For the Olympics, Paris wanted to present the best possible image of itself and went to great lengths to chase drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless off its streets wherever they might be seen. At least as long as there are visitors.
It is hard to imagine that there was still a makeshift camp there, where a hundred young African migrants, maybe more, were crammed together, just two weeks before the opening ceremony. Instead, the space under the bridge is taken up by a bicycle parking lot in the colors of the Paris Games, next to which three police officers are bored next to their patrol car.
We are at the very end of a promenade along the Canal de l’Ourcq, on the banks of which several countries, including India, Brazil and the Czech Republic, have set up their Games houses and which leads to the Parc de La Villette, one of the high places of the Olympic festivities. People stroll there peacefully on foot and by bike in front of posters announcing: “The city of Paris is happy to welcome you.”
In fact, if they had been paying attention, these walkers would have noticed that camping equipment had been hidden under another road bridge that spans the canal. “There were at least a hundred people here too. Mostly Afghan refugees. If they left things here, it’s because they think they can come back when the Games are over,” explains Paul Alauzy, coordinator at Médecins du Monde and spokesperson for the collective Le vers de la monnaie, a group of a hundred organizations that denounce what they believe to have been a campaign of “social cleansing” in the run-up to the Games.
Not the first time
It wouldn’t be the first time a city has sought to hide its most marginalized populations to polish its public image when all eyes of the world are on it, the group noted in a 77-page report in June. In the case of the Summer Olympics, it goes back at least to the 1988 Seoul Games.
In some cases, such as Beijing in 2008 or Rio in 2016, there were massive population displacements as entire neighborhoods were demolished to make way for Olympic infrastructure. In other cases, such as Paris, London, or Vancouver, the process of displacement was more indirect, with the transformations caused by the Games making housing unaffordable for marginalized populations. But it was also accompanied by more targeted, one-off, and direct actions to “clean up the streets” during the Games.
In the Paris region, organizations on the ground have reported “a bundle of consistent evidence” indicating an increase in police harassment of migrants, the homeless, drug users and sex workers, particularly around Olympic sites. squats “That had existed for years were suddenly dismantled,” explains Paul Alauzy. “This had the effect of dispersing people and throwing them back onto the streets.”
His group estimates that more than 12,500 people were evicted from informal living spaces during 138 operations carried out between April 2023 and 2024. A boost was even given two weeks before the Games.
These one-off actions come at the same time as the government has begun to implement a new system of regionalization of temporary emergency reception of migrants. Homeless migrants are offered — when they are not strongly encouraged to do so — to leave Paris for “temporary reception centers” located sometimes as far away as Toulouse, in the very south of the country. Volunteers are entitled to shelter and administrative support in their regularization procedures, but for a few weeks only and far from the jobs, social networks and aid organizations that they could have found in the capital, at the risk, thus, of quickly finding themselves on the street and more isolated than ever.
Temporary solutions
The French government and the City of Paris have been quick to deny that they are going after the homeless and other marginalized populations for the Olympics. In response to criticism, they have announced the upcoming creation of 200 new social housing units and the opening of more than 1,000 new temporary accommodation spaces in gymnasiums and other “buffer sites” that will close after the Games.
One of these places might help Aissatou. The young mother of a 12-year-old daughter has been homeless since she arrived from Senegal three years ago. Although she has found work as a cleaner in offices near the Saint-Lazare metro station, she does not earn enough to afford a place to live. “It’s very expensive, you know. And it’s not easy to find something when you come from Africa,” she says.
That evening, as almost every evening, she had gone near the Place de la Nation, where volunteers from Utopia 56, an association helping illegal immigrants and refugees, were trying to find a place to sleep for a hundred people, mainly families with young children.
Based in particular on the generosity of citizens who have to offer a spare room or an apartment for a night or two weeks — the time of the holidays or to let the Olympic Games pass — the solutions that we had to propose to them were very temporary and not ideal for families. Aissatou rarely manages to stay in the same place as her daughter. “She is very good,” says her mother, who does not want to leave Paris so as not to uproot her again and make her leave her school. She tells me: “Mom, one day it will be better.”
Waiting for it to end
Accompanied by a mobile medical clinic and a soup kitchen, this emergency housing fair was usually held near the city hall, until a ” fan zone » for the Games.
The organisations active on the ground had asked that assistance to the homeless be part of the social benefits sought by the organisers of the Games. They were not heard.
In its report on poor housing, the Abbé Pierre Foundation estimated last year that the number of homeless people had doubled in France over the past ten years, rising from 141,500 in 2021 to around 330,000 today.
“It wasn’t easy before the Games,” says Charlotte Kwantes, one of the Utopia 56 volunteers. “We’re just waiting for it to end and for things to get back to, at least, a little more normal.”