The newly elected to the European Parliament Ilaria Salis responds to the controversy over her membership of the housing movements and to the requests of Aler, the body that manages public housing in the Lombardy Region, for 90 thousand euros in arrears because she was found in an occupied house in 2008 “Whoever enters an uninhabited house takes without taking away anyone, except the degradation, the racket and the property developers”, he writes in a long post on his social profiles. “The housing movement – she continues – 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.” Living in a squat, he says, is not “something for clever people” but it is “exhausting”, because “it makes you live daily in fear 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.” And he concludes: “Like it or not, there are those who will continue to fight in the name of this principle, recalling the struggles of the past and coming into contact with those of the future”.
Salis: “Being an occupier is a social stigma”
The new Avs MEP focuses on the situation in Milan, where – she writes – “there are more than 12 thousand vacant council houses”, of which over 5 thousand in the Municipality and over 7 thousand in Aler, and they rise to 15 thousand if the whole area is considered “Therefore – Salis underlines – a fifth of the public housing is not assigned”. that are occupied are usually “in dilapidated conditions” and have been abandoned for years “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 you have”, it is “a social stigma”. It is precisely “in this context of structural housing emergency” that “housing movements act to help others” and take on the role of “a bulwark of resistance against the barbarity of our society” .
“Blaming occupants for building failure is bad faith”
For Salis, “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 of bricks or the abysmal ignorance of those he never set foot outside the ring road.”
Salis against the Lupi decree
The MEP then lashes out against article 5 of the Lupi decree of 2014: with its introduction “an occupant can no longer have connection to utilities, water, electricity, gas, nor residence and the rights linked to it , for example the general practitioner, access to a public nursery near home for children, registration in employment centres. Furthermore, non-Italian people are thus prevented from meeting the requirements for obtaining citizenship and even the issuing or renewal of the residence permit is hindered.”
