Housing Affordability in Italy

From the early ‘70s the Italian families improved their welfare, raising the national dwelling standard level. During the same period, for several reasons, the rental market share on the total housing stock decreased from 40% to less that 20%. The situation was mainly caused, on the one hand, by some structural changes introduced in the leasing contracts, and, on the other hand, by some incentives provided by the Italian government during the last 10 years in order to release many public Real Estate properties. Anyway, these factors dropped the Italian housing affordability to the current low level. By the ‘90s a diverging trend between rents and family incomes emerged: in fact, while rents run up, according to the general price trends, private incomes increased very slowly, enlarging the current tenants discomfort. The present paper offers an updated study on the whole Italian housing affordability panorama, analysing the growing social unrest during the last 15 years. The analysis, showing an extremely heterogeneous rental housing market all over Italy, is settled to provide policy makers with a geographical and typological dataset, properly divided into “urban rank”, “geographical position” and “inner district location”. Finally, at a local level, the analysis could provide major stakeholders, as Public Bodies or Banking Foundations, with a proper cognitive frame, useful to turn investment opportunities into joint strategies of intervention.