In Rillieux, near Lyon, closure of an emergency accommodation center for single mothers
Big move to seize the families of an emergency accommodation center in Rillieux-la-Pape, north of Lyon. The Habitat et Humanisme association is closing the doors of its home, exceptionally open in December 2021. All the women and their children should be relocated by July 31.
South of Rillieux-la-Pape, an old bourgeois building has been welcoming homeless mothers and their children for several months. At the end of the driveway leading to the big white house, children played in the park. A large trampoline and a fresco painted on the bay window confirm that this is indeed their place of life.
On July 31, these children and their mothers must pack up because this emergency accommodation center, run by the association Habitat and Humanism, must close. The prefecture ensures that the families will all be relocated. For now, not all of them have yet received a proposal for their next place of accommodation.
The end of an exceptional accommodation system in Rillieux-la-Pape
At the end of June, Pablo (the first name has been changed), an activist from Lyon against poor housing, receives a panicked phone call. Edona (the first name has been changed), a mother of two children housed in this emergency accommodation center in Rillieux-la-Pape explains to her that it will close and that she has no solution for the moment. accommodation.
Opened in December 2021, the system run by the Habitat et Humanisme association was intended to be temporary from the outset. The closure should even have taken place earlier in the year, but the device had been extended by the prefecture.
“It was an exceptional device, with determined funding, for the sheltering of the vulnerable public. The closure was scheduled and decided with the association from the opening, first on March 31, 2022, then postponed to the end of July 2022, ”explains the prefecture.
A total of 16 families are currently accommodated in the center of Rillieux-la-Pape. With the exception of two couples, all of them, like Edona, are single mothers, most of them without papers or awaiting papers. The women and their children have a bedroom in this large building, with a bathroom. Common areas complete the picture: playroom for children, kitchen, laundry rooms, “mothers’ room”, as well as a terrace.
The building, owned by Entreprendre to humanize dependency, can accommodate up to 47 people. Social workers are present in the afternoon and evening, and a duty person is available by telephone “24 hours a day for mothers”, specifies director Philippe Rebouffat-Roux.
The organization of the place allows the mothers to be in self-management for the supervision of the children, the meals and the household turns. The opportunity to “allow these mothers to resume their parental duties and the children to go less badly”, explains the director.
Mothers housed in the center of Rillieux-la-Pape not yet rehoused
Doubt still hangs over the future of some women currently housed in the center of Rillieux. Because if the prefecture explains that all the women will be well rehoused, Edona, for example, is still waiting for a proposal from the House of Social Watch, after several appointments with its social worker. Without papers, with her two children, she lived on the street, then experienced a squat and several emergency accommodation places in the Metropolis of Lyon.
Edona entered the Rillieux home shortly after the center opened. She recounts:
“I arrived several years ago in France, I was hosted by the 115 (emergency accommodation number, editor’s note) during the winter for two years in a row. Then I was homeless for over a year and slept in a squat. My children ask me ‘Mom, when will we have a house?’ ”
The director of the structure, Philippe Rebouffat-Roux, explains that several women have already been relocated, and that the others are awaiting proposals. He realizes the concern of the families and ensures that the teams accompany them:
“It is indeed traumatic because they have to change places, but they stay in the accommodation system. Their files are now a priority at the House of Social Watch. Launching into the unknown is difficult but we reassure them, the social workers support them”
300 emergency accommodation places gradually closed
In parallel with the closure of the Rillieux-la-Pape site, the Rhône prefecture will also gradually close 300 hotel places in its emergency accommodation system. These places were opened in November 2021. Like the center of Rillieux, it was an exceptional device.
However, one can wonder about the capacity of the emergency accommodation systems to absorb the 300 places cut by the end of July.
“There will be no delivery to the dry street,” says the prefecture.
The management of emergency accommodation has been changing models since May 2021. In previous years, places were only open in winter, then closed when spring came. This was called “thermometer management”. Since May 2021, the permanent park has been expanded but no place has been created exceptionally for the winter: a new strategy called “housing first”. The Rhône prefecture explains:
“The objective is to have a multi-year vision with budget management. There is a desire to reduce the number of hotel places to move towards other more qualitative accommodation solutions, either on other structures, or towards social housing. »
An emergency accommodation system that stabilizes
In 2021, 500 exceptional additional spaces were opened, unrelated to a winter plan, but on a temporary basis. Hence the closures this summer. “A transition phase”, according to the prefecture. In 2019, there were 5,983 permanent emergency accommodation places in the Rhône, compared to 7,897 in 2021. A park which is therefore stabilizing, since there are 7,901 places in 2022. This figure is on the rise, but it is still insufficient to cope with the saturation of the emergency accommodation system.