The Paris Olympics Has Launched a War on the Poor

Alauzy is referring to so-called “SAS reception centers,” 10 temporary housing programs located far from Olympic Paris in cities like Strasbourg, Lyon, and Marseille. Unhoused people in Paris are loaded onto buses by police and sent to these makeshift locations, where they receive shelter and food for a few weeks. While the French government says these centers are supposed to help process asylum claims and to speed up the paperwork process, one Paris-area lawyer called the system “an antechamber to deportation.”

The pace at which unhoused people–including numerous migrants who have fled violence back home–have been scooped off the streets of Paris is bracing. A research study carried out by Le Revers de La Médaille revealed that over the past year more than 12,500 vulnerable people were forcibly removed from the streets of Paris. This amounted to a nearly 39 percent uptick over the previous year. French officials have denied that these displacements are linked to the Paris 2024 Games. However, an e-mail from a government official specializing in housing stated that the goal of these mass expulsions from squats and encampments was to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and remove them before the Olympics began.

One striking example of displacement occurred at the Maison des Métallos, a building owned by the City of Paris. There, around 150 homeless and unaccompanied minor migrants were squatting to keep out of the elements. Among them was 16-year-old Fousseni Kanté, who had fled violence in his home country of Chad. As Phineus James reported in The Dial, Kanté followed the rules and “applied for asylum as an unaccompanied minor.” But “when his claim was rejected because the state did not recognize his birth certificate, he ended up on the streets.” When the City of Paris moved to expel squatters at the Maison des Métallos, the community fought back. A placard outside read: “These are grave times. No housing, no Olympics. We’re staying in Paris.” By early July, the city finally agreed to house the migrants in numerous gymnasiums spanning the city.

Last week, we visited the Maison des Métallos. The building’s makeover was unmistakable. The space where scores of migrant youth spread their sleeping pads had been replaced by a fancy exhibition designed to spotlight Tokyo as a tourist destination. Free samples of sake flowed. Exquisite glass cups were being sold for nearly €400. Glossy exhibits celebrated Japanese manga and Godzilla. We asked one of the Japanese hosts whether she was aware that before their arrival, this was a last-ditch safe space for young African migrants. “I’ve heard,” she said. “But I didn’t see them.”

Activists in Paris have fought valiantly against the injustices that are built into the Olympics. Their efforts have been complicated by members of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, who have either failed to be good-faith partners or who have outright withheld information. French National Assembly member Aurélie Trouvé, who represents a district in Seine-Saint-Denis, an area of the city deeply affected by the Games, told us, “The whole Olympic system is opaque and unaccountable,” adding, “Unfortunately, as members of Parliament, we have very few levers or resources to track the impacts of the Olympics on the people, on our cities, on our ecosystems.”

This lack of accountability was very much on the mind of Médecins du Monde outreach worker Brunnhilde Chellian. During a brief break from our maraude, she told us that while Paris Olympic organizers plowed loads of money and rhetoric into security and sustainability, they failed to do the same for the social component of the Games: Paris authorities, she said, “didn’t try at all.” Chellian lamented this “missed opportunity,” adding that “the people in the streets” have been left behind.

“The hypergentrified city keeps the most marginalized out of its territory,” France-based writer Cole Stangler notes in his book Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light. This dynamic has been turbocharged in Olympic Paris. It breaks up families. It uproots people’s lives. And it is cruel. One reporter was overheard saying that there weren’t any compelling off-the-field stories at this year’s Olympics.

Actually, there are 12,500. But you have to want to look.

Around midnight, as we packed our bags and prepared to walk back to the Médecins du Monde van, Abdishakur had wedged himself between two tents where, amid the hustle and sirens of Olympic Paris, he performed his Islamic prayers. Behind him was a wall bearing the ubiquitous purple signage for the Paris 2024 Olympics. The wall might as well have been surrounded by barbed wire.

Paris will almost certainly be remembered as a successful Olympic site. Such recollections, however, will leave out those who suffered under its weight. They will ignore that one measure of “success” for politicians and Olympic organizers will have required the cruel disappearance of people like Abdishakur.

As Los Angeles readies for the 2028 Olympics, California’s unhoused people are already being subjected to an appalling agenda of displacement. We need to shine light on the social crimes of Olympic Paris now, or they will be replicated on our own shores.