After looking in Part One at some empirical and reflective detail in the particular kinds of vulnerabilities that destitute Paris street children exhibit with respect to chronically endangered health, we now take up in Part Two a second central moment of their situation, their homelessness.

Poor Children II: Corrected Numbers

Before, however, looking at some economic and philosophical reflections on the persistent lack of proper housing that afflicts so many destitute Paris street children, we do well first to remind ourselves of some of the relatively uncertain empirical backgrounds to such reflections.

Unreliable Numbers

In March 2010 France's official Observatoire national de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale (ONPES) corrected its earlier April 2008 estimates with the help of its unusually valuable ten-year longitudinal study entitled Bilan de 10 ans d'observation de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale à l'heure de la crise. ONPES now reported that already in 2007 poverty in France, carefully measured at the European-wide metric of 60% of net national income and according to ONPES's 11 central indicators applied to data from 1998 to 2008, affected 13.4% of the then population. Moreover, ONPES specified the different kinds of poverty at issue.