On Tuesday night, the humanitarian organization Utopia 56 led a demonstration outside Paris City Hall, gathering around 200 migrants, including families, to call for emergency housing and denounce what they describe as increasingly harsh public policies toward the homeless.
Among the demonstrators was Rose, a migrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo who has spent three years in France. “We were raped and tortured back home. We came here to escape, but now we are abandoned,” she said. “We sleep in metro stations, on the streets, in churches.
We haven’t eaten, and some of us are sick.”According to Utopia 56, an estimated 350,000 people are currently without shelter in France, a steep rise from 190,000 in 2017.
The group highlights the elimination of 6,500 emergency shelter beds in the 2025 national budget and reports that 25,000 evictions occurred last year. It also claims that France’s emergency housing hotline, 115, responds to only 12% of calls in Paris, and even those lucky enough to get through are not guaranteed accommodation.
