€10 billion over ten years, 100,000 new homes, 60,000 regenerated units and simplified rules for private buyers. The new housing plan, the Piano Casa, is the government’s most sweeping domestic policy announcement since taking office.
The Italian government has unveiled its long-awaited Piano Casa, a housing plan of a scale and ambition not seen in Italy for decades. Premier Giorgia Meloni presented the package as a direct response to a housing affordability crisis that has been building for years, squeezing young people out of home ownership and placing social housing well below demand.
“If all goes to plan, our objective is to make a total of more than 100,000 homes available in the 10 years,” Meloni told reporters in Rome. “The message we’re trying to get across is that we’re trying to solve problems.”
The plan carries a headline figure of up to €10 billion over the decade, combining direct state investment with mechanisms to attract private capital alongside it. The government says it will act across three distinct fronts: new social housing construction, the regeneration of existing but currently uninhabitable public housing stock, and reforms to make private home ownership more accessible and affordable.
60,000 units brought back to life
One of the most striking pillars of the Piano Casa is not building new homes, but unlocking those that already exist and are simply sitting empty and unassigned.
“The goal is to make available approximately 60,000 units that cannot currently be assigned because they are not in a condition to be assigned to citizens,” Meloni said at her press conference. The state of disrepair of much of Italy’s existing social housing stock — a long-standing scandal in many regions — means that tens of thousands of families sit on waiting lists while perfectly renovatable apartments stand empty and deteriorating.
The financing for this regeneration programme is substantial: €1.7 billion plus a maximum of €4.8 billion, currently held in existing urban regeneration programmes, which can be distributed to municipalities for this purpose by prime ministerial decree after discussions with the National Association of Municipalities (ANCI).
New builds and private incentives
Beyond regeneration, the plan provides for the construction of new affordable housing. A cornerstone of the Piano Casa is the revitalisation of the First Home Guarantee Fund. The fund has been recalibrated to target its original beneficiaries more precisely, including a state guarantee of up to 90% for mortgages taken out by large families, making home ownership more accessible to those who face the greatest financial barriers.
For private buyers more broadly, bureaucratic simplification is promised, along with a measure designed to ease the upfront costs of any property transaction. This includes a 50% reduction in notary fees associated with property transactions including mortgages and leases — a tangible reduction in the overall cost of buying a home.
The other decree: Evictions and Social Centres
Accompanying the Piano Casa was a second, politically pointed decree with a very different flavour. The cabinet simultaneously approved measures making it significantly easier to evict delinquent tenants and to clear illegally occupied properties. These include the centri sociali, the squatted anticapitalist and anarchist social centres that have been fixtures of Rome, Milan (such as Leoncavallo), Bologna and other large Italian cities for decades.
For the centre-right government, the pairing of the two measures is deliberate. The argument being made is that properties occupied without legal title — whether by rent defaulters or by political squatters — represent housing stock removed from those who genuinely need it. Critics on the left are likely to contest the framing vigorously, arguing that social centres provide community and cultural services in areas underserved by public institutions, and that fast-tracking evictions without adequate alternative provision simply displaces, rather than solves, the underlying problem.
