in Open for Maintenance/Wegen Umbau geöffnet, German Pavillion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 Catalogue
I grew up in a tiny apartment in Rome that my father adapted over the years to accommodate the growing family. He built the furniture himself, each piece fitting the others to make use of all the space available, not unlike a sailboat. One day, when I was ten, he sat the family down at the kitchen table and asked, “Where would you like to live? We could stay here or move into a bigger house in the suburbs.” We had no doubt: moving out was not an option. Rent was low and our small terrace overlooked the Palatine and Aventine hills to the left, the Tiber straight ahead, and the Capitoline hill to the right; why would we ever want to leave this place?
I used to walk through the Roman Forum every day. I would follow the quiet paths through the ancient ruins and exit at the opposite side into the bustling city. In summertime, we would picnic between the ruins and play under the pine trees or inside the fountains. Of course, even back then, this was not allowed; my mother would be told off by police officers. Nevertheless, the Forum was an integral part of the city. Today, it is fenced off and one must buy a ticket to pass the turnstiles. Once inside, you can only look. Picnics and playing are not allowed. Over the years, our rent increased, but never too much. The landlord, a Catholic institution, gradually raised rents for new tenants, but old-time residents like my father paid rent based on their income. We stayed, but around us, the neighborhood changed. It started to feel empty. Old neighbors died, others left, new ones moved in. Judging by the closed shutters, they were never in. Many homes became second homes and, more recently, Airbnb rentals.
When my father first came to Rome, in 1963, the majority of Italians was still renting: in 1961, only 45.9 percent of households were homeowners. Today, that number has risen to 70.8 percent; another 20.5 percent rent, and an astonishing 8,7 percent live in ‘usufruct,’ meaning they neither own nor pay rent for the home they live in.[1] The high percentage of homeowners in Italy is often portrayed as a natural and historical fact. Official reports are invariably convinced that Italians display a marked “preference”[2] for ownership, presenting it as some kind of anthropological evidence. But something is missing from this narrative: over the decades, homeownership has been actively promoted by national policies and funded with public investments and tax incentives, quite suddenly turning everyone into a mortgage holder. As a result, and more than ever, housing is at the center of a fundamental conflict between the idea of the home as the physical space where life, care, and social reproduction take place,and that of the home as a financial asset. These two dimensions are not compatible, as it is precisely the value of housing as a financial asset that erodes its social value as an inhabited place. The effects of this process of erosion have become more apparent as unaffordable housing markets worldwide continue to push low-income tenants out of cities. At the same time, the invaluable public housing stocks accumulated by states in the post-war years are either being sold off or left to decay. Italy is no exception; on the contrary, due to a combination of demographic trends, economic policies, and the extraordinary appeal the country holds as a global tourism destination, Italy presents us with a textbook case study that is worth looking at in depth.
Housing postwar Italy
The first legislation in Italy providing for public housing to be built for those in need dates back to 1903 and the introduction of the so-called Luzzatti-Law.[3] Prior to this, poverty and housing exclusion had been dealt with exclusively by charity institutions. The law called for the establishment of local, decentralized Istituti Autonomi Case Popolari (Autonomous Institutes for Public Housing, or IACP) to provide housing to the less affluent. But in Rome, at a time when unauthorized, informal settlements were the main solution to the housing crisis, the local IACP was unable to catch up with the immense task of housing their inhabitants. Under the fascist regime, poor people were pushed out of the city center by high rents and evictions aimed at crafting Mussolini’s vision for a capital city of monumental grandeur and emptiness. At the same time, a steady inflow of migrants from rural areas was pouring into growing industrial cities in search of work. Between 1955 and 1970, 17 million Italians migrated to cities.[4] They found no housing, so they built shacks. The 1951 census revealed that within the city, around 100,000 people lived in 30,000 shacks, caves, basements, warehouses and attics.[5] For decades, the lack of official data on this silent housing emergency was also a convenient way to ignore it. In Rome, entire neighborhoods were built with no planning authorization. It is estimated that one-third of the city originated from the sprawl of informal or quasi-formal settlements. Over time, this praxis consolidated into an established cultural phenomenon known in Italy as Abusivismo—a word commonly used to describe the uncontrolled development of entire stretches of land by individual plot owners. This urban Wild West remained unchallenged until at least the 1950s, when the task of clearing the slums at the edges of the city and providing affordable housing for newly-arriving workers would be transferred to a national program drafted by the Christian Democrat Minister of Labor and Social Security Amintore Fanfani, who would later go on to become prime minister. The much-glorified program, called INA-Casa (after the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, or National Insurance Institute), was approved in 1949 with the dual intent of fostering employment and solving the housing emergency. By the time the so-called “Fanfani-Plan” was discontinued in 1963, almost 355,000 housing units had been built across the country, and over 40,000 construction workers had found steady employment in each year of its run. The program was funded by a mix of international postwar grants, deductions from the salaries of workers and employers, and state contributions.[6] INA-Casa was an unprecedented experiment in which the government firmly took the lead deploying centralized housing policies on a vast scale. Nine housing projects were built in Rome, housing more than 55,000 people.[7] The plan was scheduled to run out, but its success led to it being replaced by another program, dubbed Gescal (Gestione Case per i Lavoratori, or Workers’ Housing Management), a fund with the same purpose and financing model.[8]
Even before the conception of the INA-Casa program, cities were mandated to draft urban master plans regulating land use by a national urban planning law passed by the fascist government in 1942.[9] However, it took two decades before master planning started to be effectively adopted by municipalities nationwide. Rome, for example, only adopted such a plan in 1962 after Fiorentino Sullo—the Christian Democratic Minister of Public Works who had overseen its drafting—set an ultimatum for the plan’s adoption and suspended all building permits until then; an unprecedented and courageous act against land speculation. The same year, Sullo introduced an affordable housing law requiring municipalities to select areas to be allocated for the construction of public housing covering between 40 and 70 percent of the total housing demand for the next decade.[10]
Sullo’s proposal went even further. He understood rent as the extraction of value from land, which is increased by planning regimes of urbanization and public investments for infrastructure and services. These were, and still are, a key factor in determining market prices and housing affordability. It is for this reason that Sullo also proposed to reform the 1942 national urban planning law and campaigned for the executive branch to have the right to purchase undeveloped real estate at a price usually reserved for agricultural land, then sell it after development at a value increased by the servicing cost they had borne, or sell only the right to surface as a concession. Traditionally, as in most countries, Italian law assimilates land ownership with the right to build. Sullo’s proposal would have separated the two by nationalizing building rights. This way, developers would profit if they actually built housing on their property, but not from speculating on their real estate’s surplus value. Sullo’s visionary proposal was designed to structurally tackle the single most important issue at the root of the housing crisis: the private appropriation of inflated land values through speculative real estate transactions. Needless to say, his reform proposal did not sit well with the construction lobby and Sullo became the subject of a defamatory media campaign accusing him of wanting to abolish private property in Italy. His political party isolated him and the most radical elements of his proposal never reached Parliament.
In an attempt to address widespread social uprisings—crystallized in the historical general strike of November 19, 1969—a second attempt was made a few years later to achieve public control of urban rent through the housing law of 1971, followed in 1977 by the Bucalossi Law, named after one of Sullos successors, Pietro Bucalossi, which reintroduced the possibility of land expropriation based on agricultural value.[11] The law remains ambiguous on the concept of expropriation, but many considered it a success because it stated ownership rights and surface rights to be two different things. Private ownership of the land did therefore no longer automatically imply the right to build. This right is now allocated by local governments with building permits termed concessioni. A pioneering form of rent control was also introduced in 1978 with the Equo canone (Fair Rent) law, which capped the rent of any unit through a complex matrix based on factors such as location, size, and state of maintenance.[12] These, however, were often too difficult to assess and calculate for the authorities, leading to frustration towards a heavily bureaucratic system and, more generally, towards any form of state intervention in the private housing market. Results fell short of expectations, partly due to administrative delays and planning mistakes, and partly due to a global cultural shift already underway: from the late 1970s onward, as homeownership increased steadily, housing was less and less perceived as a public resource; instead, it increasingly became a commodity.
Inventing a right to buy
With the elections of Margaret Thatcher and then Ronald Reagan, the period between 1978 and 1980 is a turning point in global social and economic history. The advent of neoliberalism, facilitated by national legal systems, was marked in Italy by a 1980 Constitutional Court ruling, which declared the compensations for compulsory acquisitions based on agricultural value to be unlawful expropriations and mandated the reimbursement of incurred losses.[13] The ruling left national and local authorities reeling from the compensation payments for previously acquired land and suddenly facing huge costs when trying to acquire new real estate. As free market ideologies gained traction, Italy began to sell off its public housing stock in 1993. Until 2011, according to estimates by the Italian social housing federation Federcasa, 190,000 publicly owned units worth 9 billion euros had been sold well below market value for only 2.5 billion euros.[14] In 1998, state funding for public rented housing ended altogether when the Gescal fund— which, on average, had subsidized 1 billion euros’ worth of public housing construction per year—was abolished altogether. A law from the same year, which still regulates the rental sector today, abolished rent control and left rent prices to be determined by the market; below market-rate rents are now ensured through tax incentives for landlords and housing subsidies for tenants. [15]
With a twenty-year delay, Italy thus followed in the path opened by the United States with the 1974 Housing and Community Act. Its passage ended funding for the construction of public housing and subsidized the private market through housing allowances, known as the Section 8 program, to cover rental costs exceeding 30 percent of a tenant’s income.[16] This paved the way for a systematic shift of public resources to the private sector. Two main arguments were employed to justify this shift: first, the need for social mixing by dispersing poor tenants, otherwise concentrated in public housing areas. This argument holds some truth in that concentrating poverty in ghettos is never a good idea, but it does not deal with the root causes of poverty, nor with the prohibitive private housing market that allowances end up supporting. The second argument employed to justify the shift lies in the very name of the program: Housing Choice Voucher Program. In true neoliberal speak, so the argument goes, even poor tenants should have a right to choose where to live, again ignoring the economic conditions of tenants and the simple evidence that under the voluntary voucher program, many landlords choose not to rent homes to tenants on welfare. For too many people, high rents mean that there is simply no choice about where to live. This way, the decimation of public housing continued, now seen as the last resort for the poorest segments of society rather than as a valuable resource for all.
A look back across the past four decades confirms that neoliberalism never had much to do with economic efficiency and much more with pure and simple ideology: While the divestment of public housing stock was justified with the need to reduce government spending, in the long run, the shift to subsidizing the private rental market has seen an increase in spending, not a decrease. For example, under Margaret Thatcher’s notorious Right to Buy program, which allowed tenants of public housing to acquire their unit from their local council at a steep discount, the British government has sold property totaling 47 billion British pounds to this day; meanwhile, it spends around 16.5 billion British pounds each year on housing benefits.[17] In Italy, inefficiency within the public administration—itself also a consequence of disinvestment—motivated further cuts to public spending, fueling a vicious circle that turned out to be quite functional for presenting the free market as a solution to the shortcomings of state welfare.
A nation of homeowners
As the myth of homeownership spread around the world, the cost of housing increased. Beginning in the mid 1990s, during the tenure of Mario Draghi as Director General of the Italian Treasury who was responsible for radical reforms and privatization programs that were aimed at ensuring Italy’s membership in the eurozone starting in 1999, the annual number of housing units sold rose sharply in Italy, almost doubling until 2008.[18] As a result of the restructuring of the Italian financial system homes truly began to be understood as financial assets: whereas in industrial capitalism, companies used their fixed assets, such as real estate, as collateral for loans for purposes of production, now companies began to create special purpose vehicles to which they conferred their real estate assets, obtaining capital not as means of production but for incrementing profitability for shareholders. This mechanism relies on a steady increase of real estate values boosted by state programs subsidizing homeownership, as well as by bank loans at low interest rates. It is no coincidence, then, that in 1998, the Italian government abolished rent control, triggering a sharp increase in rents and property values; between 2000 and 2007, house prices in Italy increased by almost 40 percent.[19]
Over a period of 30 years, between 1971 and 2001, the proportion of housing occupied by renter households in Italy as a percentage of total available housing declined dramatically, from about 40 percent to 16 percent.[20] Since 2008, thanks to digital platforms such as Airbnb, a further share of the already scarce private residential stock has been converted into more profitable short-term holiday homes. Today, close to half a million rentals are available in Italy via the platform.[21] This has hollowed out entire urban districts, especially in the city centers, where homes are increasingly bought as assets and often left empty, or only temporarily inhabited by tourists. But Italians who own property have a trump card: unlimited rent-seeking from real estate is now socially accepted and viewed as a legitimate substitute for declining salaries. With short-term rentals like Airbnb, landlords’ profits yield more, at the expense of long-term tenants. As of today, renting up to four homes as vacation homes yearlong is considered by the Italian law as a non-commercial activity and the income generated is taxed at only 21 percent—2 percent less than for the lowest income bracket. On the flip side, the mismatch between housing prices, rents, and income levels means that both the rental sector and the property ladder are no longer accessible to an increasing number of people who will not inherit property. The share of people aged 20 to 29 still living with their parents in Italy is therefore disproportionally higher than in most OECD countries, trailed only by Greece and South Korea.[22] Furthermore, according to INPS (Italian National Institute for Social Security), half of full-time workers in Italy have a monthly gross income of less than 2,058 euros.[23] Stagnating salaries and soaring rents constitute insurmountable obstacles to class mobility and to the emancipation of younger generations. Confronted with this scenario, it becomes painfully clear that the promotion of private home ownership was pivotal to the ongoing conservative revolution that has been eroding post-war welfare since at least forty years. Homeownership was promoted as a means of generating the cultural consensus needed to present the project of the richest members of society as being in the general interest, justifying the return and rise of sharp class inequalities. The latter are often exacerbated by other civil inequalities, as migrants—and their descendants—, for example, are much less likely to inherit wealth or property.
Conclusion
As of today, in Italy, there are no national policy for public housing in place, nor any coherent form of rent control for short-term leases. Renters and those in need of housing are exposed to the whims and structural limitations of local governments and authorities on a shoestring budget when it comes to housing security. The alternative to public housing is commonly referred to as social housing, i.e., housing built by private developers with the aim to provide dwellings at an intermediate cost, usually with the aid of tax breaks and public funding. Social housing units are often let-to-buy, meaning that ultimately, they are targeted at middle class buyers who can afford to get a mortgage and eventually disappear from the rental market. With virtually no public debate on the issue, a new housing emergency is on the rise. According to a 2017 estimate, 650,000 people were on the waiting list competing for the 850,000 public housing units remaining across Italy, of which, astonishingly, 55,000 stand empty because the local public housing companies in charge are structurally underfunded and unable—or unwilling—to undertake essential works of maintenance.[24] Conversely, since 2020, in an attempt to boost the economy, more than 60 billion euros have been generously distributed to landlords choosing to retrofit their properties in order to meet higher energy standards, de facto financing the renovation of private homes with public money, possibly leading to an increase in private rents in some cities.[25]
In October 2022, in Venice—a city whose exceptional struggles to resist the pressure of the touristic industry are well-known—the independent research collective Ocio counted at least 2,208 empty dwellings among those owned by the two public housing agencies active in the city, ATER and Insula.[26] Many of these are in a state of permanent or semi-permanent decay. As one of the most desirable global touristic destinations, Venice often stands under the spotlight due to its exceptional geographical and economic circumstances. But in a country like Italy, whose economy is increasingly reliant on tourism and where the poor are systematically expulsed from city centers, the case of Venice is no exception anymore, but the norm. Italy badly needs a new public investment program in public—not social—housing. Accordingly, the maintenance of and care for the invaluable existing public housing stock should be at the top of any political force’s agenda if it wishes to save Italy from its tragic destiny of becoming the empty representation of its past splendors and present failures.
[1] See Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, Audizione dell’Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, Dott.ssa Cristina Freguja, Direttrice della Direzione centrale per le statistiche sociali e il welfare, Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, 6 settembre 2022, 6, accessed March 1, 2023, www.istat.it/it/files//2022/09/Istat-Audizione-Politiche-per-la-Casa_06_09_22.pdf.
[2] Ibid.
[3] See Legge sulle case popolari (Public housing law), L. n. 254, Italy 1903.
[4] See Vezio De Lucia, Se questa è una città: La condizione urbana nell’Italia contemporanea, (Rome: Donzelli, 2006), 75.
[5] See Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta, Borgate di Roma (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1960), 23.
[6] Dee Paola di Biagi, “La ‘città pubblica’ e l’Ina-Casa,” in La Grande Ricostruzione: Il piano Ina-Casa e l’Italia degli anni cinquanta, ed. Paola di Biagi, 2nd. ed (Rome: Donzelli, 2010), 11.
[7] See Italo Insolera, Roma Moderna, da Napoleone I al XXI secolo, (Turin : Giulio Einaudi, 2011), 202.
[8] See Disposizioni per favorire l’acquisizione di aree fabbricabili per l’edilizia economica e popolare (Provisions to facilitate the acquisition of areas for the creation of affordable and social housing), L. n. 162, Italy 1962.
[9] See Legge urbanistica (Urban planning law), L. n. 1150, Italy 1942.
[10] See Piani Edilizia Economica Popolare (Affordable Public Housing Plans), L. n. 167, Italy 1962.
[11] See Programmi e coordinamento per l’edilizia residenziale pubblica (Programs and coordination for public residential construction), L. n. 865, Italy 1971; Norme in materia di edificabilità dei suoli (Rules on land suitability for building), L. n. 10, Italy 1977.
[12] Equo Canone: Disciplina delle locazioni di immobili urbani (Fair Rent: Ordering of urban property rentals), L. n. 392, Italy 1978.
[13] See Corte Costituzionale, Sentenza 5/1980, January 5, 1980.
[14] See Federcasa, “Abitazioni sociali: Motore di sviluppo, Fattore di coesione,” April 2014, 12–3, accessed March 1, 2023, www.senato.it/application/xmanager/projects/leg17/attachments/documento_evento_procedura_commissione/files/000/001/276/federcasa.pdf; Federcasa For the law authroizing the sale of public housing units, see Norme in materia di alienazione degli alloggi di edilizia residenziale pubblica, (Rules on repurposing public housing units), L n. 560, Italy 1993.
[15] See Disciplina delle locazioni e del rilascio degli immobili adibiti ad uso abitativo (Ordering the lease and cession of property used for residential purposes), L. n. 431, Italy 1998.
[16] See Housing and Community Development Act, 12 U.S.C. 1706e, USA 1974.
[17] See “Government expenditure on housing benefit in nominal terms in the United Kingdom from 2000/01 to 2021/22,” Statista, November 4, 2022, accessed March 1, 2023, www.statista.com/statistics/283949/housing-benefit-united-kingdom-uk-government-spending/; John Perry, “The Treasury has made £47bn from Right to Buy but we have paid a price in lost social housing,” Inside Housing, March 23, 2021, accessed March 1, 2023, www.insidehousing.co.uk/comment/comment/the-treasury-has-made-47bn-from-right-to-buy-but-we-have-paid-a-price-in-lost-social-housing-70199.
[18] See Giorgio Giobbi and Francesco Zollino: “Tendenze recenti del mercato immobiliare e del credito,” in Le tendenze del mercato immobiliare: l’Italia e il confronto internazionale (Rome: Banca d’Italia, 2012), 17, accessed March 1, 2023, www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/collana-seminari-convegni/2013-0015/Atti_convegno_immobiliare_lug13.pdf.
[19] See ibid.
[20] See Salvatore Chiri, et al., “Tassazione delle abitazioni e mercato degli affitti,” in Le tendenze (see note 20), 208.
[21] See Francesco Luigi Milone, et al., “Airbnb e gli affitti brevi in Italia: le prospettive di un mercato in forte ascesa,” Agenda Digitale, December 21, 2022, accessed March 1, 2023, www.agendadigitale.eu/mercati-digitali/airbnb-e-gli-affitti-brevi-in-italia-le-prospettive-di-un-mercato-in-forte-ascesa/.
[22] See Boris Cournède and Marissa Plouin, No Home for The Young? Stylised Facts and Policy Challenges, ed. OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, 2022, 4.
[23] See Relazione annuale del presidente: XXI rapporto annual, ed. INPS, (Rome: July 2022), 8.
[24] See “La pratica della Mediazione Sociale nell’attività di gestione del patrimonio ERP: Risultati dell’indagine rivolta alle Aziende Casa associate a Federcasa,” ed. Federcasa, 2018, accessed March 1, 2023, cms.federcasa.it/download.aspx?id=ae2f36f4-905f-4ab5-8716-d0d1e16e7bea.
[25] “Enea, non si arresta la corsa del Superbonus 110%: a fine ottobre detrazioni per oltre 60 mld,” Il Sole 24 Ore, November 7, 2022, accessed March 1, 2023, www.ilsole24ore.com/art/superbonus-enea-a-fine-ottobre-detrazioni-oltre-60-mld-AEMJ6rEC.
[26] See “Lo Stato Degli Alloggi Pubblici non Assegnati a Venezia,” Osservatorio Civico sulla Casa e la Residenza, Oct 22, 2022, accessed March 1, 2023, ocio-venezia.medium.com/lo-stato-degli-alloggi-pubblici-non-assegnati-a-venezia-aggiornamento-2022-bee156b8db99.
