Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 57

now constitute a large proportion of the urban poor, have not been supported
by political parties. There has been a process of extension and heterogeneitiza-
tion of poverty and Rome's poor are now a mix of the weakest international mi-
grants and the most vulnerable groups of italian citizens (those with problems of
mental health, alcohol, or income). The numbers are astonishing: forty thousand
people applying for public housing (Righetti 2010), five thousand to ten thousand
homeless, fifteen thousand evicted or awaiting eviction, four thousand individu-
als squatting (mastrandrea 2004). poverty has a “home” in myriad precarious
spaces, disconnected from political institutions and connected through forced
mobility of thousands of individuals. There is not a center-periphery dichotomy
for the poor, there is just a spiral peripheric condition that can move and lo-
cate people at any scale (mudu 2006a; see also Cervelli, chapter 3). The scale of
homelessness includes streets, rooms in basements, riverbanks, roadway bushes;
while the scale of popular housing includes large housing blocks dispersed in
the metropolitan area of Rome. There is thus no direct relationship between the
number of people living in the city and the number and utilization of houses
and, moreover, there is a total mismatch between the increase in homelessness
and institutional public intervention. The ability to deny housing rights and the
progressive spreading of situations of poverty from specific parts of the city to an
area that covers the whole province has been met by the refusal of the political
class to take on any responsibility, instead transferring the problem to the private
market and religious organizations.
The solution to the housing problems of the most deprived individuals that
migrated from the south and center of italy to Rome for a hundred years between
1870 and 1970 is linked to a vast history of struggles led by the Communist party
and by the extraparliamentary left. Currently, foreign immigrants whose inter-
ests are not supported by institutional parties have found, at least for housing, the
support of grassroots associations such as Coordinamento cittadino lotta per la
casa or action. The struggles of the housing rights movement have intentionally
and effectively protected a right recognized by international treaties but violated
by governments. unfortunately, this protection cannot be extended to all those
entitled to it. economic crises are periods that often wipe out social achievements
in terms of more equal distribution of resources. in the short term, the housing
conditions of the city can only worsen as the most important goal of urban policy
has become to mobilize city resources for market-oriented economic growth.
Notes
1. in fact, poverty in official statistics and many discourses is measured and presented
in terms of “relative” or “absolute” poverty. in italy, the relative poverty threshold for a two-
member family was calculated by the national statistical institute (istat) as an average monthly