Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 220

focus of my research was uniquely on palazzina a, where, according to my rough
estimate, a yearly average of five hundred senegalese lived in the 2001-2006 pe-
riod by renting the apartments at a price of 500-700 euros per month.5 The resi-
dence was managed by Costruzioni edili immobiliari, a private company, but
owned by another private enterprise, enpam. behind enpam is the mezzaroma
family, a well-known family of Roman real-estate investors who, since the begin-
ning of the 1990s, have made a fortune and now, ironically, own “ mezza Roma ”
(“half Rome”).6 in 1983, when the city of Rome experienced a particularly acute
crisis in housing shortage, the residence, which had been recently inaugurated,
opened its doors to at least nine hundred low-income italian families. as many
as six hundred italian families lived there until the end of the 1990s. Then, gradu-
ally, the italians were transferred elsewhere. The media focused their attention
on Residence Roma when the surrounding neighbors started complaining about
illegal activities taking place inside the residence. for many, these began with the
arrivals of immigrants around the year 2000, when the city council stipulated an
agreement with the libyan embassy and enpam began renting out some of the
apartments left by the italians. after the libyans, other communities arrived,
including albanians, maghrebians, senegalese, peruvians, and Rom Napulen-
gre, and were housed there by the municipal government. at the time of the
research, the largest community was the senegalese, which occupied the entire
palazzina a.
in November 2005, walter Veltroni, then mayor of Rome, signed the final
deliberation authorizing the evacuation of Residence Roma. The eviction order,
although implemented without any major act of violence, came at the end of
street demonstrations and lengthy negotiations between the city council, the XVi
district where the residence is located, its senegalese and italian inhabitants, the
private owners of the buildings, enpam, and the owners of the extended land sur-
rounding the property, fineuropa. Thanks to an agreement signed between en-
pam and the city government, after its demolition, the land is to be transformed
into a green area furbished with a playschool, a library, public offices, and other
public infrastructures conceived as part of a general plan for its “ “riqualificazione” ”
(requalification or regeneration). what this requalification also envisions is the
construction of small living units, villette, to be sold on the real-estate market for
high profit.
what happened to the inhabitants of Residence Roma after the evacuation?
many of the tenants have found new apartments to rent outside the city, in small
provincial towns such as pomezia, torvaianica, and ladispoli, along the south-
ern shores of lazio (see also Cervelli, chapter 3). some have already relocated in
other historically important peripheral neighborhoods such as pigneto-torpig-
nattara and Centocelle. a study conducted by scenari immobiliari, a real-estate
firm, affirms that the number of immigrant house owners grew by 5.4 percent