SAINT-DENIS – Less than 500m separate the Stade de France – the sparkling centrepiece of the Paris 2024 Olympics – and the crumbling Francs-Moisins estate plagued by poverty and crime.

Despite its name, the Paris Games 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.

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’ pitch for the Games – which run from July 26 to Aug 11 – leaned hard on regenerating an area that has absorbed wave after wave of immigration and where almost a third of its 2 million people lives below the poverty line.

France not only hopes to use the Olympics to turbo-charge ongoing redevelopment there, but also to recast the 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, where 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 on the River Seine where part of the athletes’ village has been built, has seen his little municipality turned upside down by construction works for the Olympics. But he is determined it will now extract the maximum benefit from the Games.

“I have been working on this for three years,” he said.

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

However, 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, who lives in the Francs-Moisins estate – which is also getting a major facelift – said of the anticipated disruption: “It is going to be a nightmare to get around.”

It is hard to go anywhere in Seine-Saint-Denis these days without seeing scaffolding or cranes building whole new neighbourhoods.

The Olympics are 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.

High property prices in Paris and a massive soon-to-delivered extension of its metro system into Seine-Saint-Denis has made the area attractive for developers.

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

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

A large slice of the €4.5 billion (S$6.6 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 in public money.

The athletes’ village, the Games’ biggest building project and a whole new eco-neighbourhood in itself, will house 14,500 athletes and their support teams as well as 9,000 Paralympians and their staff.

Once the Paralympics end, the village will morph into a mixed neighbourhood of apartments and offices, the first of its 6,000 new residents moving in early in 2025, followed by a similar number of workers.

But only a third of the 2,800 apartments will be sold on the open market.

Contrary to previous Games like London – where the organisers were accused of “gentrification on an industrial scale” and not keeping their promises to locals – Solideo’s Vallentin said they insisted developers “respond first to (local) housing needs”.

So 25 to 40 per cent of the apartments will go to social housing, with the rest let out at “affordable” rents through semi-public housing bodies.

Seine-Saint-Denis’ other big-headline win is a clutch of new swimming pools, of which it is in dire need.

The most eye-catching is the Olympic Aquatic Centre, built opposite the Stade de France where the diving, water polo and artistic swimming medals will be decided.

It will also get the main Olympic pool, which is to be dismantled and divided in two after the Games, as well as a new training pool.

Olympic-related sites have been popping up like confetti across Seine-Saint-Denis, with the little town of Dugny likely to be transformed by the Games.

Its population is set to grow by a third with housing on a site inherited from the Olympics’ “media cluster”. Badly served by public transport until now, Dugny is using the Games to diversify its housing stock, 77 per cent of which is social housing – the highest rate in France.

One-third of the 1,400 new homes are being set aside to help get people on the property ladder.

Dugny’s mayor Quentin Gesell said many of his friends “who had grown up like me in Dugny have had to leave because they can neither buy here nor rent (their incomes being too high for social housing) when they would have preferred to stay close to their families”.

Another more subtle transformation is likely to come through a series of new footbridges linking areas long divided by the major road and rail arteries that slice through the department.

Back near the Francs-Moisins estate, a foot and bike bridge is being built across the Saint-Denis canal to the Stade de France, replacing an old and unreliable rotating road bridge and a steep-stepped pedestrian crossing.

“It’s a nightmare to cross now,” said Karene, a mother of three.

“You have to fold up the pram and take the baby in the other arm. So this is really great, a real plus for the area.”

The bridge had been talked of for years but the Games finally got it over the line.

Stephane Troussel, the socialist head of Seine-Saint-Denis council, said that the Olympics have been the “pivot point that has accelerated the transformation” of the department.

“In record time we have managed to deliver a huge amount of infrastructure, housing, roads and bridges,” he said.

But there are doubts over the jobs the Games promised to deliver to the department, whose 10.4 per cent unemployment rate is nearly a third higher than the national average.

While around 180,000 people will work at the Games, according to official estimates, most will be on short-term contracts, such as the 6,000 people taken on by Sodexo for catering at the athletes’ village.

Beyond that, though, one of the biggest Olympics legacies could be how Seine-Saint-Denis is seen.

Police have already stepped up operations targeting drug dealers and a massive security operation is planned for the Games.

In welcoming visitors from all over the world this summer, Seine-Saint-Denis hopes to write a new chapter in its history, one that plays up its diversity and potential rather than crime and sporadic outbursts of rioting.

Back on the Francs-Moisins estate, Karene is praying that “the visibility” will do everyone good.

“I hope it is well organised, because if it is like the football (the chaotic scenes before the 2022 Champions League final), Saint-Denis’ image will plummet again.” AFP