#to say nothing of the financial & environmental ramifications which inevitably follow the games which are unavoidably wasteful

[girderednerve]

The French capital faces an unprecedented emergency housing crisis. Paris’ homelessness hotline — the 115 — receives roughly 13,500 calls every day, but only 10 percent of callers are able to get emergency housing. Every evening at 6 p.m., dozens of unhoused people flock to the Hôtel de Ville in central Paris, where the charity Utopia 56 helps match them with Parisians who have a spare bed — but the association is overwhelmed by demand. Meanwhile, evictions of informal living spaces in the Île-de-France region — which includes Paris and its suburbs — doubled over the past four years. The number of unhoused people increased by about 500 in the past year.

The approach of the Olympic Games has exacerbated these trends. Statistics from civil rights groups show a troubling rise in evictions over the past year as the city has prepared for the global event that will bring 14 million tourists to Paris starting in late July. While official numbers on displacement are hard to come by, the Observatory on Evictions from Informal Living Spaces, a research group, counted 138 expulsions in the Île-de-France between April 2023 and May 2024, affecting roughly 12,545 people, an increase of about 40 percent compared with two years prior. A government spokesperson, Christophe Noël du Payrat, told the New York Times that authorities had evicted roughly 5,000 people in the past year, most of them single men.

For this story, I spoke with more than a dozen unhoused or precariously housed Paris residents, as well as charity workers, researchers and public officials. The upcoming Olympics, they all suggested, have provided Paris a neat deadline for accelerating processes of urban renewal — and displacement — that were already underway in an effort to sanitize the city for tourists. The Games, which the International Olympic Committee have hailed as a “new model” that is at once “ambitious, spectacular, open to all, but also more responsible, more sustainable, more supportive and more inclusive,” could have been an opportunity to address chronic homelessness, they lamented. Instead, the city started ramping up evictions.