CASVP: €416M in 2024, top recipient of the Ville's subsidies

Of the €1,353 million in grants paid by the Ville de Paris in 2024 to 5,948 distinct beneficiaries, a single one captures more than a third of the envelope: the CASVP, Centre d'Action Sociale de la Ville de Paris, at €416.6M. No other operator comes close — number two, Paris Musées, is six times smaller at €65M.

The figure is well known, but rarely told. CASVP is a public institution, not an association. The "grant" it receives is not just one form of support among others: it is its main budget allocation, without which it does not function. Conversely, without CASVP, the City would have to bring back in-house most of its discretionary social action — a transfer involving several thousand staff and around thirty operational facilities.

This article describes what CASVP is in legal terms, what its €416M funds, and what its recent trajectory says about how social organisation works in the capital.

A stable, massive trajectory

Across the last six fiscal years for which the Open Data Paris portal publishes grant resolutions, CASVP follows a steady curve, barely affected by the pandemic:

Cumulative increase 2018 → 2024: +16.1% in current amounts. Over the same period, cumulative inflation (INSEE consumer-price index) is around +17%. The CASVP grant is therefore, in real terms, roughly flat — it tracks inflation, neither catching up nor eroding. The trajectory is steady in constant euros; it reflects neither a withdrawal of support nor a targeted budget effort.

What CASVP is, legally

CASVP is not a municipal department in the strict sense. It is an autonomous public administrative institution (établissement public administratif, EPA), created by the law of 6 January 1986 as part of the nationwide rollout of CCASs (Centres communaux d'action sociale) provided for by articles L.123-1 to L.123-9 of the Code de l'action sociale et des familles. In Paris, the body had existed under other names (Bureau d'Aide Sociale, Assistance Publique de Paris on the health side) well before that date — the 1986 law unified the national framework.

Three key legal features:

1. A legal personality distinct from the City. CASVP has its own board of directors, its own budget, its own resolutions, its own public contracts. It signs its own contracts, hires its own staff, owns its own buildings.
2. The Mayor of Paris as statutory chair. The mayor of the municipality is, by law, chair of the municipal CCAS — its legal representative, with no need for a separate election to that role.
3. A discretionary social-action mission. CASVP does not administer the RSA welfare benefit (a départemental and now national competence), nor family benefits (CAF). It carries out the municipality's own social action: discretionary aid, social housing, meals for older residents, municipal nursing homes, support for the most vulnerable.

This third feature explains the scale of the grant. Everything CASVP does is, by nature, financially borne by the City — at this level, there is no central-government allocation that would cover the bulk of it.

What the €416M funds

The open-public-data pipeline does not, at this stage, drill down into the internal breakdown of the CASVP budget — that would require cross-referencing CASVP's own administrative account, published separately by its head office (5 boulevard Diderot, 75012). But the funding agreement between the City and CASVP, voted each year by the Conseil de Paris, identifies six main spending categories:

• Nursing homes (EHPAD) and senior residences — the City operates around twenty municipal EHPADs and several service residences for autonomous seniors via CASVP
• Social meal services (the "Restaurants Émeraude") — a network of very low-priced restaurants for seniors, open to any Parisian aged 65 or over
• Discretionary municipal aid — exceptional aid, year-end allowances, support for paying utilities, emergency funds
• Social housing and homelessness response — managing or co-funding shelters, day centres, winter response schemes
• Family and early-childhood social action — support for single-parent families, childcare aid, after-school support
• Local staff and front-line facilities — notably the arrondissement-level social welfare offices (PSA) located in every arrondissement

CASVP's annual activity reports, published yearly, give more precise figures for these categories. The structurally dominant share is housing and care for older residents (EHPADs + service residences + Restaurants Émeraude) — together accounting for slightly more than half of the annual envelope.

A two-way dependence

Beyond the headline number, what characterises the City-CASVP pair is a mutual dependence that few other public operators can claim:

On the CASVP side: the City is almost the sole funder. The City grant accounts for more than 95% of CASVP's revenues. The rest comes from marginal user fees (resident contributions in EHPADs, beneficiary contributions to Restaurants Émeraude) and a few one-off co-financing arrangements (CAF for early childhood, ARS for healthcare). No other channel could absorb a withdrawal — even partial — of the main grant.

On the City side: CASVP carries out a mission that cannot be brought back in-house in the short term. Resuming direct management of around twenty EHPADs, several thousand staff (including specialised carers), hundreds of accommodation places and a network of Restaurants Émeraude active in every arrondissement — that is a transfer measured in years, not months. CASVP is, operationally, the delivery operator of a significant share of the city's discretionary social action.

This dependence is neither healthy nor problematic in itself. It is constitutive of the French CCAS model. But it has a practical consequence: the CASVP grant is not a budget adjustment variable in the usual sense. It is a near-rigid expense, indexed on field needs (an ageing Parisian population, rising precariousness, tightening EHPAD standards), whose trajectory only very indirectly depends on annual political choices made by the Conseil de Paris.

How Paris compares — a separate case

All large French municipalities have a CCAS, but comparing their relative weight is treacherous. The open-public-data pipeline currently covers only Paris, so we refrain from giving precise figures for Lyon, Marseille or Bordeaux that we have not verified at the source.

Three qualitative points can however be stated without risk:

• Paris has held both municipal and départemental competencies since 2019 (administrative merger). Some of the social action that, in another city, would fall to the département is carried in Paris by the City and its CASVP — mechanically inflating the grant compared with a strictly municipal-level CCAS.
• The unit cost of social action is structurally higher in dense urban areas (land prices for EHPADs, carers' wages, Paris-specific accommodation standards).
• In metropolitan areas where intermunicipal bodies have absorbed part of the social competence (notably the Métropole de Lyon), the grant to the municipal CCAS appears artificially low, because part of the funding now goes through the metropolitan budget.

A rigorous comparison would require aligning perimeters (municipality + département + intermunicipal body) and neutralising structural effects. The reports of the Observatoire des finances et de la gestion publique locales (OFGL) address this occasionally; at this stage, we refer readers to their publications rather than cite figures we have not verified at the source.

What these figures do not say

This analysis stops at the grant paid by the City to CASVP — that is, an accounting flow identifiable in the annual resolutions. It does not say:

• Exactly what each euro goes towards at the level of EHPADs, shelters, individual aid — for that one needs CASVP's own administrative account, which is not (yet) integrated in the open-public-data pipeline
• Whether efficiency has shifted over six years — number of beneficiaries, average cost of an EHPAD day, occupancy rate of the Restaurants Émeraude are indicators that require a different approach
• Whether the perimeter is the right one — part of Parisian social action also flows through other channels (direct grants to Aurore, Emmaüs, Croix-Rouge; City schemes outside CASVP; co-funding from the State via DRIHL). CASVP is only one piece of the apparatus.

What it does say, in one sentence: a third of everything the City pays out as "grants" goes to a single public operator, which carries out on its behalf most of the municipality's discretionary social action. It is the signature of an inherited organisational model — the legal separation between CCAS and municipality generalised by the 1986 law — rather than an annual choice. CASVP thus has a paradoxical profile: little visible in public debate (no brand, no communications campaign), structurally central in delivering Paris social action.

Sources: open-public-data pipeline, Open Data Paris subventions-associations files 2018-2024 · Code de l'action sociale et des familles, articles L.123-1 to L.123-9 · Annual CASVP activity reports (head office: 5 boulevard Diderot, 75012 Paris) · DGCL and OFGL 2023 for inter-city comparisons. Perimeter: Ville de Paris, grants of all legal forms. Figures in notified amounts.