Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has announced that part of the vast 19th-century building housing her administration will be turned over to sheltering up to 100 homeless people per night this winter.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in July he wanted emergency shelters 'everywhere' for homeless migrants by the year's end, but while failing that target, with thousands continuing to sleep rough in cities and woodlands, the government is now focussing on tougher measures to expel migrants and also to prevent them entering the country from Africa.
Funeral costs in France can often be beyond the means of the least well-off and their surviving relatives. In one region an association has teamed up with an insurance company to offer low-cost cover to ensure that the poor can organise a dignified final ceremony. In other areas local associations are naming and shaming local councils in a bid to force them to carry out their legal obligations to provide decent burial arrangements for the most disadvantaged. Mathilde Goanec reports.
Recent official studies estimate that almost 16,000 homeless people in France are in regular employment. The problem is particularly acute in Paris, where the private property market has soared in price and publicly-managed subsidised housing falls far short of demand. Here, Thomas Saint-Cricq interviews five homeless people in and around the capital holding down daytime jobs while living rough, in emergency shelters or squats at night.
More than 8.5 million people in France are in, or face soon falling into, precarious living conditions as the effects of the economic downturn begin to also engulf middle income earners in an ‘unprecedented' housing crisis, warns one of France's leading charitable organizations, the Abbé Pierre foundation, in a report published this month.
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