It’s a little music that started to rise, at the start of the 2022 school year, and which grew in April, with the creation of “SAS” aimed at welcoming the homeless in Ile-de-France in ten regions. : the Rugby World Cup scheduled for September 2023 and especially the 2024 Summer Olympics (OG) in Paris would be responsible for the decrease in the number of hotels providing emergency accommodation. They would encourage the public authorities to clear the way, by preventing the homeless from setting up their tents and by sending them to the provinces.
Is this criticism – recurrent with the approach of major sporting events, in France as elsewhere – really founded? In any case, it deserves to be put into perspective.
The disappearance of emergency accommodation places is indeed largely suffered by the public authorities. During the health crisis linked to Covid-19, the government had increased emergency accommodation to a record level of 120,000 places in Ile-de-France – more than half of the places available in the country. “As the classic hotel park was then available, for lack of tourists, it was very much in demand”we remind the regional prefecture.
But the exceptionally mobilized hotels and student residences began, in 2022, to return to their initial activity. “The year was extremely hard: we lost 5,000 places, especially in inner Paris, and we were only able to replace 2,500, often in hotels further away in Ile-de-France, recalls the director general of the SAMU social, Vanessa Benoît, whose services book around 54,000 hotel nights each evening on behalf of the State and communities. A few hotels said they were closing for renovations before the Olympics, but that was a very small minority. There seems to have been a runaway about the impact of the Games…”
The State has launched a call for tenders to replace the places lost with new ones, in emergency accommodation centres. “These centers are more suitable than hotels, and also have the advantage of providing social support”salute M.me Benedict. But the openings were not as fast as the closings. It was necessary to move, often far away, people who had been permanently housed in the same place, where they had educated their children, found jobs, established relationships… “We were able to avoid being put back on the street, but there were ends of care, when people refused the new accommodation offer”she regrets.
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