Lyon Metropolis announces resumption of care for homeless mothers

While 2,000 children are forced to sleep on the streets in France, according to UNICEF, the Lyon metropolitan area announced on Friday, August 30, that it would start welcoming new homeless mothers into its emergency accommodation system. The presence of several babies on the streets this summer had caused a stir in the city.

For budgetary reasons and to make the State and neighboring departments face up to their own responsibilities, the metropolis, run by environmentalists, suspended new care in mid-July, while maintaining those already in place. The community is responsible, like the departments, for housing pregnant women and single women with children under three years old.

Strongly criticized by associations and social actors, the metropolis has taken the “decision to immediately resume the reception of isolated women with children under three years old”declared the ecologist president of the Metropolis Bruno Bernard, in front of journalists. However, the new support will not concern “that the public is connected to our territory”he said. This excludes, for example, people who have applied for asylum in another department, or who have never had a domicile in the Lyon metropolitan area.