The town hall of Paris wants to find 1,000 additional emergency accommodation places by spring to make them available to the State and the associations it finances, in a context of social crisis and upsurge in arrivals migrants in the capital.
The “The situation is dramatic in our city” with a “very significant increase in the number of people on the street”, declared to the press the mayor, Anne Hidalgo (PS), during a visit to a day center and emergency accommodation managed by Emmaüs Solidarité. Located in the heart of Paris, this center, which receives an average of a hundred people a day, was bought in 2019 from Enedis by the town hall, which plans to install social housing there.
The 1,000 places promised will be added to the 6,300 existing in the city’s housing stock, while the State is offering 20,000 places in the capital – 30,000 if we include social hotels, the surroundings of the aedile. About 600 places have already been identified and will open during the winter after development work, said the same source. Among the 600 places already provided, the development of the former headquarters of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), avenue Victoria, opposite the Town Hall, will make it possible to create 270 beds, pending , there too, that a social housing program be created.
A “humanitarian crisis” in the capital
The town hall asks the State to mobilize sites, for example hospitals or the SNCF, to deal with the “daily arrival flows” of migrants within the framework of a “national distribution”.
In mid-November, a camp of nearly a thousand exiles, mainly Afghans, located under the aerial metro north of Paris had been evacuated. But “500 or 600 people” are there again, and others “keep coming”, according to the entourage of the mayor of Paris. Anne Hidalgo, former socialist presidential candidate, castigated the action of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, demanding “regularizations rather than hunting down immigrants”.
On Friday, more than 200 teenagers on the street and community activists, according to the Utopia56 association, settled in tents opposite the Council of State, on the square between the Louvre and the Palais-Royal, to demand of the “hosting solutions” to the “humanitarian crisis” on the outskirts of Paris.