600,000 people forced to sleep with relatives to avoid the street

The doorbell rings. Guests arrive, but for Marc, it is above all a signal: he is not at home.

Hosted by a former colleague, the fifty-year-old grabs his bag and slips out of the house for the night. Not that we’re kicking him out, but he doesn’t want to be in the living room with them. Marc especially dreads drunken evenings. The fear of diving again never left him. After his divorce, all he had left for company was the bottle, until this delivery driver lost his job… His only option: to sleep in the airlock of a bank or in front of Rosporden station, about ten kilometers from Concarneau (Finistère).

“I especially feel ashamed! » he says, mincing his words since he had a stroke. It’s been almost two years since he called his teammate, in the early morning, after being escorted out of his apartment by a bailiff and the gendarmerie. What was supposed to be a temporary situation drags on.

Like him, nearly 600,000 people are housed with a relative in France, on a forced basis. Few of them dare to talk about their situation, as if for fear of being labeled “homeless”. However, this phenomenon is on the rise and can be explained, in part, by the record number of rental evictions in recent years – 24,556 in 2024.

In a context of inflation, more and more rents are unpaid. Added to this is the saturation of HLM: some families have been on the waiting list for years even though it is impossible for them to rent a property in the private sector. This informal solidarity is “twice as important as that of the State, which welcomes around 300,000 people in different accommodation options” warns the Foundation for Housing the Disadvantaged in its report. These people certainly live under a roof, but they remain exposed and vulnerable.

Off the radar

While some can count on the support of a family member, others turn to an outstretched hand alone, often without really knowing the person offering them hospitality. Even if it means sleeping from sofa to sofa. On social networks, notably Facebook, groups facilitate these temporary solutions. A double-edged help. In the most critical situations, these arrangements can give rise to forms of exploitation – comparable to forced domestic work – while women expose themselves to the risk of sexual assault.

This is a gray area outside the radar of public authorities. And few people want to stay with their host indefinitely. “It’s very important to have a home. We define our own rules, and this allows us to have an anchor point to rebuild ourselves physically and psychologically,” estimates Pascale DietrichRagon, researcher at the National Institute of Demographic Studies.

In certain cases, this accommodation allows us to bounce back, as for Jean, in his early fifties, hosted since August by Isabelle and her son in Lozère, a friend met in a hikers’ association. This former butcher, who lost his business, found work supporting disabled people. In this 59 m2 apartment, he put his meager suitcases in one of the two bedrooms, which he shares with his 16-year-old daughter and his little dog. One sleeps on the sofa bed, the other on a mattress on the floor. As for Isabelle, she sits in the living room. “It’s no problem, I want to watch TV in the evening and I only have one!” » says the unemployed sixty-year-old, recognized as a disabled worker, who lives on nearly 1,000 euros per month.

Non-priority files

Even if cohabitation is going well despite the promiscuity, he would like to move closer to Mende, thirty minutes away. Her daughter is doing vocational training there to become a secretary. But this is one of the perverse effects of these situations: it is difficult to obtain social housing in a saturated market when you declare that you are staying with a third party. These applications do not have priority.

The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, promised, on January 23, the construction of two million homes by 2030. A long-term solution, while many people housed with a third party risk ending up on the street. Like Marc, who left his friend’s house by mutual agreement. After sleeping outside for more than two months, he is rebuilding in an emergency accommodation center. The Housing Foundation is asking for a system to detect and support people staying with a third party and will continue to sound the alarm until then.