This comment shows two things, 1. how projects like this will always be blamed for quality of life problems in the area, and how 2. the problems of street peopl

This comment shows two things, 1. how projects like this will always be blamed for quality of life problems in the area, and how 2. the problems of street people and drug addicts are often much more complex and rooted in previous political clusterfucks. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Gare du Nord was the main place that people smugglers would assist people in travelling from France to the UK. At the time you could walk onto a Eurostar without having your papers checked by a British border police (only French passport control, who tolerated migrants travelling to the UK with false papers). Lots of desperate and often penniless people pitched up around that area. People smuggling was linked to other forms of criminality, including prostitution and robbery by people trying to get the money to make the trip to the UK. When the border protocol changed, the main staging points for migrants moved to Calais. But that part of Paris remained a centre for migrants to meet and connect. It also remained a centre of street dealing, robbery, other forms of low-level crime like selling fake bags, scams and snatching. It is notorious for street harassment, mainly of women. As far as I can tell, there isn't a particular overlap between people doing this and hard drug addicts. In practice, most cities have somewhere you go to buy drugs on the street in the middle of the night. No-one wants to be that area, but trying to get it to be somewhere else doesn't really solve the problem. There are lots of things which can make this type of area less upsetting for people who have to work, live and travel through it, safe injection sites might certainly be a part of this. Source: have lived in Paris and travelled there extensively over last 20+ years. My friend was an asylum seeker in the UK who got the Eurostar from Paris.