A young homeless girl is running up and down between the two rows of tents, holding a teddy bear. She belongs to one of about 60 families sheltering in what was, until recently, an abandoned building on the outskirts of the French capital city.
The families, the vast majority of whom are asylum seekers, have nowhere to go. They sleep in tents in the temporary shelter at night and during the day they wander the streets of Paris.
The preparation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and the resulting massive security operation in the centre of Paris has seen large numbers of homeless people displaced from makeshift camps and common rough sleeping spots, such as walkways under the bridges on the river Seine.
This recently opened shelter, which appears to be a run-down former office building, has up to 130 people sleeping in tents pitched on the floor on a given night.
It is run by Utopia 56, an organisation that works with homeless asylum seekers. Six staff are present overnight, but the organisation does not have the manpower to allow people to stay during the day, so they must leave each morning.
Since last year the French government has been relocating homeless asylum seekers from Paris to other cities and towns, offering them up to three weeks in temporary housing if they agree to move. Many end up drifting back to Paris where they have a support network.
The authorities reject the charge that this policy has any connection to the preparations for the Olympics. However, organisations working with asylum seekers claim the rate of people being bussed out of the city has increased in recent weeks.
Small migrant camps of tents pitched under the bridges along the Seine, the setting of the opening ceremony last week, have been cleared. They were replaced by metal fences and large stone blocks preventing any further tents being pitched. In central Paris on the opening weekend of the Olympics, there were still some rough sleepers lying in doorways of side streets.
The attempt to push homeless people from the centre of the city has made it harder for voluntary organisations to reach the vulnerable cohort.
One of these groups, L’Assiette Migrante, which provides hot meals to the homeless, meets each Sunday in a community centre in northern Paris.
There are two large pots of food on the boil, which will fill about 145 plastic containers to distribute that evening. “We have a very, very simple goal, to make good hot meals once a week and that’s it. We’re not pretending to do more than that,” says one of the volunteers, David Clougher.
“Our volunteers come from just about everywhere, most of them are French but then we have people from Afghanistan, we have refugees who have their status who also work with us,” he says. Clougher, a producer from Paris who has an Irish-American father, has been volunteering with the organisation for four years.
Staging the Olympics blinded politicians to the “loose ends”, such as what would happen to homeless asylum seekers during the games. “The people in the street they don’t care about sport, I mean I’m sure they would love to play football or watch a game too, but this is not the first thing they have on their minds unfortunately,” Clougher says.
The group packs the containers of curry and rice into old food delivery rider bags and set off. Three young men who are volunteering with the Malaysian Olympic team in Paris are helping out on the food run.
“We will not be able to distribute where we usually do, along the Seine, along the canal,” Clougher explains. Recently, the group was only able to hand away 40 meals one evening in a spot where they would usually distribute 150. The homeless people who have been displaced by the Olympics feel like they are being kicked around “like a ball”, he says.
The first two meals of the night are handed out to two people asking for spare change while the group is in transit on the metro.
The volunteers set up a table near Place de la Nation park, where homeless families have been told to gather. Several mothers come up with children for a dinner, which is handed out with a piece of cake and a cup of bissap, a sweet traditional African drink. Families, some carrying belongings in luggage bags, eat together on nearby benches.
After everybody is fed about half of the food is left over, so the group decides to drop the remaining meals into the shelter run by Utopia 56, located in a western suburb of Paris.
Marwan Taiebi, who manages the temporary shelter, says there has been a serious “social cleansing” of Paris in the year leading up to the Olympics. Homeless asylum seekers and other rough sleepers had been pushed out of sight. He criticises the attitude that “all the city has to be very clean for the world”. As he talks, more families with children arrive for the night. Increasingly the most vulnerable have been left in a “status of nowhere to go”, Taiebi says.
[ ‘We take a different approach to policing’: On the beat with the gardaí in ParisOpens in new window ]
The charity has an agreement with the owner of the previously vacant building, allowing them to use it as a shelter until the end of September. They are trying to extend the arrangement. If they can’t, the homeless families sleeping here will have to move on again.
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