Paris 2024: Macron can’t handle the preparations for Olympic Games Media round-up

Ahead of the Olympic Games to be held in Paris in 2024, France is facing serious difficulties. The world's media point to numerous problems arising in connection with the organization of the largest sporting event, and the recent decision taken by the organizing committee is causing more and more discontent among the public.

Paris is overwhelmed as it will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games three times. In this, it became only the second city (after London) to host the biggest event thrice. However, as visitors and athletes are planning to head to Paris for next year’s Olympics, the exorbitant rise in hotel prices is creating concerning accommodation issues, Caliber.Az reports, citing Essentially Sports.

Thus, hotel prices in Paris have increased more than 3.5 times before the 2024 games. Booking a room in a three-star hotel will now cost about $685 per night, although in July the average price was $178. Prices for four-star hotels for the Olympics period are as high as $953, compared to $266 during normal times.

At the same time, the Paris 2024 Olympic Committee has cancelled thousands of hotel reservations in Châteauroux, according to Paris Beacon reports. The second largest city in the French province of Berri was to host the shooting competition during the Olympics. The reason for the cancellation of hotel bookings was a "significant drop in demand". The decision caused a fuss. Hotel owners in the province are scrambling to find the best solution to fill the vacated rooms. Umih, the main employers' union in the hotel and restaurant sector, whose local branch is headed by Véronique Golon, expressed discontent and described the situation as depressing.

Meanwhile, The Japan Times reports on the mass eviction of asylum seekers and Roma from Parisian squats in the run-up to the Olympics. The article describes Romanian-born Camelia Toldea, who packed her bags to leave an abandoned building where dozens of other Roma live, fearing their squat would be the next in a wave of evictions near the 2024 Paris Olympics venues.

Romanian-born Toldea, her husband and three children are among thousands of migrants, asylum-seekers and Roma caught up in evictions in the north Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis that are aggravating the city's homelessness problem ahead of the Games. This suburb is the poorest department in France. In 2023, at least 60 squats were closed here. At least 3,000 people were affected. According to the squatters, some ended up on the streets of Seine-Saint-Denis and other Paris suburbs, while others were evicted to remote areas of France.

"The Olympic Games are adding additional pressure because there are fewer hotels renting rooms for social cases," said Lea Filoche, the deputy mayor of Paris in charge of housing, citing decisions by some hotels to be ready for an influx of visitors.

Of 32 closed squats for which an address could be located, 13 were within 2 kilometres of a main Olympic site in the 236 square kilometre Seine-Saint-Denis according to the tally.

One — an old cement factory a stone's throw away from the future athletes village and housing some 400 migrants mostly from Sudan and Chad — was closed by police in April. A Roma camp of 700 people behind the North Paris Arena in Villepinte was also shut down, two witnesses said.

From squat to street

The evictions have exacerbated homelessness as the turfed-out residents add to already outsized demand for social housing and state-provided accommodation, Puvilland said.

Deputy Mayor Filoche said she had never seen so many people on the streets in Paris, especially children.

"If they aim to have the Games where we don’t see poverty, then the plan to evict squats is not a good plan — it is stupid; they are evicting people from squats and putting them in the public space," said Filoche, who called on the government to requisition empty buildings, including former hospitals and offices, to house the homeless.

“Unclogging” Paris

Of 19 migrants who said they'd been evicted from four squats in the vicinity of Olympic-related infrastructures or urban development projects between April and August, two had been assigned stable accommodation by the prefecture, but the others were left to themselves and went on to sleep rough or find space in other squats.

Some of the nineteen moved into four other squats in the Paris region, all of which were themselves subsequently evicted or have been handed an eviction notice.

By mid-December, 3,329 people had been transferred from Paris to temporary accommodation lasting three weeks, according to Paris authorities.

Empty promises

Insufficient state investment in social housing over the last decade has led to a reliance on hotels to house people, making the system particularly vulnerable, said Eric Constantin, director of the Paris section of the Abbe Pierre Foundation, which advocates for secure accommodation.

"We are very scared. We know that with the Olympic Games there will be millions of people" seeking hotel rooms, Constantin said.

Aggravating the situation for migrants, the French parliament adopted a law that conditions access to housing benefits for non-EU citizens on 5 years of residency in France.

Abdallah Ali, a refugee from Sudan, and 27 other refugees and asylum-seekers were among the 400 people evicted in April from the cement factory, less than 500 meters from the athletes village, near the river Seine.

Ali and the others were taken in grey coaches to a hotel in a sleepy suburb south of Paris. A week later they were all told to leave with no explanation, he said, showing a text message informing him that his stay at the hotel ended on May 4th.

Ali had been sleeping rough since leaving the hotel, he said in September.

"It’s not right to throw us out on the street like this. We work in France, we have more of a right to a place to live than the athletes coming in 2024,” said Ali, a waste collector, whose documents show he has been on a waiting list for social housing since 2018.