The episode of intense cold which spread to France got the better of the government’s inflexibility on the creation of additional accommodation places. Concomitantly with the classification, Monday January 8, of forty-three departments in yellow “very cold” vigilance (second level out of four) by Météo-France, the Minister for Housing, Patrice Vergriete, announced the release of an additional envelope of 120 million euros for emergency accommodation.
This extension corresponds in theory to 10,000 additional places, but “the goal of the game is not to always create more places”specified the minister, who visited a day reception center in the 15e district of Paris.
The envelope will be used as a priority to respond to the most urgent needs, to accommodate women and children on the street, the number of the latter having been estimated at nearly 3,000 in October 2023 by Unicef and the Federation of Actors. solidarity.
This sum should also make it possible to reform “in depth the emergency accommodation system” by “better coordination with local authorities” and to act ” upstream and downstream “by avoiding “that people do not enter emergency accommodation, preventing evictions” and in “accelerating their exit from the system”, specified the minister. A very ambitious objective, while France is going through a deep housing crisis.
“Politics by the thermometer”
The director of studies of the Abbé Pierre Foundation, Manuel Domergue, immediately regretted what he describes as “politics with the thermometer”. “If this envelope allows us to obtain a few thousand accommodation places, it’s good to takehe said, but seeing the government, which was intransigent, break down when the temperature drops below zero is distressing in terms of public policy. »
For the Right to Housing association, “these 120 million euros in additional funding announced in the face of the cold are only crumbs, while the number of homeless people continues to grow in France, thrown onto the streets by the high cost of housing”.
In detail, these 120 million euros are added to the 2.9 billion budgeted in the 2024 finance law for accommodation and the path to housing, which already makes it possible to finance 203,000 accommodation places. emergency.
However, despite this extension, the budget will still remain lower than the credits actually consumed in 2023 (3.1 billion euros). The government was in fact initially banking on a clearly downward trajectory, assuming the hypothesis of better integration of homeless people into housing.
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