Le Figaro Lyon
Faced with the increase in the number of homeless people, the Rhône department will increase its reception capacity. The prefect of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region announced on Sunday the opening of 300 emergency accommodation places in the Rhône, while several associations have denounced in recent weeks the situation of homeless women and children. She recalled that the Rhône had 24,000 accommodation places, a figure that has "doubled in less than ten years".
"Already, a number of places will be opened," including "sixty" for homeless women and children in Villeurbanne, said prefect Fabienne Buccio in the program Dimanche en politique on France 3 Rhône-Alpes. "What's important is to create fluidity in this system: you don't go into emergency accommodation to settle there for years. We need to create fluidity to create places" and "welcome other people," she continued.
Activists requisition gymnasium
These announcements come after a week marked by cold, snow and strong pressure from associations on the subject. Last Monday, 56 children and their families, housed during the school holidays in a hotel in Lyon, and without accommodation on the first day of the school year, were put back on the street. Known in Lyon for sheltering street children in the town's schools, where the municipality leaves the heating on, the Jamais sans toit collective reacted on Friday. The activists "requisitioned" "the disused premises of the Montel school" in the 3rd arrondissement to house these 56 children and their parents. And asked the prefect to "transform the Montel school into an official accommodation centre".
On Wednesday, it was Brigitte Macron, visiting Lyon as part of the Pièces jaunes operation, who said it was "unthinkable that a child should be on the street"."We've talked about it with the mayor of Lyon, we're going to do an operation" to make sure that "no child is on the street," she announced. The ecologist mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, had asked in December to be received by President Emmanuel Macron, along with five other ecologist or socialist mayors, to denounce the crisis in the emergency housing system, which they said leaves about 3000,<> children on the street.
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In Lyon, there are 181 of them, according to the censuses of Jamais sans toit. A far cry from the campaign promise of Zero Children on the Street of the ecologist left-wing executive. While the responsibility for emergency accommodation rests with the State, Lyon's elected officials have recently taken several measures to recover vacant municipal buildings, in order to increase the number of emergency accommodation stock.