“Everyone thinks it’s shameful.”

(Paris) Brice Jouan is one of the many Parisians who have received this message from his landlord in recent months, by registered mail: “You will have to leave your apartment by the beginning of July.”

The reason given: the sale of the property. A practice which is legal in itself. But which, according to the young professional, camouflages the owner’s intention to re-let his accommodation at a high price during the Olympic Games period, from the end of July to mid-August.

“It was very stressful to go through. I had to look for an apartment very quickly in Paris, which is far from being the easiest place to find one. We don’t realize how hard it is to be in doubt,” notes Brice, who is worried to see that many other people are in the same situation as him.

The irony is that a few days after he moved out, his landlord changed his mind and told him that the place would not be sold after all, due to a lack of buyers. “They told me that we could stay in the end, even though we had already done everything and the place was empty. We couldn’t believe it, it was quite surreal,” he says.

On rental platforms like Airbnb, demand does not seem to match the colossal supply of housing currently on the market. According to the daily The world145,000 homes are listed on the American site during the Olympics, compared to 65,000 in normal times. And since not all of these homes find takers, prices have been falling for several weeks. The fact remains that the issue of evictions remains very real.

Students on the street

Mr. Jouan is not alone in this situation. Since April 11, thousands of students have also been evicted from their housing throughout Paris. The Regional Center for University and School Works (CROUS) has vacated more than 3,200 homes in 12 residences, in order to house the national police and members of Olympic security.

Honoré Getas is one of them. “We feel abandoned by the state. They want to steal our homes. It doesn’t make sense,” says the student, who co-created La Rescrous with several others, a collective whose mission is to put pressure on the government in terms of student housing. “Regardless of political color, everyone finds what’s happening shameful,” adds the young man.

The latter, who was relocated in the middle of the exam period, also deplores a two-tier treatment to the detriment of students. “I haven’t had heating here for two years. I have classmates who don’t have hot water and the CROUS has never repaired anything despite our numerous reminders. Now, with the arrival of the Olympic staff, there will be a new laundry room, we will repaint, redo several power supply systems. The message that this sends makes no sense,” he notes.

All this comes at a time when the current supply of student residences is meager. According to the student collective Le Poing Levé, there are “only 175,000 housing units for nearly 3 million students registered for the 2023-2024 academic year”, a number of places that therefore only allows for housing 6% of students, while one in ten students has already found themselves without housing during their studies.

“It’s a bit like trying to push the poorest and most vulnerable out of Paris for the Olympics. However, our concern is that it be done with a lasting intention,” worries Noah Farjon, of the organization Saccage 2024, a group opposed to holding the Olympic Games.

His group says it is “very worried” about the prospect of “ultragentrification” of Paris, which “risks evicting many people who still have affordable housing.” “The idea that we will then prevent these people from coming back scares us, very sincerely,” says Mr. Farjon.

“More sustainable” Games

For Canadian geographer Melora Koepke, who also studied the social impacts of the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, the idea of ​​”social cleansing” sums up the current fears in Paris.

“We can already see what’s coming, with the many new constructions being built where there was previously affordable housing and the evictions. […] In Vancouver, they promised to build 3,700 social housing units with the towers of the Olympic Village. Except that afterwards, it was just sold to foreign interests, then they took the money to balance the Olympic budget,” she denounces.

The “healthier” organization of the Olympic Games is nevertheless possible, in the eyes of the researcher. “This could be done, for example, by developing a fund to finance sustainable solutions for housing. The existing associations already have proposals and budgets. This would then have an effect on the cities and could even help convince others to host the next Games,” she notes.

In the meantime, other groups like Le Vers de la Médaille, which has been carrying out mobilization activities for months, are also worried about the homeless. “For months, the authorities have been removing people from the streets of Paris, especially in areas where there are Olympic facilities,” said one of its spokespeople, Bénédicte Maraval, in an interview.

A camp of 80 tents, located behind the town hall, was also dismantled the day after the passage of The PressAs always, the people who were there were sent to reception centers in the suburbs, where they are then assessed to determine the nature of their needs.

“Sometimes, there are people who are given an outright obligation to leave the territory, which is completely unfair,” insists M.^me Maraval.

Even at Médecins du Monde, which helps vulnerable populations on the streets, project manager Milou Borsotti is concerned about the acceleration of “the policy of social cleansing”.

“It’s something we’ve seen for a long time, but it intensified with the Olympics. This idea that we want to clean up tourist spots that are the images of France, by pushing precarious populations to the outskirts of Paris, and as far as possible outside the Parisian suburbs, is very worrying even from a health point of view,” he says.

A historic peak

The founder of the association Droit au logement (DAL), Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, known for his commitment to the rights of the “poorly housed” since the 1990s, is also concerned about the “accelerator effect” of the Olympic Games.

“We are reaching the peak of the 1990s in terms of levels of rental terminations, in other words the termination of leases, to which we can add a significant and increasing number of second homes around Paris, which are in fact disguised tourist rentals,” adds Mr. Eyraud, who fears in the coming weeks “tonne-wide pressure against tenants to throw them out on the street without judgment, without procedure.”

According to him, the Élysée “should have taken more control measures.” “Legislation should have been toughened to prevent fraudulent maneuvers, by increasing sanctions against owners and compensation for tenants who, for the moment, have nothing to cry about,” he illustrates.

In France, the portion of income that a tenant spends on rent is on average 30%, a figure higher in Paris. Last year, in Montreal, the Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU) estimated that nearly a third of tenants also spent more than 30% of their income on rent.