***Backup option for headline: There are more than 200 unoccupied dwellings per homeless person in Italy***
Italy’s homelessness crisis is not an issue rooted in lack of dwellings, rather in the absence of national housing policies, Airbnb’s and not trusting long-term tenants.
Authors: Greta Hirschberg, Yuliia Kyzyk, Matteo Scannavini, Hongyu Zhang
The amount of empty dwellings in Italy overpass the homeless population by more than 10 million, suggesting that Italy’s housing model is broken.
The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) published in December 2022 new data that shows a staggering 10.7 million unoccupied dwellings in 2019, an increase of more than 52% from 2011. Meanwhile, the homeless population is estimated at around 50 thousand as of 2014.
“The total lack of housing policies, at a state level, is to blame” claims Sarah Gainsforth, an Italian journalist and researcher that specializes in social issues and urban transformations. She also adds that the market “has no interest in building housing for a working class population”.
This issue isn’t exclusive to Italy. Throughout the whole European continent unoccupied dwellings remain empty while a housing and homelessness crisis is on the rise. With more migration than ever the last decade and the Covid-19 pandemic leaving people without jobs and income to pay rent and mortgages, this issue has gotten worse.
It is estimated that more than 50 thousand people live in the streets of Italy. However, the data available for this phenomenon is scarce. Istat recently published that in 2021 there were more than 96 thousand people without a dwelling. However, Caterina Cortese of fio.PSD, the National Federation of Organizations for Homeless People, says the figures are not comparable with old data because the new census includes categories outside the proper definition of homelessness. While the 2014 data remain the most reliable to measure homelessness with a reported 50 thousand unhoused people, Cortese is sure that this count is underestimated.
Unoccupied houses are defined by Istat as dwellings that are empty or occupied exclusively by not resident and short-term tenants. This definition includes abandoned houses, holiday homes, Airbnb’s as well as illegal rentals and abusive occupations. Gainsforth tells us that there are two factors that explain the large amount of empty houses in Italy. On one hand, during the housing expansion after World War 2 that created the dwellings where most people live in today, the large majority of the accommodations were built for people with high income. And to this day houses for the working class are not being built.
On the other hand, homeownership is what shapes wealth in Italy as they are kept as assets and rarely rented out to long-term tenants. State programs and public fundings promote homeownership. The lack of policies supporting the rental sector and the mismatch between housing prices and rents with income levels make landlords reluctant to rent out their homes to ordinary tenants. They are afraid they won’t be able to pay rent or that they will mistreat the property, and the eviction process can take up to two years. Thus, most of the time, they either rent it out on Airbnb or leave it empty and simply hold the property as an asset.
The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened this situation. Cortese confirms that “all the data we have about poverty tells us that it has increased in the last 3 years” while Gaisnforth explains that the pandemic has impoverished many households and intensified the empty house trend while thousands live in the streets.
The housing crisis is not addressed by most politicians. This is because most Italians own their homes, so it’s the minority that is excluded from the housing market (only 17% of occupied dwellings are rented). “When the majority of the population owns a house, the housing question is marginal. We are at a dead end on this issue” explains Enrico Puccini, president of the Rome Housing Observatory.
Although Italy lacks a national housing policy, Cortese claims that the country made many investments in the last decade to improve homelessness services, trying new and promising strategies like the housing-first approach. “We are moving from a cultural welfare model based only on first-level assistance, such as soup kitchens and public dormitories, towards an intervention that instead includes these people in a program to emancipate them from the street, providing a house and intensive social support” – explains Cortese. “But this transition requires time” – she concludes.
This issue is subscribed to a larger housing crisis in Europe that has been rising in the past decade. Even though the last time the data of unoccupied dwellings in different European countries was in 2011 – showing some countries with more than 30% of their total dwellings unoccupied – numbers from the present day show that this is still a pressing issue. In 2020 17.5% of the European Union population lived in overcrowded housing and 7.5% of the population spent more than 40% of their disposable income on their accomodations. Furthermore, between 2010 and 2022 rents have increased by 18.5% and house prices by 49.2%.
The European housing crisis has become a pressing issue in the last few years with the homeless situation being a serious topic of discussion. With people living in worse conditions and spending more money on their accommodations while rent and housing prices keep rising. Italy is a prime example of a country where the state is inadequate in solving this issue resulting in an expansion of the social class gap and an increase in homelessness. A structural change is needed in Europe in order for the basic rights of housing and shelter to be available for all.