In Seine-Saint-Denis, the Olympics worsen precarious housing for migrants and Roma

by Layli Foroudi

PARIS (Reuters) – Camelia Toldea has packed her suitcase in case her family has to rush out of the abandoned building she occupies with dozens of other Roma near one of the future sites of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games .

Born in Romania, Camelia Toldea has been living for several months with her husband and their three children in this squat in Seine-Saint-Denis, which will host many Olympic events, as well as the Olympic village.

The poorest department in France, Seine-Saint-Denis is home to many migrants, asylum seekers and Roma, and some politicians and NGOs believe that developments in preparation for the Games will worsen the housing crisis.

More than half of the infrastructure built or renovated for the Games is located in the department, which is also the one with the largest number of squats and shanty towns in France, according to an official report published in 2021.

At least 60 squats have been closed by the authorities since the start of the year in Seine-Saint-Denis, according to a count carried out by Reuters based on administrative documents, court decisions and interviews with around fifty squatters, lawyers, prosecutors, social workers and local politicians. Some see it as a desire to beautify the sector in anticipation of the Games.

The Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture told Reuters the evictions were not linked to the global sporting event, but the result of ordinary legal procedures. These steps were accelerated by the adoption last July of a law which also imposes heavier fines and prison sentences on squatters.

According to prefecture figures, just under 80 squats were closed last year. The total of 60 that Reuters arrived at for this year is surely an underestimate, social workers said. The prefecture refused to provide official data on squat closures between 2018 and 2023.

Evictions are plunging more and more people into precariousness, underlines Valérie Puvilland, director of operations at Interlogement 93, the association which manages emergency accommodation in Seine-Saint-Denis, the government having according to her eliminated a thousand of places in the department’s emergency accommodation centers, a drop of around 10%.

Some evicted people ended up on the streets, in Seine-Saint-Denis or elsewhere in the Paris region, while others were sent to other French regions, according to lawyers and squatters.

“We have an Olympic Games event coming up and which puts additional pressure because there are fewer hotels doing social work, because there are fewer places that we can occupy temporarily while waiting for work to be done. , (…) etc”, declared to Reuters Léa Filoche, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of solidarity, emergency accommodation and the protection of refugees, the fight against inequalities and against ‘exclusion.

According to her, some hotels have stopped welcoming people in difficulty in order to be able to welcome visitors during the Games. Reuters could not independently verify how many hotels would be affected by the measure.

SQUATS ON THE STREET

Of the 32 squats closed in 2023 whose location Reuters was able to confirm, 13 were located less than two kilometers from the main Olympic sites in Seine-Saint-Denis.

One of them, a former cement factory near the future Olympic Village, where 400 migrants mainly from Sudan and Chad lived, was closed in April, Reuters noted. A shantytown housing some 700 Roma was also dismantled in Tremblay-en-France, near the Arena Paris Nord, where boxing competitions will take place, according to two witnesses.

These evictions have led to an increase in the number of people living on the streets, due to a lack of available social housing, deplores Valérie Puvilland.

Léa Filoche, for her part, believes that there have never been so many homeless people in Paris, including minors.

“If the objective (of the State) is to have an Olympic Games where we don’t see too much poverty, it’s certain that the plan to evict the squats is not at all the good plan… It’s stupid, what we’re doing, because as a result, we’re evicting people from squats and putting them back in public spaces,” she said, calling on the government to requisitioning unoccupied buildings, such as former hospitals or office buildings, to house the homeless.

Illustrating the shortage of emergency accommodation places in this department which has 1.6 million inhabitants, Interlogement 93 said it had refused on December 13 655 requests from people living on the street, including 54 pregnant women.

According to the association’s figures, on certain days this month there were almost twice as many requests left unanswered as last year.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo warned last month that the capital would be “not ready” to house all the homeless between now and the Olympics. The government did not respond to requests from Reuters on this subject.

The warehouse in which the Toldea family and 70 other Roma live is located in Île-Saint-Denis, approximately 2 km from the future Athletes’ Village.

The Toldeas were evicted from another squat in May, and before that from an abandoned hotel in which they had stayed for a few days. They fear being thrown onto the streets again, after the town hall issued an eviction order last month.

Victor Drot, chief of staff to the mayor of Île-Saint-Denis, told Reuters that the decision to close the squat was taken after a fire in the warehouse. He acknowledged that due to a lack of available social housing, there is “no solution on the scale of this city to house people”.

“RELIEF” PARIS

The Toldeas submitted an application for social housing two years ago but there is an average wait of eight years, said Victor Drot.

“We have nowhere to go,” worries Camelia Toldea, who speaks in Romanian. “The children go to school here, we know the area,” adds the 31-year-old mother, who says she makes her living from selling objects found at the Clignancourt flea market.

Reuters interviewed 19 migrants evicted from four different squats between April and August near Olympic sites or urban development projects in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Two of them were rehoused in a stable manner by the prefecture, but the others had to manage to find a new squat. According to Interlogement 93, most emergency accommodation places are only available for a few days.

The French government, the Paris police headquarters and the Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture did not respond to Reuters’ questions about evictions from squats and shantytowns, or about assistance provided to the homeless.

Several people have been offered accommodation in another region, while the government seeks to “decongest” the Paris suburbs whose reception centers are saturated.

In May, the now former Minister of Housing Olivier Klein justified this approach by the fact that certain hotels had terminated their social accommodation contracts to be able to accommodate tourists during the Games.

Reuters interviewed four people who agreed to go to Bordeaux, Toulouse and Strasbourg after being evicted from a squat, but then returned to the Paris region due to a lack of resources there, or their assignments ended.

According to the Paris prefecture, 3,329 people had been temporarily relocated in the provinces as of mid-December.

The government has developed a “zero crime” plan during the Olympic Games, which also provides for the dismantling of squats, according to a parliamentary report and three local officials.

“People must not see slums, shanty towns. With the Olympics, we sell the image of France abroad,” Sébastien Piffeteau, deputy prosecutor at the Bobigny Judicial Court in charge of cases, told Reuters. related to the Games.

The Interior Ministry did not want to give Reuters details on the content of this plan, despite a decision to this effect from the commission for access to administrative documents.

The general objectives of the plan appear on the website of the Paris police headquarters but few details have been made public.

HIERARCHY OF MISERY

Bobigny prosecutor Eric Mathais told Reuters that recent squat evacuations were facilitated by a law passed last summer by the French parliament, which criminalizes the illegal occupation of industrial, commercial and private properties.

Data from the city of Paris shows that camps established by SDF have also been the target of more frequent operations – 35 since the start of the year compared to 19 in 2022.

Léa Filoche says she has noticed a spectacular growth in the number of homeless people around the town hall, and that all the services helping them – food banks, public showers, reception centers, etc. – are “in the red”.

According to a document seen by Reuters, the Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture has instructed Interlogement 93 to only provide emergency housing this year to vulnerable people, such as pregnant women, the disabled or victims of violence. domestic.

The association is not even able to meet the needs of all these people, says Valérie Puvilland.

For the director of the Île-de-France agency of the Abbé Pierre Foundation, Eric Constantin, the lack of investment in social housing has forced the State to rely on hotels to meet accommodation needs, accentuating insecurity.

“We are very afraid. We know that during the Olympic Games, there will be millions of people (to be accommodated)… And it is not in the Olympic Village that we are going to accommodate everyone,” underlines- he.

The immigration law which has just been adopted by Parliament will make matters even worse, by requiring five years of residence for non-EU nationals to receive housing assistance.

In the longer term, SOLIDEO, the public establishment responsible for Olympic infrastructure, ensures that almost 3,000 housing units will be created on the site of the Olympic Village, including 17% social housing. Local associations consider this number very insufficient.

Abdallah Ali, a Sudanese refugee who works as a garbage collector, is one of 400 people, including 27 other refugees and asylum seekers, who were evicted in April from the site of the former cement factory near the Olympic Village.

The squatters were taken by bus to a hotel in the southern suburbs of Paris. But they were informed a week later that they had to leave, without any further explanation, he told Reuters, showing the text message he had received. Recontacted in September by Reuters, he said he was sleeping in the street.

Neither the hotel nor the Seine Saint-Denis prefecture responded to requests from Reuters to confirm this story. The documents that Abdallah Ali presented show that he has been waiting for a place in social housing since 2018.

“It’s not right to throw people on the street like that,” he laments. “We work in France, we have more right to have a place to live than the athletes who will come in 2024.”

(Reporting by Layli Foroudi, Tangi Salaün for the French version, edited by Blandine Hénault)