927 deaths "without a home" in 2025: an indictment, not a tally

According to Reporterre, which cites the annual report of the collective Les Morts de la rue ("The Dead of the Street") published on 29 October, 927 people died "without a home" in 2025. Of these, 306 had been living on the street in their last three months of life, 264 had been housed, and for 357 no one knows where they were sleeping. The collective calls it a "réquisitoire" (an indictment) rather than a tally: "Behind every figure, there is a person, a story, a life broken by rooflessness and by homelessness" (our translation). We only have this summary for now: the dispatch includes neither the age nor the causes of death, nor any comparison with previous years. What follows is our reading, not the content of the report.

Let us start with the figure that disturbs: 357 people whose sleeping place is unknown. More than a third. This is not a statistical detail, it is a confession. A society that knows precisely how many tourists visited a museum, but not where its dead spent the night, has decided not to look. These are lives so little counted that even their end slips through the cracks.

Then there are those 264 people who were housed. They remind us that an emergency shelter is not a home. A shelter is a night, a week, a bag you pick up again in the morning. A home is a door you can close, a pan on the stove, a bed where you can be ill without fear of being turned out at dawn. The collective chose its words carefully: "sans chez-soi" (without a home) says better than "sans-abri" (homeless) what is missing.

This is where the Marxist-feminist lens proves useful. What we call social reproduction is all the work that remakes human beings every day so that they can live: sleeping, washing, eating something hot, looking after oneself, being looked after. Without housing, this work becomes almost impossible, and no one takes it on in your place. When public health, care and shelter services are cut back, the work does not vanish: it falls on families, on associations, on volunteers, and, for those who no longer have family or a door, on no one at all.

Housing, meanwhile, is still treated as an asset before it is a need. Our working notes sum it up: under capitalism, land and dwellings are commodities that yield rent to their owners, and the needs of those who live in them come into conflict with their value as investments. Rising rents, evictions, empty flats two streets away from people sleeping outside: this is not an accident, it is a trade-off, repeated thousands of times.

It will be objected that the street kills first through cold, illness and violence. No doubt, and the report will say more. But these causes have an origin of their own: one does not die of the street the way one dies in a storm. One dies there because someone, somewhere, left a bed empty rather than occupied.

An indictment implies a defendant. Here, it is neither the dead nor those who tried to help them: it is housing policies that accept this price as a variable of adjustment. 927 names, or rather 927 absences of a home, to be entered on the debit side of the ledger.