Twenty-two left-wing mayors, including Anne Hidalgo or Martine Aubry, challenge President Emmanuel Macron on homeless families, in an open letter published by The JDD. “We do not resign ourselves to the social distress that we see every day”, write these elected officials, stressing that “this winter is particularly worrying because it combines several factors of weakening of people already in a situation of great vulnerability ” .
The letter is also signed by the mayors of Rennes Nathalie Appéré, Nantes Johanna Rolland, Rouen Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, and the environmental mayors of Strasbourg Jeanne Barseghian, Lyon Gregory Doucet, Bordeaux Pierre Hurmic, or Grenoble Eric Piolle.
Left-wing elected officials make seven proposals “to be deployed urgently throughout the national territory”, and undertake to “fully mobilize” for their implementation. They are thus asking for “an emergency plan for the care of all children and their families without a solution”.
Ability to requisition empty buildings
They propose to generalize the annual count of the number of people forced to sleep on the street, to adopt “a programming and planning law” for accommodation places, “in a logic of territorial solidarity”, with the possibility of requisitioning empty buildings and a financial penalty mechanism; to “remove the financial obstacles to the production of affordable housing and social housing” by simultaneously upgrading housing aid.
The elected officials also wish to allow the regularization of people “long-term settled on the national territory”, and the opening of “first reception centers distributed throughout the territory for people coming to seek refuge in France”. They still propose the organization of States General of food aid.
330,000 homeless people in France
In its annual report presented this week, the Abbé-Pierre Foundation estimates the number of homeless people in France at 330,000. That is 30,000 more than the previous year, and an increase of around 130% compared to 2012.
A few months after his first election as head of state in 2017, Emmanuel Macron declared that he no longer wanted to see “anyone in the streets, in the woods, by the end of the year”. “The first battle: to house everyone with dignity. I want emergency accommodation everywhere. I don’t want any more women and men in the streets.