The buses took residents off to a slew of temporary shelters as far away as Toulouse. Abdelkarim was sent to a hotel in the town of Épinay-sur-Orge in the outer suburbs of Paris — though with a stay limited to just 15 days. “Two weeks later, we were on the street,” he says, searching for words in a language he is still learning.

Squats are not an uncommon sight around the French capital — a city whose average real estate prices tripled between 2000 and 2020, and which loses around 12,000 inhabitants every year largely due to its high cost of living. But this particular squat in Île-Saint-Denis — inside the abandoned property of cement producer Unibéton — had the misfortune of being located a quick stroll away from the Olympic Village. When the 2024 Paris Olympics kick off in July, this 52-hectare neighbourhood of glitzy residences will be filled with athletes and team officials — and thanks to the police intervention this year, VIP visitors will likely be spared the sight of migrants.

The prefecture of the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, which carried out the eviction, insisted it had nothing to do with the Olympics. But Faris Youss, a 31-year-old refugee from Chad who leads the activist group Réfugiés autonomes (Autonomous Refugees), rejects the official narrative. “The prefecture doesn’t want to own up to the reality,” Youss tells me. “We had meetings with elected officials from city hall, where it was said: ‘the Olympics are coming soon — you’re going to have to leave here.’”

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Abdelkarim, along with dozens of former residents of Unibéton, has since moved to another squat in an industrial zone in the suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, far away from the bright lights of Paris and the Olympic Village. When I visited in late November, I had a glimpse of the alarming conditions of this makeshift residence: a busted ceiling in the stairwell; bedrooms crowded with multiple occupants; limited common space overwhelmed by drying clothes; trash overflowing in dumpsters outside; a slew of space heaters to protect against the looming winter. Abdelkarim, who now sleeps in a roughly 15 square meter room with two other people, says: “The best solution is social housing. In Île-de-France, there’s a lot of people [who want it]. There aren’t many people who can get it.”

It all casts doubt on the notion that the eviction of the squat was somehow beneficial to the residents. “It didn’t resolve any problems in the long-run,” says Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the group Le Revers de la Médaille, a coalition of prominent anti-poverty, migrants’ rights, and affordable housing groups critical of the Olympics. “What it did was cross off a location on the map for the prefecture and disperse 500 refugees across Île-de-France.”

The clampdown at Unibéton not only illustrates the staggering failures of the French state to welcome migrants and refugees — it is also symptomatic of another problem: the 2024 Summer Olympics threaten to aggravate Paris’s affordable housing crisis. Already, the Games are piling pressure on the housing market, affecting not just refugees, but also students and working-class residents.

In October, Le Revers de la Médaille published a harshly-worded public letter to the Olympic organising committee, warning against a “social cleansing” of the Paris region that would affect the homeless and others living on the margins. The coalition called for a better “handling of people in situations of precarity and exclusion before, during, and after the Games”. Meanwhile, in an interview with UnHerd, Alauzy lamented the recent installation of fencing around the Charles de Gaulle bridge in southeastern Paris, a spot frequently used by homeless people for shelter.

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University students are also feeling the pinch. Earlier this year, the Paris affiliate of the Crous, a public institution that manages student housing, announced plans to seize flats during July and August 2024 to make way for Olympic volunteers and partners — thereby removing 3,000 students from their residences two months ahead of schedule. The ministry of higher education has promised a €100 cheque and two tickets to the Olympics to each student affected.

“It feels like a joke,” says Esther Laudet, spokesperson for the student union Solidaires. “I don’t think students care much about tickets to the Olympics. What students want are places to live, meals, and dignified conditions to study.” However, it is still unclear whether the plans will go through: Solidaires has filed lawsuits against Crous, with key decisions expected in the coming months, according to a lawyer involved in the cases.

If Crous does get its way, it will effectively force students into the punishing private sector, where they will have to compete with other low-income earners. “The reality is that students are accepting conditions that are pretty indecent because they don’t have the choice,” Laudet says. “In Paris, it’s impossible to find housing for less than €400 [a month]. Or at least, it’s really, really hard to do so.”

The problem is most acute around the Olympic Village, which sprawls across the three municipalities of Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis and Île-Saint-Denis. Featuring scores of modern, environmentally-friendly flats to be converted into social housing after the Games, the Village represents the crown jewel of the organisers’ pledge to deliver a socially responsible Olympics. But it may well become a symbol of the emptiness of that promise.

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The lead project developer has promised that at least 25% of the Olympic Village flats will be reserved for social housing. But that number isn’t nearly as generous as it sounds. For one thing, the pledge of 25% is in line with the minimums required by French law. The number also falls below the current rates of social housing in the cities of Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen, former bastions of industrial workers long governed by the French Communist Party. Then there’s the fact that developers are yet to announce what type of social housing will be hosted: will it be reserved for low-income residents, who make up the majority of housing requests, or middle-income ones? “They don’t want to give the numbers,” says Cécile Gintrac, a Saint-Denis-based teacher and activist with the 2024 Olympics Village Committee, sounding exasperated because she has been asking for such details for years.

Meanwhile, the flats intended for the private sector are wildly more expensive than existing houses in the area. Vinci, one of the main developers in the Olympic Village, is already advertising flats at around €7,000 per square meter — roughly five times the median monthly household income of the département. “There are very few of these that are going to be accessible to residents of Seine-Saint-Denis,” Gintrac said.

Beyond the Olympic Village, Gintrac is also concerned about the Games constricting housing supply next summer — and in particular Airbnb swallowing up much-needed apartments as landlords pivot to more attractive sources of income. “These big events tend to result in reduced housing supply for the most precarious people and the number of available flats more generally in the private sector,” says Gintrac, pointing to this autumn’s Rugby World Cup.

While Airbnb has come under fire in Paris proper, it is rapidly expanding in the banlieues, which now account for roughly half of the flats rented out on Airbnb in the Paris region. A November report from researchers at the Université Paris Cité and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that, from 2015 to 2022, the number of flats on Airbnb in Seine-Saint-Denis rose from 1,311 to 9,341. Will Airbnb continue its expansion here after the Games as landlords discover that short-term rentals can be more profitable than renting to financially-strapped tenants?

At the squat in Vitry-sur-Seine, the Olympics don’t appear to be viewed with any fondness. When I asked Abdelkarim about them, he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a big festival, it’s good for France, it’s good for Paris, but for us…” He trails off.

That sense of ambivalence could turn to hostility if the ultimate legacy of the Paris Olympics comes to resemble that of its predecessors: low-income residents of Athens, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro all experienced well-documented forms of displacement, and even the 2012 Games — which were supposed to be different — failed to deliver on the ambitious vision of “social inclusion” promised in East London. Despite this grim record, French authorities still cling to the notion that the Paris version will somehow be exceptional. But the early signs aren’t encouraging: next summer’s spectacle may well reproduce an experience of urban exclusion that has become painfully ordinary.

Or not, as it turned out.

Four years after the win, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s appeals to the racial fears of white voters carried him into the second round of the French presidential election. In October 2005, the country was convulsed by three weeks of anti-police riots in the multi-racial ‘banlieues’ – suburbs – of every city and large town in the country.

These ‘banlieues’, long a source of cosmic dread to white France, have since become associated with Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, Nice and the 1,000 or more young French people who volunteered to serve Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The pattern of the last two decades – hopes of racial harmony raised by sport and contradicted by stubborn reality – threatens to repeat itself this summer as another wonderful, brown, white and black French football team graces the World Cup in Russia. Eight members of this French squad, which has briefly united a racially and socially divided nation were brought up in the Paris suburbs where the 2005 riots began.

On Friday, just like in 1998, multi-racial crowds from those suburbs invaded the boulevards and avenues of Paris to celebrate the team’s progress to the semi-finals. And yet last week there were also four nights of anti-police riots in the multi-racial suburbs of Nantes, birthplace of Jules Verne and one of the most quietly attractive of French cities.

These explosions of car-burning and attacks on public buildings in retaliation for alleged police brutality remain commonplace. The Islamist threat also persists. French security services revealed last month that they had thwarted half a dozen plans by Isis old boys or their sympathisers to commit fresh atrocities on French soil.

The ‘banlieue problem’, a synonym for France’s race problem, has been one that all French presidents since 2005 have promised to solve. Jacques Chirac and François  Hollande tried to do it with modest amounts of money, Nicolas Sarkozy with a “Karcher” or high-powered hose. None succeeded.

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The crime and drug problems are getting worse; unemployment, over 20 per cent among the young in the Paris banlieues, has hardly moved; the spread of militant Islamic teaching, not yet a serious issue in 2005, has undermined parents and community leaders and eroded the always limited sympathy of urban and posh-suburban France for the scary world beyond the “Boulevard Périphérique”.

The banlieues are an archipelago of mostly high-rise housing estates thrown up around all French cities in the 1960s and 1970s to provide homes for migrants from North Africa, from the French overseas departments, from former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa but also from southern and eastern Europe and from rural France. They are almost always outside the city boundaries, with Marseille a notable exception.  The ‘inner city’ problems of other countries are ‘suburban problems’ in France and were, for many years, all the more easily ignored.

They were not, however, mono-racial ghettoes in the US or even the British sense. I met gangs of youths in the 1990s and 2000’s whose parents or grandparents were Algerians, Yugoslavs, Portuguese, Ivoirians and working class white French. This was, essentially, the racial profile of the mobs which burned cars and schools in the autumn of 2005.

This was also the racial profile of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup. The brightest star of this year’s team, Kylian Mbappé, from Bondy just north of the Paris city boundary, is also a product of this once racially integrated character of the “banlieues”. He was born, in December 1998, to an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father.

But much has changed in the banlieues since the 2005 riots – arguably for the worse.

Over the past decade, radical Islam has been offering an alternative ‘identity’ to disenchanted youths with muslim backgrounds. This has created new barriers and animosities between races and religions in the banlieues. Life for women has become more oppressive. Many cités (tower-block estates) have become mono-ethnic. White French or eastern or southern Europeans have become segregated from people of north African and African origin.

France would officially deny the existence of racial or religious ‘communities’ or even different races. For years French politicians dismissed Britain’s more relaxed, ‘multi-cultural’ policy as dangerous. In truth, neither approach has prevented the spread of extremist Islam.  Nor has it been much help to those trying to escape the suburbs.

The indivisible, we-are-all-French approach, conceals tenacious prejudices and barriers. In France, a recent study found, a young person with an Arab or African name is four times less likely to be interviewed for a job. Brown or black faces are finally beginning to be seen in presenting roles on French TV but much less so than in Britain. There have been several leading ministers in recent years from Arab or French west Indian backgrounds but there are none in senior positions under Macron.

This is not just to France’s discredit but also to its loss. The banlieues, in my experience, can be terrible, violent, destructive places. But they are also an immense reservoir of creativity, talent, energy, hard-work and tenacity – and not just in the visible fields of football and French rap music.

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Might the new President make a difference? During and after his successful election campaign last year, Emmanuel Macron promised a “new approach”. He said that the solution to the banlieue problem is indistinguishable from his solution to the wider “French problem”: the breaking down of the corporatist barriers which make France a comfortable country for “insiders” but a miserable place for “outsiders” and especially racial minorities and the young. He may be right about that.

In May, the former centre-right economics minister, Jean-Louis Borloo presented a much-delayed plan for a 50bn euro project to rescue the banlieues. He made 19 proposals, including short-circuiting bureaucratic delays to speed new transport projects and to replace the worst of the old schools and tower blocks.

He suggested the creation of a new “corps” of French senior civil servants to supervise the resurgence of the suburbs, recruited from the cleverest kids in the banlieues themselves. He proposed the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, ranging from sports coaches to care workers.

Macron cherry-picked a few of the ideas but dismissed the approach as “old thinking”. The plan, he said, was just another top-down, bureaucratic exercise in which well-meaning “white males” imposed solutions on a disenchanted, young and racially heterogeneous population. He may have had a point.

His critics say that he did not want to spend the money or annoy the right-wing section of his electoral coalition or anger rural France, which would rather like a 50bn euro Marshall Plan of its own. They probably also had a point.

The President’s decision was, though, heavily influenced by his controversial special adviser on racial and banlieues issues, a comedian turned political polemicist called Yassine Belattar.

Mr Belattar has been attacked in the French press for suggesting that there is no real problem with radical Islam in France. His argument is in fact more subtle. He says that militant islam exploits a vacuum of identity and purpose among the poor-suburban second and third generation migrants. Such kids are, he says, more French than they realise and more French than urban and rural France is willing to acknowledge. Enforcing a narrow, traditional sense of French identity pushes them towards the extremists and criminal gangs. Instead, Mr Belattar says, the banlieue kids should be encouraged to channel their energies into creativity and entrepreneurship.

This may sound hopelessly vague and optimistic when one considers how much a 17-year-old youth can make from selling cocaine. However, Macron’s drive to make it easier to hire and fire in France – against the will of some of the big trades union federations – is already spawning new opportunities for young people in the banlieues. (Sunday opening of shops; new inter-city bus-routes; more taxi drivers and chauffeurs.)

But there can be no quick fix for a problem which has been 60 years in the making. Some of Mr Borloo’s 50 billion euros would doubtless be handy. But Mr Belattar is right. The solution, if any, is spiritual and psychological as much as political or economic.

The dreaded banlieues have much to offer France so long as they can be persuaded – along with the rest of the country – that they are part of France. There is no reason that they should be solely a breeding ground for footballing talent, terrorists and drugs-traffickers.

The fact that banlieue youths identify with a France football team and wave the tricolour on the Grands Boulevard or the Champs Elysées is significant. It remains to be seen whether the Mbappé generation will be more successful than the Zidane generation in finally bridging the moat of suspicion and ignorance which separates France’s lovely old cities from their ugly, violent, dynamic inner suburbs.

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