Hundreds of people were evacuated the next day from France’s largest squat in Vitry-sur-Seine, south of Paris, in the shadow of the ceremonial lighting of the Olympic flame in Greece. The evacuation of this former factory coincided with the symbolic date of 100 days before the start of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France 24 reports.
This is the third major eviction operation organised in the Paris region since the beginning of 2023. Before Vitry, some 400 tenants had already been evacuated from the Unibeton squat on the outskirts of the current Olympic Village site on the island of Saint-Denis in April 2023, and almost 200 from the Thiai squat in July 2023.
These evacuations, as well as other police operations targeting the homeless, quickly caught the attention of those involved in helping people in difficulty. So much so that in October 2023, more than 80 associations joined together to form the collective Le Revers de la médaille (“The Other Side of the Medal”) to denounce the “social cleansing” taking place on the streets of the Paris region in the run-up to the Olympic Games. Paul Alausi, spokesperson for the group and coordinator of Médecins du Monde, explained:
There are several signs that allow us to use the term social cleansing. Evacuation operations are not new; they were not designed with the Olympics in mind. But what has changed as they approach is the frequency of evacuation of occupied facilities and the systematic sending of evacuees to another French region.
To build an overall picture of these actions by public authorities, the various components of Revers de la médaille gathered their feedback from the field (for the period from April 2023 to May 2024) in a report published on June 5. They explained:
A number of indicators show that the Olympic and Paralympic Games accelerate the dispersal and displacement of people in disadvantaged situations.
For more than a year, authorities have been struggling with a range of populations: homeless people, migrants, gypsies, sex workers and drug addicts. Antoine de Clercq, coordinator of the Revers de la médaille movement, laments that “in order to make the city look like a postcard, we take everything away from it and make it invisible.” He said:
What we are seeing on the ground repeats what happened at previous Olympics abroad: they don’t want the most excluded sectors of the population to be visible to cameras and tourists.
Dramatic acceleration of evacuations in the pre-Olympic period
For their part, state authorities have denied for months that there is any link between the evacuation policy in place and the upcoming Olympic Games in the French capital. Amélie Oudea-Castera, the Minister of Sport, Olympic and Paralympic Games explained last March:
It has nothing to do with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there is no social cleansing,” Regarding the evacuation of homeless people from the Île-de-France region. The aim of this emergency accommodation policy is to spread the effort across the country. […] Operations of this kind are regular and not dictated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games programme.
The mayor of Orléans accused the government of trying to hide homeless people and migrants during the Olympics. Oudea-Castera replied:
There will be no social cleansing.
She also said the policy of providing emergency accommodation “has nothing to do with the Games.”
However, the method has raised concerns. Earlier this year, France’s Human Rights Commissioner, Claire Edon, announced that she was launching an independent investigation into the “eviction from public space of people deemed “undesirable” in the run-up to the Olympics” and the “referral of homeless people living in Paris to temporary regional reception centres.” At the time of writing, his report had not yet been published.
The number of municipal and prefectural evacuation orders leading to evictions has more than tripled in the Île-de-France region in three years. There were 15 between May 1 2021 and April 30 2022 and almost 50 between May 1 2023 and April 30 this year, according to the Observatoire des expulsions de lieux de vie informels. The publication “The Other Side of the Medal” notes the “great propensity of Paris region authorities” to resort to this mechanism – it accounts for almost 40% of all evictions in the region in the pre-Olympic year.
In addition, the Paris region has seen a marked increase in the number of “shelters” – evictions that are often accompanied by an offer of temporary accommodation. The Collectif accès au droit (CAD), an organisation that has been collecting data since 2015 and whose details were seen by France 24 TV, counted 14 such cases between 2021 and 2022, 17 between 2022 and 2023, and 27 between April 2023 and April last year. Theo Ferignac, a member of the DAC, noted:
This acceleration in the pace of squat accommodation and evacuation coincides with the start of the Olympic Games. And even if this is not an official signal taken by public authorities, these figures clearly show a desire to see as few campsites as possible in Paris this summer.
In response to a query from France 24, the Paris city council noted that “emergency accommodation is the responsibility of the state: it is the state that plans and organises the evacuation operations that take place in Paris.” It added that “the policy of the City of Paris is based on a simple principle: no eviction without a solution to the problem of care, and operations must be carried out with respect for people and their property.”
For its part, the Paris police prefecture responds that, “responsible for preventing threats to the safety of people and property,” it “implements evacuation measures that are appropriate, necessary and proportionate to maintain public order, health and safety in the urban area.”
“I felt like a prisoner”
The pace of asylum provision has also accelerated with the introduction of the March 13 2023 scheme by public bodies. The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Housing jointly issued a circular “with immediate effect” to regional prefects and departments.
This document sets out “guidelines for the administration and orientation of people sheltered in temporary shelters”. Since then, all French regions, with the exception of Hauts-de-France and Corsica, have been authorised to receive people evacuated from the Île-de-France region for a limited period of three weeks.
These gateways, with a maximum capacity of 50 people, are located in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Besançon and Rouen, as well as around Rennes, Strasbourg, Orleans and Angers. Their official aim is “to ensure that administrative situations are systematically dealt with and that the accommodation process runs smoothly, combined, where necessary, with the examination of an asylum application or an application for an exceptional right of residence”.
Paul Alausi notes that “since this system has been in place, no more places have been offered in Île-de-France during asylum operations.” Every time the authorities carry out an evacuation, evictees are offered a seat on a bus travelling to a particular city – not necessarily to the same destination depending on the day – and without knowing exactly what will happen tomorrow.
This is what Omar, a Sudanese refugee who arrived in France in 2017, whom France 24 met at the end of May in the southern suburbs of Paris, faced. He has held a ten-year residence permit since 2018 and works on short-term contracts on construction sites. Despite his legal status, the 27-year-old has been living in an unstable situation for several years. He was first sheltered by friends, then moved into a squat near Saint-Denis before moving into a squat in Vitry-sur-Seine four years ago.
On the morning of April 17, he was evacuated in an asylum operation, along with the other occupants, who included Chadians, Eritreans, Ethiopians and Ivorians. He said:
I was at work when I got a call from someone from the association. I had to go back and tell my boss that I could have a shelter tomorrow. When I got there, there were a lot of people there, as well as the police.
Despite the fact that he had a contract in Paris – a three-month fixed-term contract was in force at the time – he still boarded a bus that took him to the Orléans Gateway. There, he checked into a run-down, run-down hotel in a shopping district on the outskirts of Orleans for three weeks. He added:
I was in my room most of the time. Sometimes I would go out into the city centre to feel a little more alive, but in this place I felt like a prisoner.
After three weeks, he was told he had to leave the temporary shelter without being offered any accommodation. “I had no choice but to leave on the last day. I ended up losing my squat, I lost my job at a construction site and now I have no housing,” explains Omar, who is staying with friends while he searches for a new place to live. He is still bitter about the month-long journey. “I never thought I would go through this in France. I’m really tired of being homeless, it’s always the same loop.”
Efficiency of the gateway system is questioned from the inside
According to the Revers de la médaille collective, in 2023, 3,958 of the approximately 6,000 people sheltered in the Ile-de-France prefecture were sent to regional emergency shelters.
According to state authorities, the main purpose of these shelters is to relieve overcrowded temporary accommodation centres in the Paris region. Paris city hall told France 24 television that “there are more and more people on the streets”. It added:
In 2024, 3,492 people were recorded as homeless in Paris, a particularly worrying increase of around 16 per cent compared to the previous edition of the Nuit de la Solidarité.
According to the same source, this estimate is “minimal” and it should be added that “we also have to add about 500 people who were in various municipal institutions (gymnasiums, former lycée, former Go Sport shop) at the time.”
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that some of the hotels where homeless people usually stay have been reorientated towards a more touristy clientele due to the Rugby World Cup and soon the Olympics.
But the situation with emergency housing is no better in other parts of France. So much so that the mayor of Orleans and the mayor’s office in Strasbourg have started pointing fingers at this displacement of homeless people in recent months. Florian Varieras, Strasbourg’s deputy mayor in charge of the inclusive city, said:
It’s more like moving the problem than solving it. The homeless problem won’t be solved with ‘regional gateways’ alone.
There are also doubts about the effectiveness of regional drop-in centres. France 24 managed to see a preliminary evaluation carried out in February this year for one of these ten shelters. Of the more than 800 people who passed through this structure between 2023 and 2024, 36% were sent to 115 shelters, while 15% chose to leave voluntarily, often to return to Paris. “Thus, more than half of the people end up on the street for lack of housing,” laments the head of the centre, who also denounces the “false hopes” given to the homeless.
The permanence of the gateways designed to relieve emergency housing in the Paris region is also in question. According to a document seen by France 24 and several associations we spoke to, the Paris police prefecture has assured us in at least one meeting that the system will be funded “until the end of 2024.” In other words, just a few months after the end of the Olympics. What happens after that? When we contacted France 24, the government authorities had no comment on the end date of the floodgates or whether they would be extended beyond the end of the year.
Note from a government department confirming the authorities’ strategy for this summer
The evacuation of homeless people from the Paris region to other parts of France also allows public bodies to reoccupy sites at a later date, especially in areas designated by the authorities as “black” or “red” for the Olympics.
This is what happened with the Charles de Gaulle bridge between the Austerlitz and Lyon stations – this area will be part of the protective perimeter around the Seine during the opening ceremony. The street camp set up under this bridge was evacuated last February, after which street furniture such as stones and railings were installed in the same place. “There is a real strategy of occupying public space to avoid any relocation in the run-up to the Games,” says Paul Alausi. Anti-homeless furniture is placed right under the bridge to prevent people from pitching a tent, taking shelter from the elements.”
When asked about this, the Paris City Council replied that “Parisian public space is not under the sole management of the City of Paris. Various players manage parts of the public space, and some of them install such furniture despite our opposition.”
Among these players is the platform at Austerlitz station, owned by Haropa Port, a public institution. In early March, Haropa Port admitted to the Huffington Post that it had installed this street furniture “to limit the re-installation of tents” in order to “keep the waterfronts clean” and “avoid setting up temporary camps in flood-prone areas”. Thus, Haropa Harbour is in no way officially linked to the upcoming Olympics.
However, within other government departments there is a black and white link between the organisation of the Olympics and the solution to the problem of illegal overnight campers. Such is the case with a memorandum from the regional and inter-ministerial housing department of Seine-Saint-Denis (Drihl), excerpts of which have been made available to France 24. The memorandum was emailed to the departments’ union teams last March.
In this document, Drihl 93 defines a “framework for mobilisation during the 2024 Olympic Games”. Claiming that “mobilisation” to prepare for the Games has been underway “since 2023”, the union states that “these preparations relate in particular to ’emergency accommodation and social surveillance’ activities”.
Among other things, this includes “the identification of ‘buffer sites’ […] that can be rapidly mobilised during the 2024 Olympic Games to provide shelter for a significant number of people”. In particular, the use of sports halls is mentioned. The need to “identify those without overnight accommodation in areas close to Olympic venues” is also emphasised in order to “organise care for them in structures adapted to their situation before the start of the Olympic Games”.
To meet these needs, Drihl 93 details the introduction of a “special duty system JOP 2024” of six agents for the period from July 4 to September 9 – in addition to the normal duty system. The Decentralised Division of the Ministry of Housing did not respond to our requests when we approached it for comment on this memorandum.
