Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 51

2007). The city government unequivocally refused to pursue a policy of conser-
vation and protection of popular housing, shifting toward supporting financial
investments and real-estate speculation. The local policy is set within a similar
national context; in fact, real-estate speculation was boosted during the five years
of center-right national government between 2001 and 2006 that sold thousands
of apartments by creating a company for property sale called Scip. The law did
not allow local governments to buy housing; it was an exclusively private busi-
ness (pilla 2001). according to the Court of audit (Corte dei Conti), from 1994 to
2003, 71,000 apartments were sold with very poor results (Del Vecchio and pitrelli
2007); the housing market fell entirely into the hands of speculators. This means
that it is impossible to guarantee public housing in most cities, while the market
generates social segregation. with very few exceptions (e.g., pilla 2001; Carlini
2005), newspapers and political parties commented positively on the blanket sale
of publicly owned housing (see, for example, liguori 2007). an expected outcome
of this political choice was the possibility of evicting thirty thousand low-income
families in ten years, particularly in the metropolitan areas of Rome and milan
(pilla 2001). The eviction of the old city center inhabitants began under fascism
and continued without interruption after the second world war (sonnino 1976).
Currently fewer than 100,000 inhabitants live in the center; that is less than one
quarter of its residents in 1951 (436,000 inhabitants).
The minimum average prices for selling apartments in different toponymical
subdivisions between 2001 and 2011 help to clarify some trends.3 The range of the
lowest values for sale has been reduced and prices have leveled upward. similarly,
the range of maximum prices has been reduced too. This means a more limited
supply in terms of prices now than in the past. This leveling has happened mainly
in the suburban areas. The houses built in the periphery in the 1950s became
semicentral in the 1990s and the increased land value was privatized by selling
the apartments to the tenants (whether these were legitimate or not) at very low
prices and then resold by the new owners at market prices (abate and picciotto
1983; Del Vecchio and pitrelli 2007). low-cost housing is mainly concentrated in
the eastern part of the city, whereas few people can afford to buy an apartment in
most of the city center and in large sections of municipi (boroughs) 2, 3, and 17.
Just over 5 percent of all apartments are in the historical center (municipio 1) but
they are worth approximately 34 billion euro: 23.8 percent of the whole of Rome's
real-estate value (santarpia 2007). Comparatively high prices are also charged in
the immediate vicinity of municipio 20 and the esposizione universale di Roma,
or euR, section of municipio 12. Due to these trends in prices, which partly arose
due to buyers' preferences and partly as a consequence of demographic processes,
these areas are now mainly inhabited by the upper middle classes.
in italy, between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, rent absorbed on average less
than 15 percent of workers' salaries. The proportion of expenditure on rent rose