The Roof: The NPACH Blog

The New York Times reports that French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposes legislation that would would “put the right to housing on the same level as the right to medical care or education.” Unfortunately, The Time misses the story.

The story is that after a concerted campaign by the homeless and homeless advocates, the PM is bowing to pressure and proposing the legislation. The BBC has more:

. . . A housing bill will be presented to the cabinet on 17 January, he said, as the government came under renewed pressure to help homeless people.

Squatters have moved into a vacant office block in Paris and also set up a tent city along a canal in the capital. The office building, near the Paris stock exchange, has been nicknamed the "ministry for the housing crisis".

Three housing lobby groups took it over and then invited families to move in. Homeless Parisians are also camping out in 200 tents by the Canal Saint Martin.

Lobby groups say about a million people in France are homeless, of whom 100,000 are sleeping on the streets.

Under the government plan, from the end of 2008, the right to housing will apply to homeless people, impoverished workers and single mothers. All those living in slums are to benefit from the same right from the start of 2012, Mr de Villepin said. The plan entails the construction of 120,000 new homes every year up to 2012.

. . . The squatters' campaign is being spearheaded by a group called Les Enfants de Don Quichotte (Children of Don Quixote).

The group has also set up makeshift camps in the southern port city of Marseille, as well as Orleans, Lyon and Toulouse.

The Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, yesterday became the latest politician to promise urgent help for the sans domicile fixe or "SDFs" - a once largely invisible army of down-and-outs, the working poor, the wandering young, illegal immigrants, alcoholics and the mentally ill.

Judged by events of the past fortnight, the most effective politician in France is not Mme Royal or President Jacques Chirac, but Augustin Legrand, a 31-year-old actor.

In mid-December M. Legrand, his brothers and a couple of friends established an illegal encampment of SDFs and sympathisers on the quays of the Canal Saint Martin in the centre of Paris. Within days, the double line of red tents was domintating news bulletins through the quiet Christmas period, forcing the government to crash through the gears of a new homeless policy.

Similar encampments have now sprung up in almost every large town in France, from Lille in the north to the chic Promenade des Anglais in Nice. The original Paris encampment has attracted high-profile, "sympathy SDFs" including the actors Béatrice Dalle and Jean Rochefort.

In the past few days, political parties from the centre-right to the far left have signed up for the six-point "Canal Saint-Martin" charter, calling for "an end to the [homelessness] scandal which shames a country like ours".