Article source: "Paris 2024 : le maire d'Orléans dénonce l'arrivée "en catimini" de centaines de sans-abri dans sa ville en provenance de Paris avant les JO", franceinfo (Radio France), 25/03/2024.
Just a few months before the beginning of the Olympics in Paris, Serge Grouard, the mayor of Orléans, a former member of the conservative Les Républicains party, condemned the surreptitious displacement of hundreds of homeless people to his city, about 100 miles south of the French capital. Speaking in an interview on local radio station France Bleu Orléans, he demanded an explanation from the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. Grouard claimed that “since May 2023, every three weeks, a coach departing from Paris has been ferrying undocumented migrants with no fixed abode to Orléans.”
“All of this is being done on the sly. It is particularly shocking,” fumed Grouard, arguing that it is not the responsibility of Orléans “to take in the drug users and dealers from la colline du crack” (“Crack Hill”, the name given to an area on the outskirts of Paris where drugs are rife and which has also been home to migrant camps, ed.). He claimed to have carried out his own investigation, but said that when he had asked state officials for clarification, “the answers were elusive, they wouldn’t tell me precisely who was coming and what they were being offered.”
The newly arrived migrants and homeless people stay in hotels for a few weeks, and then they “vanish into thin air,” he claimed, “and that isn’t acceptable, you can’t just offload your problems on us, saying ‘things are not easy in Paris, deal with it’”. He estimates that this represents a total of around 500 new arrivals since 2023. However, Grouard confessed that he could not be absolutely certain that there was a connection with the Olympics.
‘Social Cleansing’
Certain charities share Grouard’s opinion. Over the past year, at the behest of the government, hundreds of people have been displaced from migrant camps or squats in Paris to be relocated in 13 temporary accommodation facilities, outside the Ile-de-France (Greater Paris) region. “Since it was announced that the Olympic Games would be held in Paris, people have been sent out of the region,” confirms Paul Alauzy, a spokesperson for Médecins du Monde, “this is just displacing homeless people who end up in small towns where there is less money, out on the streets, disconnected from their support networks”. And without these support networks or any long-term housing solutions, some of these people even prefer to return to Paris.
Alauzy is also a spokesperson for Le revers de la médaille (“the flip side of the medal”), a collective of over 60 charities denouncing what they consider to be “social cleansing” of the Paris streets, in the runup to the Olympics. For the group, high-profile sporting events create “a proven risk of ‘social cleansing’ of city streets” with the following consequences: “displacement of the homeless, reduced capacity in emergency shelters, help centre closures, cutbacks in food distribution, and so on”.
Only last October, the French government also met with a backlash when it proposed to pay €100 in compensation to students who will be expelled from their university accommodation during the games.
Translated by Pierre Hébert and William Lefever.
Editing by Sam Trainor.