Housing Battleground: Rome’s Grassroots Power Pays Off
Grassroots Resistance Puts the Right to Housing Back at Center Stage
By Olga Nassis, Event Coordinator
ROME. A powerful and authoritative signal was sent on October 27th from Trastevere, in the heart of the Italian capital, where the event “Rome Calls on Europe” transformed a conference into a political act of resistance to put the right to housing back at the centre of the political agenda. Promoted by the European Left Party as part of the ‘EL Housing Campaign,’ in collaboration with Unione Inquilini, the Vivere 2000 cooperative, the International Alliance of Inhabitants, and the SFRATTI ZERO! network, the meeting denounced the way in which the housing crisis is now a structural and chronic violation of human rights. The choice of the date, coinciding with the World Zero Evictions Days, reinforced the urgency of the message.
The snapshot of the emergency in Italy is dramatic, revealing a structural housing precarity: over a million families live in rented accommodation with absolute poverty levels of incomes, while 650,000 households are waiting for public housing in municipal waiting lists. Added to this are the approximately 40,000 eviction orders issued annually, with over 30,000 motivated by rent arrears, and the over 20,000 evictions carried out by public force in 2024 alone. The absence of public and universal housing policies was recognized as an explicit political choice that fuels exclusion and poverty, a situation aggravated by the drainage of resources to finance military spending, a manoeuvre strongly denounced by the pacifist network Stop ReArm Europe, represented in Rome by Elena Mazzoni.
The Vivere 2000 Model and Self-Recovery
While at the European level, the labels of social housing and urban regeneration are often used as a façade for mechanisms of speculation and gentrification, the event proposed a radically alternative path: housing Self-Recovery.
The example of the Vivere 2000 cooperative at the former Convent of S. Agata, the meeting venue, is not just a local “political laboratory,” but a historic victory that has rewritten the rules. The Vivere 2000 experience paved the way for 12 other self-refurbishment projects in the capital alone, generating an extraordinary political victory. It was, in fact, the strength demonstrated by this struggle – which began with the occupation in the ’90s of an abandoned convent by a group of homeless people – that led to the Regional Law n.55/98 (and subsequent amendments), which for the first time formalized and regulated Self-Recovery in partnership with cooperatives.
This fundamental law allows Public Bodies (Region, Municipalities, IACP/Public Housing Authorities) to identify unused and/or evidently degraded properties, with priority for those in historical centres, to recover them in partnership with Self-Recovery and/or Self-Construction cooperatives. The legislation clearly defines the tasks: the common and structural parts of the building (foundations, roofs, façades, systems) remain the responsibility of the public body, thus ensuring the integrity of the public heritage, while the cooperatives are responsible for the execution of internal works on the dwellings (floors, partitions, finishes). Furthermore, the law establishes that the costs anticipated by the members for the works are deducted from the rents to be paid.
Self-Recovery, in this way, not only subverts the logic of real estate exploitation but is a subsidiary intervention that simultaneously generates practical knowledge and class consciousness among the participants. The speakers, including Silvia Paoluzzi (National Secretary of Unione Inquilini), MEPs Benedetta Scuderi (Greens) and Gaetano Pedullà (The Left), Confederal Secretary Daniela Barbaresi (CGIL) and Councillor Luca Blasi, agreed: Self-Recovery is an effective form of grassroots participation, and its prerequisite is strong public policies.
UN Condemnation and Commitment
The intervention of Balakrishnan Rajagopal, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, conferred legal and international weight to the claims. His visit to Rome reinforced the condemnation: “Evicting without alternative is illegal.” Rajagopal reiterated that international law, sanctioned by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), establishes a clear constraint: whoever is forced to take refuge “on a relative’s couch” is, to all intents and purposes, homeless.
The UN official praised the “strength, resilience, and capacity for self-recovery” of the local communities and pledged to present an official report and intervene with the Italian Government, providing the movements with a powerful tool for struggle.
The concluding assembly, with speeches, among others, by Giuseppe De Marzo (Rete Numeri Pari) and Fabrizio Nizi (National Social Forum for Housing), cemented the coalition between social movements, trade unions, and activists. “Rome Calls on Europe” affirmed itself as a crucial moment of critical consciousness, reiterating the final commitment: the promotion of a European Housing Plan that unites the battle for housing with that for peace, for Nature, and for essential public services.