The Housing Package: combining the futile with the unpleasant

The claim that the “More Housing Program” was received with applause would be as exaggerated as the news of Mark Twain’s death. The harsh criticisms, on the left and right, differ in terms of diagnosing the problems and the reasons for repairs – but, in their partiality, they nonetheless turn out to be largely correct.

For some, the guarantee of the fundamental right to decent housing makes an incisive intervention by the State in the real estate market urgent, replacing inertia in the face of unregulated behavior by speculative agents for an effective promotion of access to and enjoyment of housing, as a basic requirement of human dignity and personal and family self-determination.

For others, more to the right, the serious insufficiencies and distortions of the housing market are the culmination of decades of demagogic, casuistic and short-range state interventions, which destroyed the stability and trust essential to the regular development of real estate activity, made bureaucracies flourish and speculative behavior and burdened landowners and other economic agents with the extra costs of social policies that must be borne by the entire community.

Turning from the diagnosis to the criticism of the therapy proposed by the Government, the left highlights, rightly so, the scarce or null feasibility of many solutions, at least in good time. This is the case with the allocation of public buildings and land to housing programmes, which is nothing more than a pious wish when it turns out that public entities have not even completed an inventory of their assets, let alone making them available.

The coercive leasing, little more than symbolic, will be in the hands of the municipalities, not interested in allocating their scarce resources to interventions with a high potential for conflict, prone to endless legal disputes and with an uncertain result. The legislative package will not provide the minimum levels of effective guarantee of the fundamental right to housing, possibly violating the constitutional principle of proportionality in terms of deficit ban (of protection).

On the right, it is stated with equal certainty that the current housing emergency was created, by action and omission, by the State itself, which now invokes it to justify the intemperance of some measures. In fact, without a drastic increase in the public offer, the compulsive creation or increase of the private offer – via the threat of confiscation of (certain) vacant houses and restrictions on local accommodation and the setting of rents – represent a disproportionate damage to the principle equality and fundamental rights of property and private enterprise. Therefore, here too there will be a violation of the principle of proportionality – but now in terms of prohibition of excess.

Sinning by default and sinning by excess, the version in public consultation seems to be both useless and harmful…