One year after the Olympic Games, the situation of homeless people in the Paris region continues to deteriorate

For Awa (not her real name), the year following the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games was particularly trying. At the end of September 2024, the single, undocumented mother was ordered to leave the emergency accommodation hotel in Goussainville (Val-d'Oise) where she and her newborn son had been staying eighteen months earlier. Despite the child's significant health problems, she was subsequently housed for only periods of one week to one month, calling 115, the emergency number for the homeless.

"When I had nothing, I slept at friends' houses, changing rooms often. It's not easy with a little one," she describes. In the spring, she was welcomed into a classroom with four other mothers and their children, in a former school roughly converted by the Paris City Hall. A legal appeal then allowed her to obtain long-term accommodation in a hotel.

"I really believed that with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, we would succeed in changing the situation of the homeless. But things continue to get worse," regrets Paul Alauzy, who was the spokesperson for the Revers de la médaille. This collective, bringing together around a hundred solidarity associations, mobilized intensely, nine months before the Games and during, without managing to prevent what it called "social cleansing" : the inhabitants of squats and camps were subjected to mass evictions, with accommodation offered for no more than a few days, except during the Olympic Games.

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