Apartments in the Abbaye district, in Grenoble, are occupied by around fifty homeless or poorly housed people who are demanding “decent” rehousing solutions. The building manager has just cut off electricity, water and collective heating.
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About fifty people “including single women and 3-year-old children” have occupied vacant apartments in the Abbaye district in Grenoble for a week. They demand from the ecological municipality “decent solutions” relocation.
The occupants, homeless or poorly housed, took over the premises on December 9. But the social landlord Actis, building manager until the end of the year, has just cut off electricity, water and collective heating. The city of Grenoble explains in a press release that “building fluids (…) must be cut off before the end of the year” for a change of manager.
A “abjection” while “We are still in a state of health emergency and the epidemic is experiencing a new rebound” for the Right to Housing (DAL) collective. One of its activists, Raphaël Beth, accuses the municipality of having knowingly cut off the building fluids to “to punish” associations and occupants “because she considers that we are in bad faith on the rehousing”.
Rehabilitation of the building
The latter obtained from the town hall that there is no immediate eviction, but refuse to be redirected to the vacant places of the winter accommodation system, considering this proposal. “degrading”. “We do not squat for fun, but to obtain decent solutions. They prefer to take to the streets rather than integrate the winter system, through which some have already passed”, emphasizes Raphaël Beth.
He also deplores “the gap” between “the presidential ambition very marked on the left” of the ecological mayor Éric Piolle and his “lack of efforts on the ground”. The occupied building, located on Place Laurent-Bonnevay, needs to be renovated “as soon as the sources of financing have been identified and the technical and architectural studies carried out”, according to the city of Grenoble.
