Homeless Persons

     HomelessPerson           

Like any large city, Paris has its share of homeless people and street people, even if you don't usually read about them in the tourist guides. They are easy to spot, scattered around the city. The politically-correct French term for people with no place to live is “sans domicile fixe” (prounounced /sɑ̃ domisil fiks/), which means “having no fixed domicile”; it is usually just abbreviated to SDF (pronounced /ɛs de ɛf/).

Most of these homeless people are male, and a significant proportion of them have mental health or substance abuse issues. Some are migrants. Like most European states, France has a massive welfare system, but the social “safety net” is having a hard time catching everyone. People who are homeless for years at a time are sometimes that way by choice, or because something (personality or mental problems making them socially dysfunctional, etc.) prevents them from actively seeking out and profiting from state assistance. This pattern, of course, is similar to that seen in every developed country where homeless people are found.

In this photograph, I show four SDFs, selected at random from the many I have seen over the years in Paris. During a walk of several hours and many kilometres in the city, I'll typically see two or three SDFs somewhere along the way. They don't do anyone any harm, in part because they seem to be asleep almost all the time and are often in a daze the rest of the time. Since helping them requires in part that they seek or at least accept and cooperate with help, and since most of them won't do this, it is difficult to resolve the problem of SDFs entirely.

Undated photograph.