“Active policies are required to encourage the settlement of new residents: otherwise the social fabric will be extinguished”
By Vera Mantengoli
4 February 2021
It has always been a problem and the solution has not yet been found. We are talking about housing and how it is always more and more difficult for a Venetian to find real estate aimed at residents. Today amendments to incentivize residence, proposed by opposition groups of counselors without the signature of Andrea Martini, will be discussed in City Council. Yesterday, during a meeting coordinated by Franco Migliorini on this delicate issue organized by councilor Martini, the voices of experts were head. “The data provided by the City for 2017 and 2018 state that the City manages 5,500 residences, with 800 empty, and that Ater has 5,184 homes managed, with 1,000 empty” explained Orazio Alberti di Ocio: “The lack of maintenance of the public residential building stock is the final result of the total underestimation of the problems related to social housing by the State and the Region, which has translated into the absence of multi-year programs of intervention and in a chronic lack of funding, which has provoked the widespread and serious decay of these public assets, in particular of the vacant and never recovered homes”.
The middle class feels it the most. “We need to construct a real housing policy, and to treat the home itself as an element of welfare” said Laura Fregolent, Professor at Università Iuav and one of the speakers. “The social fabric of public housing has changed. At one time there were the wealthy and the poor, now there are more intermediate degrees – a middle class – and housing is increasingly costly”. “Before making proposals we want to hear from people who study the subject of housing every day”, said the former president of the Municipality, Andrea Martini. “We live in a city with 10,000 empty homes: 20% are public and the rest private, that is, locations which now have no tourists”, explained Franco Landini of Urban Promo. “The public housing should be recovered with true social housing projects, which have two main elements: Savings and Loan Banks and resumption of the Special Law policy offering subsidies for restorations carried out by residents”.
Also participating at the meeting were Paolo Russo and Giacomo Salerno, Venetian scholars of tourism.
Source: La Nuova Venezia
Campaign For A Living Venice 