Efficiency versus Fairness in the Management of Public Housing Assets in Palermo (Italy)

Grazia Napoli,Maria Trovato,Salvatore Giuffrida

doi:10.3390/su11041199

Grazia Napoli, Maria Trovato + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su11041199

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Feb 24, 2019
Citations: 22	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Catania, University of Palermo

Abstract

Public housing policy has been proposing plans of public housing (PH) stock alienation or, as an alternative, property enhancement plans, since administrative and financial commitments have become too heavy for municipalities. This paper deals with one of the current public housing management policy initiatives, undertaken by the Municipality of Palermo (Italy), which aimed at transferring a significant part of the public housing asset to the current tenants, according to some terms and conditions, and applying a politically fixed price. This policy is described in general, focusing on the amount of the assets involved, reporting the terms and conditions for transferring them at an affordable price, and analysing their concentration/distribution in the urban areas. The main aim of the paper is to provide a valuation pattern for defining the trade-off between the efficiency and fairness of such a tool, recognising the conditions for the consistency between the transfer price established by municipality, the merit of the public housing asset, and the market value. A detailed study on two representative neighbourhoods was carried out in order to measure the value of solidarity of this policy and to propose some corrective rules.

Highlights

IntroductionThe right to housing, in particular, is one of the main features of the “right to the city” [5], and in the 1960s–70s it was a key objective of Italian welfare policies, many households still face the problem of affordable housing today, especially in the southern Italy and in the metropolitan areas of the big cities
This case study aims at providing a measure of the efficiency and fairness of the public housing (PH) policy the municipality is committed to, based on a comparison of the estimates of the current real estate market prices of the properties to be transferred, to the transfer prices supposed by municipal administration in order to:
The estimate of the properties to be transferred aimed at comparing the real estate potential market price to the political prices carried out by the municipality according to the current laws, in order to provide some critical item of the fairness of the municipal public housing management policy

Summary

Introduction

The right to housing, in particular, is one of the main features of the “right to the city” [5], and in the 1960s–70s it was a key objective of Italian welfare policies, many households still face the problem of affordable housing today, especially in the southern Italy and in the metropolitan areas of the big cities. As discounts on market price were very heavy and ranged from 35% up to a maximum of 70%, or up to a maximum subsidy of 80,900 pounds (April 2018), the RTB was the main factor responsible of an increasing share of home ownership among householders from 55% to 70% by 2000 [11,12]

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