decrease the burden on the Ile-de-France region and ensure for the region’s homeless to have greater, more individualized support in the provinces. In Bordeaux, one of the cities selected to host a SAS, this number is as high as 40%. “They disappear,” Bordeaux deputy mayor Harmonie Lecerf-Meunier told CNN. “We presume they go back to Paris.”
Similarly, Lyon deputy mayor Sandrine Runel told CNN that the government has rushed to relieve the situation in Paris and the Ile-de-France without ensuring the proper resources are in place elsewhere. “The Olympics are a pretext to direct people to the regions without any thought and without even checking the reception capacities that the regions have,” she said.
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