The Territorial Agency for Public Residential Housing of Calabria (ATERP) has been facing a deep structural crisis for years. Hundreds of housing units require renovation, while the Agency struggles to acquire new properties in order to meet the constantly growing demand for housing.
In 2016, ATERP was centralized at the regional level following a reform supported by both centre-right and centre-left governments. In Calabria, this choice has contributed to worsening the situation. The former provincial ATERP bodies had direct knowledge of local needs, whereas the Agency has now become an institution increasingly concerned with complying with regional budget constraints, losing touch with the real needs of the people.
The current situation is telling. ATERP is under extraordinary administration, its workforce is less than half of what is required, and instead of expanding the stock of public housing, it continues to sell properties without acquiring new ones.
Over recent decades, public investment in social housing has collapsed throughout Italy, to the benefit of major real-estate owners, property speculators and construction companies. As wealth and capital become increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, these forces accumulate ever greater real-estate assets as a source of rent and profit. In Calabria, two thousand public housing units remain unused because they are dilapidated, abandoned or were never completed following the withdrawal of contractors. Another fifteen thousand require major maintenance work, since around 60% of the housing stock was built before 1980. As a result, more than 11,000 housing applications remained unmet as of January 2025, while thousands of Calabrians have been waiting for years. In some cases, the allocation of public housing has notoriously been subject to rackets and the control of organized crime. In Calabria, almost one home in three is vacant or unoccupied, amounting to approximately 480,000 empty homes across the region. This situation is certainly linked to the depopulation of small towns and villages, but also to the high number of second and third homes in coastal and mountain areas. At the same time, the effects of intensive tourism are becoming increasingly evident, with a growing number of evictions aimed at converting apartments into holiday homes and B&Bs, alongside record increases in rents throughout Calabria. In April 2026, the region recorded the highest increase in rents in the country, at 4.1%, with a strong trend towards gentrification, particularly in tourist municipalities.
A paradigmatic example of how the question of the right to housing is being addressed in Calabria can be seen in Lamezia Terme, where the class-based policies described above are fuelling yet another war among the poor. Dozens of families are being forced out of their homes to make room for those higher on the housing list, according to the perverse logic that a roof can be provided to one person in need only by taking it away from another who is equally in need.
The case of Marco S., one of the next victims of this logic, is emblematic. He is a 50-year-old worker employed on an on-call basis, without a contract and without any form of income support. A victim of employment blackmail, he also fell prey to those who “rented” him an apartment as though it were private property, without informing him that it was in fact a public housing unit. Paradoxically, because he is now considered an unlawful occupant, ATERP no longer regards him as meeting the necessary requirements, while soaring rents prevent him from finding alternative accommodation. In recent years, the Calabria regional government has halted the regularization procedures that previously existed in order to crack down on occupations, which often arise out of necessity, as in this case.
This situation is also intertwined with the question of the Roma community. Many Roma families are included in the ATERP rankings, often near the top, for entirely legitimate reasons. The ranking system gives priority to larger families, households with sick dependants and those with low incomes. This has predictably fuelled controversy over the alleged “privileges” granted to non-Italian families. Such claims are completely unfounded, not only because the Roma community has lived in Calabria since the sixteenth century, but above all because there is a real need to overcome the ghettoized settlements where this population has been marginalized for decades. Several such settlements exist in Lamezia Terme, including Scordovillo and Ciampa di Cavallo. The dismantling of these ghettos had to be fought for. The Calabria regional government’s original plan for dealing with the issue of Roma camps was to use European funds to build a new ghetto consisting of 120 public housing units, financed with 28 million euros, thereby permanently institutionalizing segregation. This was prevented only through the intervention of the Stop Ghetti Committee. Following that intervention, a different plan was adopted, based on a fair distribution of housing through the renovation of existing public housing units and the acquisition of new ones. However, implementation has been slow to begin.
No privileges are granted to any ethnic group. On the contrary, one class, the capitalist class, deprives another class, the workers and the popular strata, of its rights. The real problem is the alarming shortage of public housing available to all, a situation that literally forces other poor workers onto the streets because they cannot afford alternative accommodation.
In Italy, and particularly in Calabria, there is an obvious contradiction between the material possibility of guaranteeing housing for everyone and capitalist ownership, which ultimately denies that possibility. Those who “steal homes” from the people are not members of any particular ethnic group. It is capital that does so, whether Italian or foreign.
Within this framework, the Communist Front calls for a genuine programme of public housing, financed through resources that are currently spent on objectives serving only the interests of the capitalists, such as military expenditure, subsidies and incentives for businesses, and funding for large-scale useless projects. A substantial share of vacant housing must be expropriated in order to address the housing emergency in our region. We also demand controls on housing prices and rents that are compatible with the needs of the working class, which cannot be sacrificed on the altar of the profits of the real-estate and tourism industries.
