Speaker
Description
Climate change and the environmental crisis pose challenges that must be addressed in a rapid and decisive way. The green transition, significantly put forward by the European Green Deal, aims at facing such challenges through initiatives to make Europe climate neutral by 2050, boosting green growth, cutting pollution and creating green jobs. The green transition is expected to involve deep transformations towards sustainability and energy efficiency in multiple sectors of society and economy. While it has a strong focus on housing as one of the most climate-exposed and energy-consuming sectors, critical challenges have emerged as housing solutions that are ecologically more effective might be socially more exclusionary. Building on existing conceptual framework and on empirical data collected in the framework of the EU funded Horizon research “Rehousin: contextualized pathways to reduce housing inequalities in the green and digital transition”, the paper investigates the scope of existing housing inequalities in Italy and explores the possible effects of three policies linked to ecological transition – namely: densification, retrofitting and greening – on housing inequalities.
Italy is a homeownership dominated country with high and growing wealth inequality and more moderate-income inequality, featuring a shrinking population (due to low fertility and high outmigration only partly counterbalanced by foreign inflow). In the last forty years, despite a significant growth in the number of dwellings which outpaced the number of households (resulting in an increasing vacancy rate), housing prices grew substantially and access to housing became critical especially for households in the rental sector. In this period, the tenure composition has shifted in the recent period, with owner-occupation growing from 68% in 1991 to 77% in 2021 and rental tenure decreasing from 25% in 1991 to 17% in 2021. While poor households increasingly tend to live in rented dwellings, the share of public housing shrank from 5,8% in 1991 to 3,6% in 2021.
Housing costs tend to be a larger burden for poorer households residing in rental tenure, and more so in bigger cities than in intermediate and less dense areas. EU-SILC data show a decrease in the share of overburdened households in those categories, especially in recent years, which can be linked to the introduction of a minimum income scheme (Reddito di cittadinanza), a support instrument for households in need, which has meanwhile been abolished. While social housing policies were marginalized, a relatively large share of the housing stock is old in comparison to other EU countries – in 2011, 72% of the dwellings had been built before the 1980s, when minimum energy-efficiency rules were required by the building code – and important country-wide retrofitting policies were introduced. Additionally, some cities adopted plans and initiatives to densify the urban fabric and increase green infrastructures, e.g. through new park and forestation.
Our paper explores those policies and addresses potential synergies and conflicts between policies for the ecological transition and access to housing, and more in general relations with existing housing inequalities in Italy.
| Keywords | Housing inequalities; Ecological transition; Italy |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
