![]() The more the mode of housing/accommodation of homeless persons depends on an organization that can provide social support, the greater their chances of having a registered address. Interpretation: 68% of homeless persons living in collective housing (in a room or a dormitory) have a registered address in an association or other organization. Scope: Metropolitan France, towns of 20,000 or more inhabitants,įrench-speaking individuals aged 18 or over Source: INSEE, Survey of persons using accommodation and free meal services, 2012 In 2012, 32% of homeless persons living in collective housing, 44% of those housed in an accommodation provided by an association or living in mobile homes or hotel rooms, and 50% of those without a roof over their heads did not have a registered address. The organizations that handle address registration applications (mainly the Community Centers for Social Action and the associations fighting against exclusion) are thus faced with a complex procedure, which the Access to Housing and Town Planning Reform Act of 24 March 2014-known as the ALUR law-aims to simplify: The procedure for claiming the AME is expected to disappear, leaving only the standard procedure and the one for the admission to residence of asylum seekers. The other two concern undocumented persons: The first serves to collect the AME (State medical aid) and the second is intended for asylum seekers. One is a standard procedure for individuals with a regular status. There exist three address registration procedures today. Moreover, insofar as it provides a spatial anchoring, address registration constitutes one of the stages in the process of social reconstruction of disaffiliated individuals with compounded problems. It makes it possible to receive mail, to claim certain rights like the issuance of a national identity card, to register on electoral rolls, to request legal aid, and to enjoy social benefits. ![]() What is Address Registration?Īddress registration is the first condition of access to rights. ![]() To better understand how the question of address registration is posed today, we conducted research among those who are “on the front line,” in direct and daily contact with the problems of access to rights: outreach workers who operate in associations for the homeless. But what does this reform propose? Does it respond to the difficulties one encounters concretely on the ground? And, more generally, how is the access to rights of homeless persons ensured by the organizations that welcome them? Several pieces of legislation have sought to simplify this address registration procedure in recent years, and a reform is currently under way. Address registration becomes the first step to receiving mail, and hence to accessing civil, political and social rights. For those in greatest difficulty, who lack a stable home or live in mobile or precarious housing, access to rights is therefore a real challenge. In France, in order to collect benefits such as the RSA (Supplementary welfare allowance), one must have an address-a domicile-defined in the Civil Code as the place that allows for the exercise of rights (“The domicile of a French person, as to the exercise of his civil rights, is at the place where he has his main establishment,” section 102). This is clearly illustrated by the issue of address registration. But this is to forget that these populations’ ability to access rights is intimately linked to the conditions in which they receive the support of outreach workers who fight, often in the shadows, against their exclusion. The literature on non-take-up mainly focuses on the difficulties encountered by the most precarious service users in our societies: those who lack capital and who, owing to their social characteristics, are assumed to be little or poorly informed of their rights. The question of access to social rights is central to the implementation of public policies: How is one to ensure that the publics for whom benefits are intended are the “right” publics, that they are aware of those rights, and that the procedures they follow to access them are successful? The issue of targeting and of access to social rights, which in turn poses that of the non-take-up of rights, raises important questions concerning the functionality and effectiveness of public policies that have been subject to greater managerial pressure in recent years.
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