Opposition parties speak out against the Brugnaro administration’s three-year plan for the restoration of 538 vacant public housing units: “A strategy is required”
By Maria Ducoli
December 8, 2023
Everyone agrees, minority parties and associations, in saying that what was presented last Tuesday by commissioners Michele Zuin and Simone Venturini “is not a Housing Plan”, even though it bears that name.
The three-year, 28 million Euro plan calls for the restoration of 538 empty public homes between the historic center and the mainland, and specifically, should lead to delivering the first 224 apartments involved in the work by 2026. “Much too small a number”, says councilor Giovanni Andrea Martini (Tutta la città insieme), who yesterday afternoon had a heated exchange about the Plan in the commission meeting with Zuin and Venturini. “It’s just publicity to cover the 95 million Euro lost with the Bosco dello Sport, money which would have allowed interventions on all the thousands of vacant properties in the municipality”, he continued, calling it an “inflated plan, decidedly inadequate for responding to the needs of the city”.
PD leader Giuseppe Saccà’s position was more moderate, who despite openly stating that it could not be defined as a Housing Plan, did recognize that “it is a good thing that something is moving, seeing that we have called for more resources for public housing for a long time”. However, Saccà reiterated that “the theme of housing has many facets that the administration does not want to address, from the limitation of tourist rentals to setting up guarantee funds for the property owners. This would be a true Housing Plan, like in other cities”.
Orazio Alberti of OCIO is also convinced regarding the need to intervene on tourist rentals. “There are about 7,500 short-term rentals in the Municipality of Venice, which have removed housing from the rental market, and we further point out that 17% of the real estate in the historic center is either empty or occupied by non-residents. We cannot think of a Housing Plan without considering this problem” he explained.
“A real Housing Plan is something totally different”, commented Gianfranco Bettin (Verde Progressista), “it is made up of repair and restoration, certainly (much more than those promised), but also of new residences, and a policy to favor long-term rentals in a market heavily conditioned by tourist rentals, which the Municipality has given totally free rein, despite being the only city in Italy that can regulate them thanks to the well-known “Pellicani Amendment”.
Raffaele Bolani of Consulta Civica Veneziana emphasized that “the 14 announcements for available public housing that the Municipality says it has done are much fewer, because they often repeated the same properties, such as in Sant’ Erasmo and Burano, where in the first case four out of four places were abandoned, and in the second case only half were rented”. Bolani also recalled that in 2015 there were 545 vacant public apartments, “while today there are 1,026, yet they say it is the fault of the previous administrations” he continues, saying that he is still waiting for the commission on social housing, “signed and postponed at least three times. It will be an opportunity in which we can explain that with a household income of 6,000 Euro you are not middle class, but in poverty”.
The Assemblea sociale per la casa, which organized the “We live here and we’re staying here” demonstration last November 18, also called the plan into question: “Only 100 will be assigned in the historic center. Great: for years there have been 2200 empty public housing units, more than 2,000 requests for the last public announcement, almost 50 thousand beds for tourists and nearly 7,000 residents lost from the historic center in 8 years of the Brugnaro administration. Venturini says that we are lying: perhaps he should spend less time offending the citizens, and instead take some remedial mathematics”, they concluded.
-Source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre
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