TURIN – The “Empty to return” campaign has reached 3 thousand signatures, which aims to register vacant properties and make them available to the community. The signatures needed to ask the Municipality of Turin to examine the proposal were 1,500; now therefore the City Council will have to discuss the text.
The proposal
As the Returnable Voids Committee explains, it is a “popular initiative that proposes new protections for the right to housing, aims to increase the number of available homes, lower rents, relaunch the social agency for rental Lo.CARe., to make homes available outside the logic of the market”.
How many apartments are vacant?
In the Municipality of Turin, according to this 2021 Istat census, there are 78 thousand unoccupied apartments out of a total of 502 thousand homes. In the entire province of Turin the figure rises to 313 thousand. However, these numbers may have changed after the end of the Covid emergency.
The text of the proposal is divided into 7 key points and asks the Turin council to: start a moratorium on eviction plans from public housing; carry out a census of vacant housing within 9 months; contact the owners of abandoned properties and ask them about the situation; to finance the Lo.CARe agency so that the new apartments are made available with an agreed fee; penalize owners who leave apartments vacant by raising IMU or TARI; take into account the social utility of taking the property away from the owner.
What happens now
According to the rule on popular participation of the City of Turin, after the Public Relations Office has verified that the signatures are all valid, the President of the council will call a press conference with the representatives of the Municipality, the citizens who deposited the proposal of deliberation and the press. Subsequently the text will be discussed in the competent Council Commission, “in the presence of the first presenters”; everything will then pass into the hands of the Turin City Council, which will be able to approve or reject the proposal. Attention: when approving, the Council can also slightly modify the proposal.
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