Paris Olympics: The Homeless and the Challenges Before the Olympic Games
As the world waits for the Summer Olympic games, Paris is addressing homelessness by learning from the experiences of previous host cities.
The high number of homeless in Paris is a serious issue. Recently, there was a follow up to the long awaited Logement d’Abord, which is known as “Housing First” in English. This plan was presented by the minister delegate for housing, Olivier Klein. After being presented, Logement d’Abord was launched in 2017 by President Emmanuel Macron who said he no longer wanted “men and women on the street.”
In the five years since its launch, it has allowed 440,000 homeless people to get access to housing, without having to go through emergency shelters and the long integration process which was previously required.
Following the implementation of this plan, it appears to have successfully moved a majority of the homeless population off the streets and into appropriate housing.
“In 2022, there were approximately 50,000 homeless people housed in hotels nightly in the Ile-de-France region, where Paris is located” according to the Federation of Solidarity Actors, which is a group for local associations and charitable organizations.
When looking back at how countries handled the homeless after the Olympics, many host cities have faced very similar issues with homelessness and how to relocate the homeless appropriately. The situation often appears chaotic.
“More than two million people were displaced between Seoul 1988 and London 2012” says the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions. The Rio Olympics resulted in tens of thousands of people being forced out.
After the Olympic events, evictions continue to be a disturbing tradition for people who live in host cities. After the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Japanese media reports showed that people in host cities faced a grim reality.
“Hundreds of people in central Tokyo were recently given eviction notices even though they had no permanent addresses and nowhere else to go.”
Eviction notices are not the only issue people face in host cities.
“Even after the Olympics are over, development efforts have fed gentrification and rapidly rising property and rental prices, which have driven people in lower-income brackets out of cities in mass second-wave displacements” says The Washington Post.
So, what is Paris trying to do to avoid previous issues?
A new plan has been proposed by French politicians and charities to handle the homelessness crisis before the events. The new plan, which has faced a ton of criticism, gives the homeless population the initiative to leave Paris before the Olympics to free up accommodation.
“Homeless people who voluntarily left Paris or surrounding areas would be housed for three weeks in the temporary regional reception centers, paid for by the state, before being guided towards accommodation in the same region that met their needs” says the housing minister, Olivier Klein.
However, where the homeless are being relocated to is being deemed unfit and a wasteland.
Bruz, a town of 18,000 people near Rennes in Brittany, has been chosen as one place to house the homeless. This location is scheduled to receive 50 people every three weeks and started receiving people since September.
“The ground is polluted by heavy metals and petrol. For us, these are not dignified conditions in which to house people” says Philippe Salmon, the mayor of Bruz.
After the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, the Olympic Village buildings were converted into apartments which are still inhabited today. The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki was the first circumstance where the villages that were created for the Olympics were actually turned into permanent housing.
Since then, Olympic Villages have been renovated and transformed into residential apartments.
However, there is a major flaw with the transformation–the price. A Forbes report studied the Tokyo Olympics and the games’ plans to transform the Olympic Village to affordable housing after the games and related it back to the grim reality the London games faced.
“After the London Games, the East Village was converted into nearly 3,000 new homes along with restaurants, shops and schools in one-time Olympic buildings — today, two-bedroom flats in the former Athletes’ Village are on sale for upwards of $1 million.”
After doing some research, it was discovered that the average price for a home in the East Village today is about £600,000, which is equivalent to 764,000 US dollars. This is by no means affordable housing.
As Paris prepares to welcome athletes and spectators from around the world, the challenge of homelessness continues to linger. But one thing is clear — the true measure of success for the Paris Olympics will not be found by athletes holding medals on the podiums, but in how Paris addresses the needs of the homeless and most vulnerable.
One major question that looms is why do the Olympics have such a terrible record on these issues? The Mayor of Saint-Denis, Henri Lemieux, is trying to shake off the bad image. But then again, so did London and Tokyo prior to the games.
“Paris is promising to do better by locating the village in run down, but accessible St-Denis, and building a new metro station and promising half of this will be socially allocated.”
