Brescia – The attempt to control the phenomenon of short rentals it runs aground at the Regional Administrative Court of Brescia. The administrative judges, by virtue of national legislation, accepted the appeal of the owner of a residential building in municipality of Sirmionewith 10 apartments used for tourist rentals, against the regulation approved by the Municipality in 2022, which establishes the quality requirements for non-hotel accommodation facilities.
The appeal challenged both the competence of the Municipality, and some requests such as the elimination of architectural barriers for at least 1 housing unit in every 4 (the ministerial regulation provides this only for new buildings or renovations), the presence of parking spaces based on the size of the real estate units, the conformity of the systems. The TAR partially accepted the appeal, with a ruling that highlights a fundamental point: without national legislation, the Municipalities have no power, if not when there is now an emergency, to regulate the spread of short-term tourist rentals of houses and rooms, which take away space for long-term residential living, effectively emptying towns and cities.
“European jurisprudence considers the objective of the States to be legitimate contain tourist rentals to ensure a sufficient supply of affordable housing for long-term rentals. However – we read in the sentence – it is an objective normally included in a specific regulatory framework, which is not present here, and in any case based on a site-specific evaluation, with the ascertainment of widespread situations of housing hardship. Outside of these emergency conditions, the Municipalities do not have the power to limit or distribute the supply of holiday homes and apartments across the territory, but carry out the different task of ensuring that the structures freely placed on the market by private individuals are safe, accessible and sustainable in the urban context”.
In recent days, the TAR had accepted another appeal, which it had contested the limits placed on rental activities of the new Sirmione regulation, underlining that, for architectural barriers and parking, “the municipal regulation as a whole would interfere with the characteristics of the accommodation: it would be outside the municipal powers and in contrast with the principle of liberalization”.
