Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 56

which would eventually unlock funds and resources to plan public housing. The
new resolution requires each borough to: create a “home for evictees” ( casa dello
sfrattato ), providing temporary accommodation; build entire lots of new social
housing in the 167 areas; buy houses owned by public bodies that have not yet
been sold; provide contributions for rent. Despite some tensions caused by ac-
tion's activities, the city government recognized their importance and the cen-
ter-left mayor Veltroni (2001-2008) requested that action collaborate with the
municipality. in 2005, the Coordinamento cittadino lotta per la casa was even
received by a u.N. delegation reporting on housing rights. on the other hand, the
housing rights resistance movement was treated with hostility by the center-right
parties and the palazzinari. in fact, political action by the palazzinari intensi-
fied (Desario 2009), and in 1996, the daily local newspaper Il Messaggero was
bought by Caltagirone, while I l Te m p of was purchased by bonifaci, both real-
estate magnates.
in terms of the population involved in squatting, we can distinguish three
typologies. until the 1970s, squatting was carried out by people living in shanty-
towns (baraccati) or homeless, whereas during the 1980s, evicted tenants started
squatting big public housing units (transform! 2004). The end of the century
marked a further change in the composition of the squatters; these are now not
only evicted tenants, but also a variegated set of precarious unemployed, stu-
dents, and migrants. in fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, the saving model of middle-
class families was to rent an apartment, setting aside savings which after a few
years were enough to put down a deposit with a constructor. The new apartment
could then be let and passed on to the next generation (Giustiniani 1981). This
administration model for family budgets went into crisis during the 1970s and
was replaced by a model whereby people's savings were invested in thirty-year
mortgages to buy the apartment they were living in. This model, which domi-
nated during the following thirty years, could not survive the neoliberalization
of the city.
housing means the creation of a relationship between a society and a par-
ticular space, and it is one of the most powerful devices in designing a city. The
current ability to generate improper housing has been a long historical process
of oppressing lower classes and controlling middle classes. This mechanism of
power shifted from being explicit in post-unitary Rome, during fascism, and
with the Christian Democrats, to an indirect bureaucratic system, nourished by
debt (both for mortgages and rent), directed by financial and real-estate specula-
tors. Contemporary Rome is far removed from the modern model of poverty that
featured a clear spatial pattern of concentration in borgate and borghetti created
by the authorities or italy's internal migrants. That poor population, which was
supported by political parties and in turn influenced the institutions in the three
decades after world war ii, has since been abandoned. foreign immigrants who