Fatoumata entered the café, perfectly upright, with her daughter snuggled up to her in a baby carrier. The mother (whose name has been changed) was dressed with care, and the 3-week-old wore pretty floral pajamas. There was nothing to suggest their extreme poverty: Several months ago, Fatoumata decided to leave the emergency accommodation she shared with another homeless woman. "I couldn't sleep because of the bedbugs and my hepatitis B. I spent the whole night scratching myself. Alone, I was alright, but pregnant, no," she said.

She called the Paris teams of the emergency housing number, 115, time and time again, but they were unable to provide her with a new shelter. Until the birth of the baby, she slept on the sofa of a lady she met in the afro hairdressing salon where she worked. She explained that, as soon as the child was born, at Lariboisière hospital, she called "all the time, from 6 in the morning until late at night." It took her two days to get through to a listener in this overworked unit. Seven days after the birth, she was discharged from the maternity hospital, with no accommodation available.

Had she given birth a year ago, she would not have left the hospital until she had obtained a room in a center or hotel, where, by virtue of the right to continuity of emergency accommodation, she could have stayed as long as necessary. But the situation has deteriorated. France reached a record 205,000 emergency accommodation places during the winter of 2022-2023, and exhausted most of the funding earmarked for 2023. Now, the government has decided to cut back, even though the needs have not diminished.

In the Paris region, at the end of June, the prefecture informed the organizations managing those beds that 3,000 would have to be closed. For the capital itself, the loss, although limited to 200 or 300 places, led to a review of the already drastic criteria used to assign them. "Since September, we haven't even been able to meet the needs of all priority 1 applicants, including women over seven months pregnant and families with babies under 3 months of age. This is unprecedented, and [it] shows that the system is failing," said Vanessa Benoît, head of the social emergency service Samusocial in Paris.

The situation is even more complicated in Seine-Saint-Denis, a part of the Paris region that is also the poorest area in mainland France. There, the government has decided to cut 2,000 beds. "We have managed to close places gradually, without putting people back on the streets in order to respect the continuity of accommodation provided for by law. But almost no one can get into the program anymore," said Maxence Delaporte, deputy director of the Interlogement93 housing organization. At the last count, on December 5,700 people remained on the streets despite having contacted the 115 emergency number. Of these, 51 were pregnant women and 95 were children under the age of 3.

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