Saint-Denis, France (AFP) — Less than 500 metres separate the Stade de France — the sparkling centrepiece of the Paris Olympics — and the crumbling Francs-Moisins estate plagued by poverty and crime.

Samia Achoui, a secretary who lives in one of the grey blocks dogged by drug dealing, does not have a ticket to see the Games.

Instead she will listen from her window to the cheers and applause echoing over the canal.

Despite its name, the Paris Olympics will take place mostly in Seine-Saint-Denis on the other side of the “peripherique” ring road that divides the French capital from some of its poorest and most notorious suburbs, known as banlieues.

The densely populated working-class department north of Paris hosts four of the Games’ big venues, the athletes’ village and other key Olympic sites.

Paris’s pitch for the Games — which run from July 26 to August 11 — leaned hard on regenerating an area that has absorbed wave after wave of immigration and has the country’s youngest population. A third of its 1.6 million people lives below the poverty line.

France not only hopes to use the Olympics to turbo-charge ongoing redevelopment there, but to recast the fevered image of Seine-Saint-Denis as a crime-ridden collection of ghettos forged during suburban riots which started there in 2005.

Its reputation took a further battering in the world’s media after the 2022 Champions League Final fiasco, when football fans were attacked and robbed on their way into the Stade de France.

Mohamed Gnabaly is relentlessly upbeat about how the Games could help change Seine-Saint-Denis.

The mayor of Ile-Saint-Denis, the narrow island in the River Seine where part of the athletes’ village has been built, is “obsessed” about making the Olympics “a people’s Games”.

So much so that his little municipality has brought 7,000 tickets — one for pretty much all of its inhabitants.

The island, which has its share of grim apartment blocks, has been turned upside down by construction works for the Olympics.

But the mayor is determined it will now extract the maximum benefit from the Games, notwithstanding that his town hall was ransacked when rioting again erupted in poor suburbs across France last June after police shot and killed a teenager at a traffic stop just outside Paris.

“I have been working on this for three years,” said Gnabaly, who is proud the island is also home to the Olympics’ “Africa Station”, a fan zone dedicated to African culture and sport.

“We have suffered [with all the work] but not only will this transform our town, we will be at the heart of the reactor,” the mayor insisted. “We are not going to be left out by the Games.”

His optimism is not shared by everyone across Seine-Saint-Denis.

“There are two extremes,” said Cecile Gintrac of Vigilance JO, a local watchdog group. “One part of Paris is going to be a big party while the other won’t be able to go to work or get around” because of all the Olympic road closures and restrictions.

Delivery driver Moussa Syla, 45, who lives in the Francs-Moisins estate — which is also getting a major facelift — said the thought of the disruption brings him out in a cold sweat.

“It is going to be a nightmare to get around,” he said.

– Renaissance –

It has been hard to go anywhere in Seine-Saint-Denis in the build-up to the Games without seeing scaffolding or cranes building whole new neighbourhoods.

The Olympics is part of a long-term push to drag up the department that began with the symbolic decision to build the Stade de France there for the 1998 World Cup, which France’s “rainbow” multiracial team went on to win.

High property prices in Paris and a massive soon-to-be-delivered extension of its metro system into Seine-Saint-Denis — Europe’s single biggest infrastructure project — has made the department attractive for developers.

Companies like Tesla have moved their French headquarters to its former industrial areas where factories have long shut.

“We need to find a second wind for Seine-Saint-Denis so jobs stay here,” said Isabelle Vallentin, the number two at Solideo, the state body charged with delivering the Olympic projects.

And Seine-Saint-Denis’s “extremely decrepit housing has to be overhauled”, she added.

A large slice of the US$4.8-billion building budget for the Games is going into this push, with the department the big winner, taking around 80 per cent of 1.7 billion euros in public money. While private investment is harder to quantify, it likely is not far behind.

A photo shows a view of the construction site of a new footbridge linking the Stade de France and Le Franc Moisin neighbourhood of Saint-Denis, a northern Paris suburb, on March 13, 2024. (Photo: AFP)