“Living in a squat is not a turning point, it is not something for ‘smart’ people. It is exhausting.” As Ilaria Salis in a long post on social media to talk about public housing, occupations and the housing issue. After the controversy, the new MEP writes – “as promised” – on the employment issue in Milan.
“Is it really all the fault of the occupants?”, asks Salis in the post after having reeled off a series of data on the city and the missed housing assignments. “First of all – we reply -, let it be known that occupied houses – around three thousand (Confbuilding data, Sept. 2023) – represent only a small part of vacant houses, a number far lower than the number of homes left empty. Abandonment it is literally everywhere. We all have eyes to see, but not everyone has the intellectual honesty to admit this sad and uncomfortable truth for those in charge of managing public housing.”
“When an unassigned house is occupied, which is generally in dilapidated conditions and has been abandoned for years – he continues -, the accusation of taking the place away from a person on the waiting list simply does not hold up. Whoever enters an uninhabited house takes without taking away from anyone except degradation, racketeering or property developers. To say otherwise is low political rhetoric aimed at pitting one against the other, so that nothing changes.”
Because “any inhabitant of a working-class neighborhood in Milan knows very well that following an eviction there is never any reassignment. The houses are closed, walled up and sheet metaled, sometimes they are even destroyed by the eviction workers. As a rule, they become deserted and they call it legality”, continues Salis.
Therefore, he explains, “blaming the occupants for the collapse of public housing underlines either the bad faith of those who know well the pneumatic vacuum of housing policies, the incompetence of the managing bodies and the speculation on bricks, or the abysmal ignorance of those who have never set foot outside the ring road. Of the two, frankly I don’t know which is worse. Living in a squat is not a turning point, it is not something for “smart” people. It’s exhausting“.
The reason? “It makes you live in fear every day that they will wake you up and throw you out of the house, or that they will find all your things on the sidewalk when you return from work, if you find them at all.. Occupying means entering an abandoned house, walled up, with broken sanitary fixtures and holes in the walls, left to decay rather than being assigned. Being an occupier means inhabiting this precarious space and laboriously transforming it into a place that can be called home, trying to fix it with the few means available that one has.”
Being an occupier, the MEP continues further on, “it is a social stigma, it means being treated like criminals for trying to live with dignity. Put this in your head, no occupier wants to be an occupier. In this context of structural housing emergency, housing movements act to help others, with perseverance and dedication, without profit, because the value that animates and guides them is solidarity. They help individuals and families in great need and recover places that have been abandoned for years, renovating and renovating them. They promote the spread of a culture of participation, respect and mutual help.”
“They are on the front line fighting the rackets that speculate on poverty, as well as taking complaints when it comes to defending themselves from the violence of evictions. I will never tire of saying it: such movements represent a bulwark of resistance against the barbarism of our society, and this is where we must start again“, he explains further.
And to those who say that occupying is illegal, Salis replies: “The concept of legality, in its crudest and most instrumental version, often becomes the black hole where public discourses on the great social issues that concern the popular classes and young people collapse, such as ‘home emergency. On the other hand, we hear very little about legitimacy. Legitimacy concerns the ethical, moral and political justification of the action. As history teaches us, legitimate actions are not always necessarily legal at that given moment – but in a healthy society they can become so later. Often, in fact, it is precisely actions beyond the Law that push the Law itself to change, to modify itself for the better, taking into consideration the needs and desires that are posed by subordinate groups”.
“The housing movement has always acted with the strength of legitimacy given by the simple principle that we all must have a roof over our heads.. This is the crux of the matter, the topic on which we are all called to express ourselves and decide what we collectively want. Like it or not, there are those who will continue to fight in the name of this principlerecalling the struggles of the past and coming into contact with those of the future”, he concludes.
