The Displacement Machine
How the Olympics exacerbated the housing crisis in Paris.
JULY 16, 2024
Early on the morning of April 17, news began to circulate throughout the squat in Vitry-sur-Seine, an industrial suburb of Paris: The police were on their way. Squad cars started to line the street outside of the four-story abandoned office building, which was home to as many as 450 migrants and asylum-seekers. Resigned, the residents began to bring their belongings into the courtyard. Strollers, suitcases and a toddler-size motorcycle were strewn across the pavement.
Many had lived here since May 2021, when the squat opened — a last-ditch solution to the housing crisis plaguing France, where the waitlist for social housing nears 2 million people, state-run emergency housing centers are overwhelmed and homelessness has more than doubled in the last 10 years.
She had been living in the informal dwelling for three years, unable to find affordable housing in Paris despite doing odd jobs in kitchens and other restaurant work.
Now — exactly 100 days before the opening ceremony of the much-awaited 2024 Paris Olympics — the French state was making good on an eviction notice dating back to June 2021 and emptying the squat, the largest in France.
While the building, located about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to the southeast of Paris, is not near any Olympics infrastructure, the Olympic torch will be carried through the area as part of the opening ceremony. Housing advocates, social workers and elected officials say they see the eviction as part of a broader pattern of the government cleaning up the Paris area ahead of the Olympics by dismantling informal settlements and reshuffling vulnerable populations to other regions of France. For some of the residents, this was the second, third or even fourth time they had been evicted.
Fnan, who emigrated from Eritrea (and whose name, like others in the piece, has been changed to protect her identity), was lugging a suitcase to the courtyard of the building. She had been living in the informal dwelling for three years, unable to find affordable housing in Paris despite doing odd jobs in kitchens and other restaurant work. Joseph, 26, had lived in the squat for about six months. An electrician by trade, he had traveled through nearly 10 countries to reach France, fleeing war in his native South Sudan. He wore a red beanie against the April cold and carried a large suitcase filled with his belongings. Pita, 18, from Sudan, was waiting outside of the building with her parents, who had been living there for several months and struggled with French. Despite her father’s work contract, the family had been refused social housing; Pita was crashing on her brother’s couch in Paris, and her parents had been staying at the Vitry-sur-Seine squat while they figured out their housing situation.
One by one the residents were processed. Those with ongoing asylum claims or work contracts in the Paris region — about 90 in total — were given provisional housing in the area, either in gyms or hotels. One hundred were temporarily housed in Val-de-Marne, where Vitry-sur-Seine is located. About 100 more boarded long-distance buses to Bordeaux and the Loire Valley to be housed in temporary reception centers in the SAS sytem, part of an effort launched in April 2023 by the French government to ease pressure on the Paris region by resettling vulnerable populations outside of the capital.
Evictions of informal living spaces in the Île-de-France region — which includes Paris and its suburbs — doubled over the past four years.
“Great attention was paid to the social aspect of this operation,” the prefect of Val-de-Marne wrote in a communiqué. “Thus, a detailed examination of individual situations was carried out, at the request of the state, by France Terre d’Asile [a state-run charity], which made it possible to identify support adapted to each of the situations encountered.”
To Fnan, though, the approach felt uncomfortably familiar. “They say they will give us a house, but they always lie like a child,” she texted me after the eviction.
By late morning, the outdoor gate to the Vitry-sur-Seine squat had been closed and padlocked and barbed wire had been strung above the fence. It joined the growing list of informal settlements, squats, tent cities, metro grates, tunnels and park benches that had been cleared of their inhabitants by French police in recent weeks. In the first four months of 2024, police evacuated 20 such sites — more than in all of 2022.
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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.
“There’s been an acceleration of evictions, be it of squats, camps or emergency housing,” said Camille Gardesse, a sociology professor at the Paris School of Urban Planning and coauthor of the book L’exil à Paris: 2015-2020 (Exile in Paris: 2015-2020). “The basic idea is, ‘We’re going to empty Paris because the Olympics are coming.’”
Some people have been caught in a whirlpool of displacement. The population of the squat ballooned after another informal dwelling, called Unibéton, located right across from the future athletes village, was evicted in April 2023. Others came to the Vitry-sur-Seine squat after being kicked out of a squat in the nearby suburb of Thiais. Then, in their new location, they were evicted again.
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.
A spokesperson from the prefecture of Île-de-France contended that the evictions were not related to the Olympics. “We’re saturated, Olympics or no Olympics,” they said, adding that the region had opened 300 long-term housing solutions for chronically homeless Parisians as part of the Olympics’ social legacy, about 100 of which had been filled, and increased its emergency housing budget to address demand.
Paul Alauzy, a health worker at Médecins du Monde, said he saw the opposite: more evictions, more displacement, less access to resources and solidarity for the city’s most vulnerable populations.
Alauzy was present as dozens of squats and informal settlements across the Île-de-France were evicted, starting in the spring of 2023 with Unibéton. Smaller camps that appeared in their wake — in parks, outside of train stations and along the quays of the Seine — were then quickly and often violently dismantled. In June, 250 migrants living under an elevated metro track in the Paris neighborhood of Stalingrad were evicted, with about half sent outside of Paris. Two months later, 500 migrants were evicted from the same spot (about a fifth of them were sent to an SAS center in Marseille).
“We began to see this system being put in place,” Alauzy said. “This worried us tremendously.”
Aminata Konaté remembers the day she learned that she would have to vacate the room she had rented since 2020. Konaté, 34, lived in the Maison des F&Es, a fleabag hotel near the Sacré Coeur in Paris’ 18th arrondissement that was converted into temporary housing for immigrant single mothers in 2020 at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and run by the charity Basiliade. In January, the owner of the hotel called an emergency meeting. The building, the women were told, was no longer up to code and would have to be evacuated.
The Olympics were never mentioned, but to Konaté, the link was clear. “It’s not just because it wasn’t responding to norms — in reality it was the Olympics,” she said.
Konaté began organizing the mothers to protest the eviction. “34 families evicted. All this for the Olympics?” read one banner the women hung outside the building during a protest. The hotel was unflinching: The government would rehouse the residents by the end of March.
When I met Konaté in late April, she was living in a 23-square-meter (28-square-yard) apartment with her 4-year-old son in the 12th arrondissement, about 30 minutes by metro to his kindergarten. Other women were not so lucky, she said. Some were rehoused in industrial zones far from Paris; others were given apartments with mold. She showed me videos of one apartment where the shower curtains were stained, the windows smudgy.
The hotel, meanwhile, was renovated. When I called in May, I was told that the hotel was “under construction” and would begin accepting reservations in June. When I called again in July, it was nearly fully booked. (Basiliade did not respond to multiple emails and text messages requesting comment.)
“The Olympics, no question, are a gentrification machine,” Boykoff said. “We’re talking about cracking up communities that have often been there for generations and sanitizing the space to make it safe for capital.”
Jade Lindgaard, the author of Paris 2024: Une ville face à la violence Olympique (Paris 2024: A city facing Olympic violence), has described a similar phenomenon in Paris’ working-class suburbs to the north, where most of the Olympic events will take place. In 2021, a dorm for migrant workers in Saint-Ouen-sur Seine was gutted to make way for the Olympic Village. That was followed by the 2023 Unibéton eviction and the eviction in 2024 of another 200 residents from a row of industrial buildings in L’Île-Saint-Denis, which, former residents told me, will be converted into offices for startups. (In total, four families were housed for three days in hotels in Saint-Denis.)
“The immense majority of the people dislodged for the mega-event are people of color: French families of sub-Saharan or North African descent; migrant workers and their children; asylum-seekers and those who have had their asylum claims rejected; documented and undocumented migrants,” Lindgaard writes.
It’s a pattern Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University and the author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, has seen repeated in host cities around the world. A former professional soccer player, Boykoff has studied how the Olympics reshape host cities: favela residents displaced from their homes in Rio, homeless Atlantans given one-way bus tickets out of town, nearly 1.5 million people forced out of their homes in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“The Olympics, no question, are a gentrification machine,” Boykoff said. “We’re talking about cracking up communities that have often been there for generations and sanitizing the space to make it safe for capital.”
The 2024 Paris Games were supposed to be better. Ads across France highlight the commitment to converting infrastructure such as the athletes village and the media village in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis into social housing after the Olympics. “This is the heritage of the Games,” the ads read.
But as Lindgaard notes, of the 325 units of the athletes’ village that will be converted into housing after the Games, just 50 — or about 15 percent — will be reserved for current residents of L’Île-Saint-Denis, one of the poorest communes in France.
That has galvanized some groups to raise demands for decent housing. Outside of the Maison des Métallos, a community theater in Paris’ hip 11th arrondissement owned by the city and squatted by unaccompanied minors experiencing homelessness, a sign read: “These are grave times. No housing, no Olympics. We’re staying in Paris.”
When I met him in early May, Fousseni Kanté was listening to music in the entryway of the theater, which had been converted into a food pantry. Kanté, 16, fled his native Chad due to family violence. As he tells it, he crossed Algeria and Morocco by foot before embarking on a boat across the Mediterranean and ultimately crossing the Spanish border into France. Upon arriving in Paris, he applied for asylum as an unaccompanied minor. When his claim was rejected because the state did not recognize his birth certificate, he ended up on the streets.
“At first it was very difficult because I wasn’t able to handle sharing a tent with two people, in the cold,” Kanté said. “It’s a life experience that makes you confront reality. It shows you the real image of how things are in France.”
With the help of aid organizations, including Utopia 56, roughly 100 young migrants like Kanté began to occupy the theater in early April, sleeping on twin-size mattresses. Soon, as others were evicted from tents along the Seine and parks throughout Paris, the group of squatters ballooned to 150 young people.
The Olympics “reinforces a tendency that has existed for a long time,” she said. “There are not enough emergency housing solutions, not enough affordable apartments, especially in the Paris area.
Later that month, they organized a protest in front of the Maison des Métallos, demanding a long-term housing solution as well as access to educational resources and a recognition of their status as minors. “No housing, no Olympics; no health, no Olympics; no school, no Olympics; no transportation, no Olympics: These are our demands,” Kanté said. “All of the media in the world, all of the cameras are focused on Paris. It’s time to make ourselves visible. Our only weapon is the streets.”
In a communiqué, the city of Paris called for “an immediate treatment by the state of the concerned populations,” noting that the French state has the legal right to requisition empty buildings to house vulnerable populations.
On July 3, authorities rehoused the roughly 230 inhabitants of the Maison des Métallos in several gyms across Paris, where they have asked to stay for the duration of the Olympics, according to the collective representing the minors.
To Gardesse, the urban studies professor, the situation is symptomatic of a larger problem with France’s emergency housing system, which has prioritized Band-Aid responses over longer-term solutions. The Olympics “reinforces a tendency that has existed for a long time,” she said. “There are not enough emergency housing solutions, not enough affordable apartments, especially in the Paris area. The closure of emergency housing centers, the general rise in rents and the perpetual state of flux are aggravating the situation.”
Since 2023, when the SAS system was launched across France, the Île-de-France region has closed down roughly 3,000 emergency housing spots, ostensibly to clear up hotels for visitors during the Olympics. Meanwhile, social housing rents have increased faster than household earnings, and a new law, passed in July 2023, criminalized opening up new squats.
To Alauzy, at Médecins du Monde, the lack of housing solutions is by design. “All of the community hubs in the [Paris] region are disappearing, so there will be nothing to show during the Olympics,” he said. “The region will have been cleansed.”
After the expulsion in Vitry-sur-Seine, Alauzy said he worried that many former squatters would be pushed into even more precarious situations. For most of the former residents of the Vitry-sur-Seine squat I met, their temporary housing solutions were short-lived.
While Pita and her parents were still living in a gym north of Paris as they awaited a housing placement, Joseph, the electrician from South Sudan, was told that since he didn’t have a work contract, he couldn’t be provided temporary housing, despite his refugee status. He and a friend had set up a tent in the Gare de Lyon train station and were sleeping there as he continued to take French classes in Saint-Denis. “These people, they tell me, ‘You go outside.’ I say, ‘OK, no problem, I will go and live in the street,’” he told me by voice message. “Everything will be OK one day, one time.”
In early May, Fnan, from Eritrea, spoke with me via WhatsApp video from a gymnasium in northern Paris where about 40 women slept on rows of bunk beds. Two weeks later, she sent a picture of her suitcases on the ground outside of the temporary housing center. She had once again been evicted. “French humanity,” she wrote.
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
