Twenty-two left-wing mayors, including Anne Hidalgo and Martine Aubry (PS), challenge President Emmanuel Macron on homeless families, in an open letter published this Sunday by the JDD.
A “particularly worrying winter”
“We are not resigned to the social unrest we see every day,” these elected officials write.
They all underline that “this winter is especially worrying because it combines several factors that weaken people who are already in a situation of great vulnerability.” They mention in particular “social crises”, “energy and food costs or even “saturation of the emergency shelter system”.
The letter is signed in particular by the PS mayors of Paris Anne Hidalgo, Lille Martine Aubry, 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 from Grenoble Éric Piolle.
7 proposals to deploy “urgently”
Left-wing elected officials make seven proposals “to be urgently deployed throughout the national territory” and pledge to “fully mobilize” for their implementation.
They ask for “an emergency plan for the care of all children and their families without a solution.”
They propose to generalize the annual calculation of the number of people forced to sleep on the street; adopt “a law for the programming and planning” of accommodation places, “in a logic of territorial solidarity”, with the possibility of requisitioning empty buildings and a mechanism of pecuniary sanctions.
But also to “remove financial obstacles to the production of affordable housing and social housing” by simultaneously improving housing assistance; It also wants to allow the regularization of people “established for a long time in the national territory”, and the opening of “first reception centers spread throughout the territory for people who come to seek refuge in France”. They still propose the organization of States General for food aid.
More than 300,000 homeless people
In its annual report presented this week, the Abbé Pierre Foundation puts the number of homeless people in France at 330,000. That’s 30,000 more than the previous year, and an increase of approximately 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 “nobody on the streets, in the woods, at the end of the year.”
“The first battle: to shelter everyone with dignity. I want emergency housing everywhere. I don’t want more women and men on the street”.
Source: BFM TV
