OfLuca Gasperoni
The mayoral candidate of Democratic Florence: «We need to move from a municipality that manages public housing to one that deals with developing public housing»
Objective of 5 thousand public housing in the next five years to be allocated to poor groups, university students and the middle class with a total investment of half a billion euros. The driving force behind the operation is a benefit company, majority owned by Palazzo Vecchio, capable of financing the recovery and redistribution of homes through the issue of Social Impact Bonds that Florentines will also be able to subscribe to, receiving in exchange a discount on the IMU.
«To face a complex emergency like the housing emergency, we need to resort to innovative tools and change our vision, moving from a municipality that manages public housing to one that develops public housing», explains the former councilor for urban planning and candidate for mayor of democratic Florence, Cecilia Del Re, during a press conference at the Brac café-bookstore. An opportunity also to invite to your list the exponents of 11 August who were left without a candidacy, a hypothesis however immediately discarded by the founder of the association, Tomaso Montanari.
The housing plan, developed in collaboration with the professor of Applied Economics at the University of Florence, Nicolò Bellanca, and with a group of academic researchers gathered in the MetroPolit association, takes the Vienna case as a modelwhere over half the population lives in publicly owned homes with controlled rents and thousands of new homes are built every year.
From this perspective, therefore, Palazzo Vecchio, in addition to recovering the over 800 remaining ERP accommodations with an investment of 20 million euros, should take over and rent at least one thousand accommodations every year with an investment of around 100 million. The cornerstone of the project is the creation of a benefit companynot listed on the stock exchange and owned by the Municipality, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the European Investment Bank, which knows how to intercept public and private resources.
«A company from which, I say it clearly, politics should stay out, so as not to transform it into yet another bandwagon or armchair factory”stings Del Re. The main tool available to the company would be the issue of Social impact bonds in which the return on invested capital is linked to the achievement of a specific social result.
«Investors – explains Del Re – therefore only earn if adequate quality is achieved, otherwise they only get back the paid-in capital. The aim is to also involve institutional investors such as pension funds, mutual investment funds and insurance companies, as well as ordinary citizens who by purchasing them will obtain exemption from the municipal share of the IMU from the Municipality”.
Alongside the plan there is also the desire to expand the team in view of the vote in June. “We are closing the lists but if anyone from the 11 August association wants to participate the doors are open”, proposes the former councilor along the lines of what was done by the Left common project mayoral candidate, Dimitrij Palagi. «Grateful to Del Re for the invitation but this won’t happen», replies Montanari, according to whom «there were no conditions to form a coalition and even more so, obviously, there aren’t any due to the presence of some of us in any of the individual lists in which the left is shattered.”
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April 30, 2024
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