The Guardian 31 January, 2007
France’s homeless step up struggle
Protests by France’s working people are taking place against the intensified efforts of big capital to drive down their living standards.
Their struggles include the successful fight to reject the neo-liberal European Constitution, the rebellion of the poor in the suburbs of Paris and other cities, and the successful movement to defeat laws which aim to make labour, particularly youth labour, more "flexible" and exploitable.
Homelessness in France has deep roots in the socio-economic system. Today, after nearly three decades of privatisation and "free trade", 7.5 million people are unemployed or underemployed out of a population of 63.4 million. The unemployment rate is particularly high among young people.
Unemployment is the leading cause of what the French call "sans domicile fixe", or "without fixed housing".
According to conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, "There are approximately 20,000 homeless in France, and around 100,000 people are living in unacceptable housing." The French Institute of Statistics reports that the number of people without fixed housing is 86,000, of which 8 percent, or about 7,000, are living on the streets.
According to non-governmental organisations defending the rights of the homeless the situation is much worse. The Abbé Pierre Foundation says 3.2 million people are either homeless or living in very bad conditions. Among the homeless are whole families, including many sole-parent women and their children.
The problem is aggravated by a large amount of vacant housing. In Paris alone there are at least 400,000 empty houses or apartments belonging to pension funds, banks, insurance companies, the state, the city, the Catholic Church and speculators.
These houses and apartments are kept vacant deliberately to force up rents which have risen by 85 percent between 2000 and 2006. Under these conditions it is virtually impossible for the poor to find decent housing at a fair renal.
The current struggle began with the decision of some housing activists to sleep outdoors in solidarity with the homeless and to create a new aid association, the "Children of Don Quixote". Other organisations sprang up as well, including the Right to Housing, the Committee of the Homeless and the Call of the Without.
Using the Internet and working effectively with the press, the groups set up a camp of 400 homeless on Concorde Square in Paris on December 2. They were quickly (and repeatedly) driven off the square by the police.
Undeterred, they pitched 3,000 red nylon tents in the French capital, mostly along the Saint-Martin Canal, and hundreds of tents in other cities — Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille, Marseille, Strasbourg and Grenoble. The tents raised the public profile of the homeless in a dramatic way.
The movement wrote a manifesto declaring that all residents of France should have access to adequate housing. Popular support for this demand was so strong that after only two weeks the government (keeping in mind that the presidential elections are at hand) announced an increase of up to 27,000 beds in shelters for the homeless and declared its willingness to consider implementing a more far-reaching plan to address the problem in 2008!
France needs bold government measures like the requisition of vacant housing owned by speculators and other property holding organisations, and a return to the pre-neoliberal policies of the massive construction of public housing, rent control, the official recognition of housing as a right (as is the case with health care and education), a social plan to combat poverty, a plan to redistribute the wealth and the creation of public sector jobs.