Housing Plan, INU rejects the decree: “It does not meet expectations”

INU’s main criticisms of the Housing Plan

The National Institute of Urban Planning has presented specific criticisms of various aspects of the Plan. “First of all – we read in the report – there are problematic and contradictory elements in the nature of the Plan, which, despite the title, is rather configured as a call for the provision of public contributions (as well as generous procedural simplifications) to private individuals, outside of any national or local planning and in the face of random proposals from private individuals”. According to INU, what is missing is “a concrete approach to planning and programming a structural housing policy and the related supply of adequate resources”.

Furthermore, INU claims, the resources are insufficient: “These are in fact very limited public funds” and what’s more “the distribution of these funds will take place over a period of 5 years (2026-2030), despite the progressive intense increase in evictions (over 20,000/year) and an unmet need (and estimated by many sources and studies) of at least 650,000 homes”.

The report then defines “the process of alienation of public assets as unacceptable, as the aim and outcome of the indications of the Plan”. The reference is to the “power to transfer shares of housing, now unused, from subsidized (i.e. public) construction to construction for other regimes, in the subsidized form first and foremost, through the use of public-private partnership operations, under the guidance of Invitalia spa”. According to INU, in this way “there is a risk of losing part of the stock of public housing in favor of private entities, which do not credibly set themselves the priority objective (declared instead in the Housing Plan) of improving the social and generational mix of working-class neighborhoods, but rather of profiting from operations in more attractive places (many historic working-class neighborhoods are located in the most central and attractive real estate areas)”, and if it is true that “among the various measures contained in this process, the redemption of housing is also envisaged (art.5)”, however “the Plan renounces an active investment policy, allocating the resources recovered to balance or budget recovery activities”.

Criticisms of procedures

There are also criticisms of the procedures: the figure of the Extraordinary Commissioner and the timing, “impracticable for any public administration, which expresses intolerance both towards institutes and paths of heritage protection (often of historical, architectural and urban importance) and towards the forms of possible contribution or dissent expressed by local administrations, otherwise subject to silent consent”.

INU then identifies vulnerabilities in the infrastructural programs of integrated construction, for subsidized construction (equal to at least 70% of the entire intervention) and free construction (art.9): “The programs are intended to be implemented through the prevailing attraction of private investments. The rental or sales quotas are not set, neither subsidized nor private, with possible imbalances that do not favor the growth of the fundamental affordable rental sector” and “there is a lack of planning of the public contribution”.

Then once again focus on the procedures: “The authorization methods and procedures envisaged for these programs are expeditious and so far unusual – including the SCIA in the case of urban restructuring, as well as building. Volumetric increases of up to 35% are permitted, and the use of the agreed permit in place of implementation plans, for interventions which, given the size and their ‘strategic’ character (as defined by the same Decree), as well as the use of urban restructuring and/or new construction, would require urban planning and democratic evaluation thus canceling out more reasoned and negotiable controls and evaluation paths and explicitly abandoning planning for Urban Regeneration, a theme just mentioned and instead crucial for the governance and design of the contemporary city”.

Finally, “the consequences on the urban functioning of the proposed interventions are not considered: in fact the useful surface area of ​​subsidized buildings does not contribute to the quantification of the total useful surface area (as if, by lawwas exempt from constituting an urban planning burden), anticipating in fact the real possibility of heavy densification, without any overall design, program or induced urban planning standards”.

The two critical issues of the Housing Plan according to INU

In conclusion, INU highlights two highly critical issues of Legislative Decree 66/2026. First of all “the renunciation of public housing policy and its necessary integration with urban planning and territorial governance”, then “the contradiction between the urgent provisions of the Housing Plan with its worrying simplifications and the need, now undeferrable, to prepare a law of national principles for the governance of the territory and urban planning which is capable of inserting all urban planning and building processes, including housing measures, in the wake of some shared national principles and general rules”.

We remind you that INU presented its bill of principles for the government of the territory in the Senate in July 2024 (>> you can find it below together with the INU hearing on the Housing Plan).