The number of families fighting for the right to a dignified home is increasingly larger, which is why Sunia-Cgil has launched an appeal, in defense of the right to live in Italy and in Europe, to the candidates in the European elections, to the political parties and representatives of the institutions. The tenants’ union thus sends the interlocutors, together with the national document, a request for a meeting to discuss housing policies and to request that they commit to supporting and carrying them forward.
In Calabria, the first to respond to the appeal are Nichi Vendola, the regional secretary of the Italian Left, Fernando Pignataro, the candidates for the European elections of the Alleanza Verdi and Sinistra, Maria Pia Funaro and Gerardo Pontecorvo who, in Reggio Calabria, met a delegation of the tenants’ union.
Francesco Alì, General Secretary of Sunia-Cgil Calabria, illustrated the document: “We know that the initiatives taken by the European Parliament can influence the policies of Governments. We have a fruitful dialogue underway with the Trade Unions, starting from the IUT and the Organizations that at European level deal with the housing issue from part of the tenants, the homeless, the small owners and that vast world of precarious workers, students, workers, migrants, women and men on low income who have the right to dignified housing and who, in Italy and in Europe, are subjected to processes of marginalization. We also speak with candidates and parties because we believe it is essential that the issue of the right to sustainable living, which is too often underestimated, receives adequate attention from the perspective of a social Europe and rights”. Furthermore, “we consider the process of reducing energy consumption and waste which affects the public and private residential building stock as indispensable, as per the recent directive voted by the European Parliament and which takes into account the need to support in this absolutely necessary transition, the small and medium-income owners who represent a significant part of building ownership in our country. Another central aspect is that of urban regeneration which must also be social and environmental recovered to provide answers to those who don’t have a home. We need more land waste”. Before symbolically handing over the document, Alì underlined: “Living without a home has always been synonymous with the coexistence of many forms of poverty: material, economic, emotional, relationships and projects that generate psychophysical suffering, insecurity, marginalization. But the access to a home is an essential component of a series of values closely linked to the full development of the human person protected by the Constitution: family, school, health and work, none of which would be conceivable without the prerequisite of a home to live in reasons we invite you to also sign and support the four referendum questions of the CGIL on work which must be protected as a constitutional right. It must therefore be safe, dignified, well paid and stable”.
Nichi Vendola committed to supporting the document: “There is a very strong demand for public residential construction – he underlined – necessary to respond to situations of hardship. The objective of a dignified and safe home is an essential element for a more equitable development that healthy inequalities that are no longer acceptable. We need to redevelop the suburbs, offer prospects of autonomy to young people, ensure a dignified life for the elderly. The housing issue intersects with the strategic issue of neighborhood regeneration. We need to increase the availability of housing, but this can be done do above all through the recovery of unused heritage, without new waste of land, through the regeneration of abandoned and degraded areas, sometimes even symbolically relevant such as those stolen from organized crime”.
