Hosting of homeless: a massive and growing investment

The use of overnight stays in hotel increases due to lack of sustainable housing. In Ile-de-France, 21% of the hotel capacity are mobilized.

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The homeless housing policy, massive, is it on the right track? For the sociologist Julien Damon, author of a study commissioned by the Institute of Hautes Studies for Action in Housing (Idheal), published on Tuesday, November 9, “The Accommodation [Interim] of Homeless Persons has become, little by little, for fifteen years, a central component of housing policy, whether it is the supply, budget, the political interest and even energy and the time it devotes to the Ministry housing “. The displayed priority, however, is rather sustainable relocation, translated, since 2017, in the national strategy “for housing first”.

Accommodation financing, for example, tripled between 2006 and forecasts for 2022, from just over 1.095 billion euros to € 3 billion. The number of seats quadrupled from 75,000 to 300,000 in the same period. Today, 107,000 of these beds are intended for asylum seekers and integrated into the national host system, under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior, while the general accommodation, managed by the interdepartmental delegation to the Accommodation and access to housing (DIHAL), total more than 200,000 beds. “There is no place, in fact, to distinguish these two types of structures since they welcome the same audiences, many asylum seekers and refugees being hosted in general structures,” said Mr. Damon .

The state’s effort amplified during the health crisis. Then the Minister of Housing, Emmanuelle Wargon, decided, in October, to the great relief of associations, to perpetuate 43,000 seats temporarily for shelters facing COVID-19, half in emergency centers, half in Hotels. The most striking, in the record drawn up by Mr. Damon, is the number of hotel nights, spent 9,000 per day, in 2006, at 70,000, in 2020. However, again, the objectives advertised, both under. François Hollande’s presidency that under the Emmanuel Macron, were to reduce the use of hotels that do not offer the desirable living and social environment for the insertion of families.

The phenomenon is shouting in Ile-de-France, where 33% of the accommodation places are in hotel, so much so that 21% of the hotel capacity of the entire region are mobilized for this purpose and a client in five hotels are homeless.

costly policy

This accommodation policy, “one of the most generous in Europe”, relieved M. Damon, is expensive, since a place of accommodation returns to 1,250 euros per month, when the rent of a Perennial housing would not exceed 800 euros. Since 2006, successive ministers have been trying to mobilize social landlords to welcome homeless people, and it works partly because the number of those who access a real dwelling increased from 72,000 in 2018 to 80,000 in 2019, then 82,000 in 2020 and 46 000 just in the first half of 2021. “It transforms the vocation of the social park, which was to accommodate the modest and medium classes, in reception of very disadvantaged persons, attests. Damon, with the difficulty that people without papers or status do not have access to the HLM. “

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/Media reports.