This April, 27-year-old Abdelkarim was forced to leave his home in the Paris suburb of Île-Saint-Denis — a decrepit squat inhabited by more than 300 migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees like himself. “There were about 200 police. They told everybody: ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go’,” recalls Abdelkarim, a native of Sudan, who has lived in France for the last three years. “They stopped buses next to the front door, and people got onto the buses.”
The buses took residents off to a slew of temporary shelters as far away as Toulouse. Abdelkarim was sent to a hotel in the town of Épinay-sur-Orge in the outer suburbs of Paris — though with a stay limited to just 15 days. “Two weeks later, we were on the street,” he says, searching for words in a language he is still learning.
Squats are not an uncommon sight around the French capital — a city whose average real estate prices tripled between 2000 and 2020, and which loses around 12,000 inhabitants every year largely due to its high cost of living. But this particular squat in Île-Saint-Denis — inside the abandoned property of cement producer Unibéton — had the misfortune of being located a quick stroll away from the Olympic Village. When the 2024 Paris Olympics kick off in July, this 52-hectare neighbourhood of glitzy residences will be filled with athletes and team officials — and thanks to the police intervention this year, VIP visitors will likely be spared the sight of migrants.
The prefecture of the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, which carried out the eviction, insisted it had nothing to do with the Olympics. But Faris Youss, a 31-year-old refugee from Chad who leads the activist group Réfugiés autonomes (Autonomous Refugees), rejects the official narrative. “The prefecture doesn’t want to own up to the reality,” Youss tells me. “We had meetings with elected officials from city hall, where it was said: ‘the Olympics are coming soon — you’re going to have to leave here.’”
Abdelkarim, along with dozens of former residents of Unibéton, has since moved to another squat in an industrial zone in the suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, far away from the bright lights of Paris and the Olympic Village. When I visited in late November, I had a glimpse of the alarming conditions of this makeshift residence: a busted ceiling in the stairwell; bedrooms crowded with multiple occupants; limited common space overwhelmed by drying clothes; trash overflowing in dumpsters outside; a slew of space heaters to protect against the looming winter. Abdelkarim, who now sleeps in a roughly 15 square meter room with two other people, says: “The best solution is social housing. In Île-de-France, there’s a lot of people [who want it]. There aren’t many people who can get it.”
It all casts doubt on the notion that the eviction of the squat was somehow beneficial to the residents. “It didn’t resolve any problems in the long-run,” says Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the group Le Revers de la Médaille, a coalition of prominent anti-poverty, migrants’ rights, and affordable housing groups critical of the Olympics. “What it did was cross off a location on the map for the prefecture and disperse 500 refugees across Île-de-France.”
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