FRANCE-HOMELESS: Christmas Cheer Comes in the Form of a Home

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Angeline Oyog

PARIS, Dec 23 1994 (IPS) - Walled in and empty for the last five years, the building on No. 7 Dragon street in Paris is slowly coming back to life.

“We’re doing things one by one. The electricity’s been re- established and we also have hot water. The central heating will be back by tonight or tomorrow. Before Christmas, anyway, we were told,” said Abdelaziz Ludiyi, 60 years old and from Morocco.

For the past nine years, since losing his job and then his apartment, he wandered from one friend’s house to another until he ran out. For the past two years, he said he had been sleeping in a dark and dank cellar, “together with rats”.

Last weekend however, he joined hundreds of other people in a surprise attack on No. 7, Dragon street, knocking down the walls and tearing down the barricades and liberating the apartments within for 20 homeless families.

The six-floor property is an enormous 10,000 square metres and can easily fit in more than the first batch of 126 tenants. The entrance leads into what used to be a private school, now being spruced up to house more people and families in need.

Gestures of solidarity, offers of help and donations of cash and kind have been pouring into Dragon street. Dec. 25, is the big feast and an open house, and the building on Dragon street is humming with preparations for Sunday.

“It will be a happy Christmas after all for me, my husband and four-year-old Jennifer,” said Sylvie Duthillier. With his room, Mohamed Marchanguy, from Tunisia, is confident he can now find a job. “You know, in France, if you don’t have an apartment, you can’t find a job. If you don’t have a job, you can’t have an apartment.”

For Ludiyi, who got a one-room apartment on the second floor, it meant more than having a happy Christmas. “I feel re-born,” he said.

Last weekend’s action in one of Paris’ chic districts was the latest of radical measures taken by the humanitarian organisations “Right to Housing” (DAL) and Committee of the Homeless (CDSL) to seize long-abandoned apartments and put them to good use.