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The Urban Way

Confront real estate speculation

Michelangelo Di Beo from the Italian Tenants' Union was in good company at the meeting with victims of property and financial speculation organized under the World Assembly of Inhabitants at the World Social Forum in Tunis by the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAI).Together with representatives of law initiatives in the housing field from Argentina, Germany and the USA, the Tenants' Union reported on the depressing results  of liberalising rents, selling housing and privatisations.

Please remember that behind every single figure in the following statistics is at least one person, and often an entire family:

  • 650,000 families on municipal waiting lists for access to public social housing;
  • 90% of the 65,000 eviction sentences issued every year are for arrears that are not the tenants' fault.
  • 130,000 annual requests by legal officials to carry out evictions.
  • 30,000 evictions carried out every year by the police;
  • 90% of the 140 cases of families evicted every day are because of rent arrears;
  • 350,000 families are now risking eviction because the rent contribution fund has been abolished; 
  • Zero public funding for public residential building at social rents;
  • 30,000 municipal homes kept empty and deteriorate without any plausible reason.
  • Assurd application of  taxes to public social housing.
  • A million municipal tenants condemned to live in deteriorating housing without maintenance work by managing bodies.
  • A million homes rented on the black market with enormous tax evasion as a result;
  • 200,000 homes withdrawn because dismissioni??? from the stock of public social housing to be let at a sustainable rent.

For the Italian Tenants Union, to rebuild a policy of the housing right requires a series of coordinated actions to limit the excessive power of profit making property companies and funds,reducing rent levels (promote rent agreements or fair rents), preventing sell-offs of the public housing stock in favour of private interests launching  urgent actions at a national and local level, to:

  • Increase the number of homes with social rents;
  • Block the auctionsfor those prevented from paying mortgage payments, drawing up new contracts and deferring payments;
  • Block evictions also for rent arrears;
  • No taxes  on a first home, with modified rates on second and third homes; 
  • Promote legal actions against rates collection agencies.
  • Struggle against black-market lets.

Georeferences


The Volunteer translator for housing rights without frontiers of IAI who has collaborated on the translation of this text was:

George Wright

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