French Companies Are Inviting Homeless People to Sleep in Their Offices

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French Companies Are Inviting Homeless People to Sleep in Their Offices

Most workplaces sit empty every night. Across France, companies are opening theirs up to people experiencing homelessness.

By:<br>Michaela Haas

June 15, 2026

6 min read

Cities + Towns

Credit: Béatrice Prève

For several years, when Pierre-Yves Loaëc left his office in Nantes in the evenings, he passed a woman sleeping rough in the parking lot near Nobilito, the marketing agency he runs. The contrast nagged at him. Outside, she huddled near a parking garage vent for warmth during the winter. “My office had heat, a kitchen, sofas, a shower, toilets, but was sitting empty all night,” he recalls. Yet he never spoke to her, unsure how he could help.

Instead, Loaëc became interested in a broader question: Why were so many offices sitting empty every night while thousands of people lacked a safe place to sleep? The answer became Bureaux du Coeur (“Offices of the Heart”), a nonprofit that turns unused office space into temporary overnight accommodation for people experiencing homelessness.

Bureaux du Coeur has helped more than 1,000 people and provided roughly 160,000 nights of shelter. Credit: Béatrice Prève<br>Today, the initiative works with 400 companies in 40 cities across France, and beyond, in Lisbon, Barcelona and Brussels. Since its founding in 2019, Bureaux du Coeur has helped more than 1,000 people and provided roughly 160,000 nights of shelter. Its ambition is even larger: to expand across Europe as cities grapple with two parallel crises — a persistent rise in homelessness and a glut of underused office space following the shift to remote and hybrid work.

Bureaux de Coeur’s solution remains remarkably simple: When employees go home, offices become homes.

Loaëc did not arrive at the concept alone. He is president of the Nantes chapter of the Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants (CJD), a longstanding French business leaders’ movement founded on the principle that economic activity should serve society. “I always imagined the solution collectively,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t do it alone.”

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When he first presented the idea to around 15 fellow business leaders, “many people thought I had lost my mind,” Loaëc says with a laugh. Some immediately listed potential problems — security concerns, insurance issues, liability risks, property damage. Others focused on the practical question that would ultimately define the initiative: How could it actually work?

The group developed a model that companies could realistically adopt. To qualify for Bureaux du Coeur, candidates must meet strict criteria: They must be adults, without children or pets, reside legally in France, use neither alcohol nor drugs, and not suffer from severe physical or mental health issues. Also, every candidate must participate in accompanying measures to help them reintegrate into a job or vocational training.

Naturally, these criteria exclude a large number of those in need. “We can’t accommodate everybody,” Loaëc acknowledges, noting that roughly 350,000 people are homeless in France. That limitation disappointed him at first, but he says participating companies are not equipped to provide medical treatment, addiction support or intensive social care. Their role is to offer space while partner organizations select participants and provide professional support.

Each company takes only one guest at a time. The “guests,” as Loaëc insists on calling them, sleep in meeting rooms, break areas, or spaces that are temporarily converted into bedrooms each evening.

“You can’t keep a job if you don’t have a roof over your head,” Loaëc says. “The mental burden becomes enormous.” Credit: Monsieur Roni<br>The first host was Loaëc himself. In 2019, he welcomed Elisabeth, a woman fleeing domestic violence who had been sleeping in her car despite holding a job. She stayed in his office for three weeks while securing longer-term housing.

A second guest, known as Booba, stayed during the Covid-19 pandemic, practically alone in the building throughout the country’s first lockdown. At the time, emergency shelters were among the most significant clusters of coronavirus transmission in Nantes. “Knowing he was safe in the agency and away from that risk was important,” Loaëc says.

The breakthrough came in May 2020, when France’s largest regional newspaper, Ouest-France, published a story about the initiative. Companies and social-service organizations from across the country began calling. “The response was completely crazy,” Loaëc remembers.

What had started as a local experiment became a national movement. The initiative now employs 12 staff members and coordinates approximately 270 volunteers nationwide. Funding comes from foundations and private...