This January 22, Paris and different French towns are organizing the Night time of Team spirit – a type of citizen motion to rely folks dozing at the streets. This must now not difficult to understand what analysis has proven over the last 40 years: along with the well known determine of homelessness, there are different much less visual sorts of housing lack of confidence and deficient housing.
As of late, increasingly more individuals are excluded from their same old housing. The most recent to be had knowledge dates from 2012 and signifies that the collection of homeless folks higher through 50% between 2001 and 2012: on that date, 81,000 adults, accompanied through 31,000 youngsters, had been homeless in towns with a minimum of 20,000 population in mainland France. Recently, the homeless survey carried out through INSEE in 2025 is used and can permit those figures to be up to date, however the entirety means that the location has worsened additional, as evidenced through our observations at the flooring.
In step with INSEE, an individual is thought of as homeless in the event that they slept the former night time in a spot that’s not meant for housing (they’re then “homeless”), or if they’re cared for through a company that gives “free or low-cost accommodation” (lodge or lodging paid for through an affiliation, room or dormitory in a collective lodging, and many others.). Thus, homelessness is an excessive type of homelessness this is itself a part of the myriad sorts of deficient housing.
Along with those homeless folks, others reside in RVs arrange in campgrounds, squats, third-party properties, transformed vans, unsanitary flats, and many others., all precarious housing eventualities that slip off society’s radar and obtain little media protection.
Thus, the Basis for the Housing of the Inclined estimates in its 2025 file that virtually 4 million folks in France are suffering from most of these sorts of deficient housing, with maximum signs of deficient housing worsening.
“Housing crisis: these French forced to live in a camp” – Document #Cdanslair, 31 January 2024.
Along with the well known determine of the homeless particular person dozing in the street, there are different much less recognizable sorts of housing lack of confidence.
As we way the Night time of Team spirit, which is arranged once a year in Paris and different French towns, it’s price remembering what analysis in this subject has emphasised for 40 years: homelessness is best the top of the iceberg.
If counting operations of folks dwelling in puts now not meant for habitation, and particularly at the streets, are necessary for elevating the attention of voters, they simply permit to acquire very approximate estimates of homelessness and masks a much wider drawback that can’t be diminished to those excessive eventualities, as we will learn on this file (pp. 42-52).
The hidden faces of housing exclusion
Along with the outdated and relatively cartoon determine of the vagabond – a unmarried, white, unemployed and marginalized guy – there also are different faces: insecure employees, girls, every so often accompanied through youngsters, aged individuals who obtain small pensions, people who find themselves discriminated towards as a result of their sexual orientation, scholars, younger individuals who go away and the migrant inhabitants…
Those various kinds of folks have all the time been roughly provide amongst suffering populations, however the normal build up in lack of confidence and loss of inexpensive housing has additional weakened them. Greater than 2.7 million families had been looking ahead to social housing in 2024. On the similar time, best 259,000 housing gadgets had been introduced in 2024, together with 82,000 funded social housing gadgets.
If positive numbers of homelessness are extremely visual, comparable to migrants whose camps are often featured within the media, different sorts of exclusion are extra discrete.
Cops right through the dismantling of a migrant camp close to the Stalingrad metro station in Paris, November 5, 2025. Picture: Bertrand Guai/AFP.
That is the case, as an example, with workers, sufferers of the rising housing disaster, who flip to institutional lodging constructions as a result of they can not in finding lodging in spite of their common revenue.
In 2012, nearly 1 / 4 of the homeless had been hired. This phenomenon creates little noise despite the fact that those folks frequently interact in professions crucial to the functioning of society.
Likewise, homeless girls are much less visual in public areas than their male opposite numbers, as a result of they don’t resemble the vintage determine of the homeless particular person (SDF). When provide there, they don’t settle there and are a lot more cellular for concern of violence: thus they’re very much underestimated in counting operations.
“Sans domicile” surveys display that between 2001 and 2012, the collection of French-speaking homeless girls higher through 45%, from 17,150 in 2001 to 24,930 girls in 2012.
Answers of court-thermists
Confronted with this rising housing lack of confidence, what answers are supplied through public government?
Expanding finances for emergency lodging that gives transient lodging in night time stands or accommodations no doubt represents a snappy repair for the homeless, which, from the standpoint of town councilors, damages the picture of towns, however does now not clear up the issues of those folks.
Relegating essentially the most precarious to the fringes of towns or to housing with out privateness the place it’s unimaginable to settle in the longer term, those non permanent insurance policies, interested in social emergencies, are related to sorts of repression (eviction, anti-begging orders, inhospitable city furnishings) that give a contribution to the lack of confidence and invisibility of populations categorized as “failed.”
That is evidenced through the huge build up in evictions with the assistance of public forces in 2024, the lodging of homeless folks in accommodations an increasing number of far-off from the facilities of city spaces and poorly out there public shipping, or the displacement of homeless folks from Paris right through the 2024 Olympic Video games.
Discontinuous improve
Then again, profound coverage adjustments are had to cope with housing exclusion through addressing its structural reasons. An formidable coverage for the manufacturing and promotion of social housing at low hire ranges is very important to permit low-income families to search out housing with out going during the lengthy means of institutional housing.
The prevention of evictions will have to be promoted, in addition to the law of costs on the actual property marketplace.
It is usually important to make sure higher continuity of care in numerous establishments for help. Particularly fragile populations, who enjoy a couple of difficulties, enjoy early remains in establishments, repeated and a couple of, from social help for youngsters (in 2012, 23% of beneficiaries of homeless improve services and products born in France had been housed in youth, whilst this proportion used to be best about 2% to three% within the normal inhabitants) to paintings integration methods, passing in positive circumstances in psychiatric prisons or health facility circumstances.
Then again, this frequently discontinuous improve does now not supply lasting answers when it comes to housing, employment or well being. In addition they foster a way of rejection that encourages non-enforcement: individuals are entitled to social advantages and help, however don’t practice or now not practice for them.
For those maximum desocialized folks, the coverage of housing first (“Housing First”) or “Home First” in France), which is composed of offering unconditional get entry to to housing and offering social and well being improve, provides convincing effects, however, because of the loss of to be had housing, isn’t sufficiently carried out.
Perceive the issue as a complete
After all, we will have to cope with the migration insurance policies that produce homelessness. As public insurance policies associated with the reception of foreigners are an increasing number of restrictive, and explicit methods are saturated, migrants in finding themselves with no housing answer. Thus, the proportion of foreigners some of the homeless higher considerably, from 38% in 2001 to 53% in 2012.
Addressing housing exclusion in France, as in many nations, calls for reforms in housing coverage up to motion within the social sector, employment and migration coverage. Homelessness finds the rising social inequalities in society and the processes of exclusion that happen thru it. Discovering a technique to this serious problem calls for greater than ever that we are aware of it as a complete, now not restricted to its maximum visual signs.
Pascal Dietrich-Ragon and Marie Lawson-Leroust co-edited The Hidden Face of Deficient Housing. Strange Housing Edge Survey, revealed through INED in September 2025.
