cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24868460

Archive: [ https://archive.is/Tllsn ]

The government denies that the busing is connected to the Olympics. But we obtained an email, which was first reported by the newspaper L’Équipe, in which a government housing official said the goal was to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and move them before the Games.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    5 months ago

    This happened in London in 2012 and I’m sure in other cities when they hosted the Olympics too. Get all those scary, icky homeless people out of the way so tourists don’t have to remember that poor people exist in Paris.

    • madsen@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yup. I remember it from when Atlanta hosted the Olympic games some time in the '90s. Despicable.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      basically all hosts of olympic games try to sanitize the tourist experience when they win the bid. for non homeless actions for example, grauvre magazines were removed from convenience stores magazine racks for the tokyo games.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris ahead of the Olympics.

    But the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.

    Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris.

    But we obtained an email, which was first reported by the newspaper L’Équipe, in which a government housing official said the goal was to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and move them before the Games.

    “They promised us housing and social help,” said Yussuf Ahmed, from Sudan, who cleans airplanes at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

    The men we met had left their jobs in Paris and boarded a bus hoping for long-term housing and social services.


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