Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 52

slightly in the second half of the 1980s and reached around 18 percent in the first
half of the 1990s. since the mid-1990s, rents have been growing rapidly and con-
stantly, absorbing about 30 percent of employees' salaries at the beginning of the
new century. The cost of an apartment remained relatively stable during the 1970s
and the 1980s, requiring an average investment of approximately seven years of
an individual's income. During the 1990s, the cost of an apartment increased to
14 years' income (poggio 2009). since 2001, rent and sale prices have more than
doubled, and Rome is the city which has exhibited the highest increase in house
prices and the largest gap between the most wealthy and poorest areas (liquori
and manzella 2003; Giordano 2006). Rome is estimated to be the worst city in
italy in terms of renting possibilities for immigrants: 69.3 percent of their income
is spent on rent (CNel 2010). Renting an apartment in the central or semicentral
areas of Rome, and in many peripheral parts, is impossible also for the middle-
class population (ares2000 2002). families with an annual income of less than
20,000 euros cannot rent an apartment in Rome, where rent now absorbs 44 per-
cent of a family's income, according to estimates by Nomisma (santori and am-
mendola 2005). after 1979, the rent market was regulated by the equo Canone
law (law No. 392/1978) that capped rents at affordable prices for low- to medium-
income tenants. in 1992, a new law in favor of the owners was passed, and in 1998,
the rent market was completely liberalized.
in the last five years, 15 percent of public housing residents in italy have not
paid the rent, and in 2004, around forty thousand homes were illegally occu-
pied, constituting 6.73 percent of all housing in the lazio region (Del Vecchio
and pitrelli 2007). in 2010, in Rome, around forty thousand people applied for
public housing (Righetti 2010) and the house stock of azienda territoriale per
l'edilizia Residenziale (ater, formerly iaCp) is de facto predominantly support-
ing middle-class families and not poor people (Del Vecchio and pitrelli, 2007). in
2008, only 1.5 percent of apartments in Rome (737 of 47,804) owned by ater were
assigned to foreign immigrants (Righetti 2010), and the province of Rome holds
italy's worst record for evictions: 1 of every 220 families. The largest number of
evictions were executed, first, against tenants in arrears (60 percent of cases) and,
second, because the rental contract had expired. an average of 2,851 evictions per
year were carried out between 1983 and 2011 and the number has since remained
stable, while there are more serious oscillations in the number of requests for
evictions ordered by the bailiff, which tend to rise when there is an increase in
social problems.
Resistance to housing policies
Three phases of struggles over housing have emerged in the postwar period. The
first went from 1950 to 1960, the second from the late 1960s to 1980, and the third
has developed during the last twenty years, with a new dynamic in the last de-