Sector players agree on the importance of having a home for more precarious people. And on the mixed results of government actions.
When precariousness intrudes into a household, housing is the last defense against great distress. Having a “home” represents an essential base of comfort and security, avoiding the escalation of difficulties and the risk of social exclusion. It is to respond to this emergency and fight against homelessness that the government launched, in 2017, the five-year plan entitled “Housing First».
By making obtaining housing the absolute priority, the objective is to give people who are very vulnerable a real chance to bounce back. Psychiatrist Raphaël Bouloudnine, who works with homeless people suffering from severe psychological disorders within the Interministerial Delegation for Accommodation and Access to Housing (Dihal), states this bluntly: “The first thing a person on the street will ask for to get by is housing.”
This “Housing First” plan is inspired by the model «Pathways Housing First», developed in New York in the early 1990s by the American psychologist Sam Tsemberis. Originally intended for people with psychiatric disorders living on the streets, the system demonstrated the importance of housing as a fundamental right. “When a household finds itself in a street situation, it must be able to benefit from multidisciplinary social support adapted to its background and its specific needs in order to reintegrate into society,” recalls Raphaël Bouloudnine.
In July 2017, shortly after his arrival at the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted “house everyone with dignity” by the end of this same year. With the objective “the production and mobilization of 50,000 additional housing places by the end of the five-year term: 10,000 places in boarding houses and 40,000 in rental intermediation”. Ambitious but untenable promise: the collective the Dead of the Street (CMDR) has recorded at least 735 deaths of homeless people in 2023, a figure that continues to rise. Nathalie Latour, general director of the Federation of Solidarity Actors (FAS), emphasizes that it is preferable to “promote adapted and supported housing” and to limit hotel accommodation, a solution which “does not provide the necessary social support”.
In 2023, a second five-year plan (2023-2027) was announced, aiming to sustain the reintegration of the homeless, after allowing 440,000 people living on the streets or in accommodation centers to access housing. If Nathalie Latour is delighted following the “good numbers” of the foreground and the establishment of a “virtuous circle” when individual support was well deployed, she became indignant: “Today, what scares us is that there is a kind of addiction” to homelessness. However, in its May 2024 insight note, the FAS recalls that its members have long been “convinced that the most direct and rapid access possible to housing is a guarantee of facilitated and lasting integration into society”. To improve “interknowledge” between medical and social circles, FAS Bretagne organized a meeting in Rennes on October 3 for around fifty professionals from these sectors. Through sketches, actresses highlighted the difficulties of access to care and the rights of people in very precarious circumstances.
But despite the government’s stated efforts, the voluntary sector points out that the situation remains extremely tense. The Social Housing Union thus indicates that in 2023, 2.6 million households were waiting for social housing, an increase of 7.5% compared to the previous year. This is why the FAS recommends the use of rental intermediation, which allows families to occupy private housing while benefiting from social support. This solution is ideal for a social park that is seriously lacking in spaces. It is still necessary to succeed in encouraging individual owners to rent their properties, which can be the case through, for example, advantageous taxation…
This Housing First 2 plan also promised reinforced social monitoring, which would make it possible to better identify households whose difficulties are worsening, in particular with 500 additional employees within the integrated reception and orientation services (Siao), who support 115. Except that more and more people who need accommodation no longer even call this number, too often synonymous with endless waiting and inability to find emergency shelter.
“The Covid crisis showed that when we activate all the levers of housing policy, there is an inversion of the paradigm” homelessness is possible, recalls Nathalie Latour. Today, she regrets that once the health crisis has passed, the government has returned to its usual ways «court-termistes» et “uses economic tools to respond to a structural crisis”.
Source: www.liberation.fr
