The administration of French President Emmanuel Macron is reportedly loading homeless immigrants onto buses by the thousands and shipping them out of Paris ahead of the Olympics.
Some of the relocated immigrants said they were falsely promised homes in other cities to lure them onto the buses.
Macron’s problem is that the Olympic Village was constructed in the notoriously shabby, overcrowded, and crime-ridden Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Le Monde described the site of the village as a “cluster of former industrial wastelands” renovated at staggering expense during the six-year construction of the Olympic Village.
The village itself was touted as a marvel of “sustainable” development, with over 2,800 housing units, 80,000 square meters of office space, and enough shops and parks to accommodate some 24,000 athletes and support personnel during the Games.
One of the chief design goals was to allow athletes to sleep, dine, and relax within minutes of their training facilities. Another goal was to meet the strict demands of the Paris Climate Accords — which, among other things, requires a generous allocation of ground space to parks, fountains, and pools. Extensive use of low-carbon and recycled construction materials was mandated.
French officials clearly hoped the $1.85 billion poured into the Olympic Village would revitalize the surrounding neighborhood, transforming “no-go zones” into “welcome zones,” as Seine-Saint-Denis Mayor Mathieu Hanotin put it to the left-wing New York Times (NYT) in February.
“The nearby stock of dilapidated social housing is being revamped. New roads, bridges, cycling paths, parks and schools are being added. There is also the promise of jobs and training for locals in a region dogged by stubborn unemployment. Only one question looms over the immense ambition: Will it work?” the New York Times asked.
The answer, so far, seems to be “not really.” The NYT glumly reported on Thursday that French officials have resorted to simply shoveling the huge numbers of homeless immigrant men living around the Olympic Village onto buses and carting them off to other towns, where they can remain discreetly invisible during the Olympics.
Even more glumly, the NYT acknowledged that the French government is lying about sweeping the homeless off the streets. French officials claimed the busing was a voluntary program to move the homeless into spiffy new dormitories that just happen to be nowhere near the Olympic Village, but the NYT reviewed an email from a government housing official who explicitly said his instructions were to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and get them out of town.
This was a tall order because Paris currently has about 100,000 homeless people and roughly a third of the population of Seine-Saint-Denis are immigrants. Some of the relocated homeless said they were tricked into getting on the buses with false promises of long-term housing. Others said they were advised by lawyers to stay away from the relocation buses because they might be deported if they climbed aboard voluntarily.
The NYT sent reporters to shadow some of the migrant buses and discovered they were not, in fact, taking willing and eager migrants to fresh new long-term housing projects in other cities. Most of the men evicted from the Olympic Village area found the shelters in other cities completely filled, and there were even fewer opportunities for employment than in Paris.
In a grim echo of President Joe Biden’s migrant disaster in the United States, other cities in France complained they did not have the resources to take care of the thousands of migrants evicted from Paris. Some dejected migrants tried to return to Paris only to find their squats had been taken by others or locked down by the authorities, so they resorted to breaking into shelters and other buildings.
“The city says they don’t want to see tents and homeless people on the streets during the Olympics, but we’re not delinquents. They want to send us away to clean up Paris, but what will we do in the countryside? It’s not a solution,” a young migrant from Guinea named Alseny told the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) on Friday.
Alseny said he was one of about 400 migrants rounded up by police in March, bused to a gymnasium in Paris, and told they would be relocated to temporary shelters in France to get them out of town during the Olympics. City officials claimed they were being evacuated due to risk of flooding along the banks of the Seine.
CSM noted that Paris is only the latest Olympic city to sweep inconvenient homeless people and migrants off the streets to put on a good show, with vague promises that the bountiful income from the Olympics would help to create more jobs and provide better housing later. It never seems to work out that way:
Ahead of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver authorities created a network of temporary shelters; they were heavily criticized for the way they kept the homeless out of sight. And one year later, those people were back on the street, says Dr. Kennelly. Apartments constructed for the Olympic Village, intended to provide affordable housing post-Games, have since become too expensive for low-income renters. London experienced a similar fate in 2012 with its East London revamp and its own Olympic Village, whose low-income ambitions have not been realized.
“There is this naivete on the part of authorities, that we can build more housing and somehow it will magically work out,” says Paul Watt, a visiting professor in the department of sociology at the London School of Economics. “But it’s just spinning politics.”
A French nonprofit called Utopia 56 angrily denounced what it called the “social cleansing” of Paris in April. The group said that contrary to official promises, no “lasting accommodation solution” was provided for many of the city’s relocated homeless people.
“The people affected by the social cleansing provisions are numerous, the need for access to social services and support is constant. If Paris wants to be magnificent this summer, this cannot be done to the detriment of the most precarious,” Utopia 56 said.