The building amnesty that the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is working on will affect - according to data - almost 80% of the Italian real estate heritage. The goal is to protect those small property owners who have been waiting, in some cases for years, for the regularization of their positions and who often are unable to renovate or sell their house, while also reducing the workload of the municipal technical offices, often overwhelmed by requests for regularization. The set of rules to intervene on housing was also requested by local administrations, associations, and entities in the building sector: it is a series of measures aimed at regularizing small discrepancies or structural irregularities in eight out of ten houses. In light of simplification and administrative efficiency, it was also planned to intervene on administrative procedures to guarantee citizens definite answers in certain times.
When it can be applied
In particular, the measure will concern formal discrepancies, related to the interpretative uncertainties of the current regulations; internal building discrepancies, concerning individual housing units, to which owners have made minor changes (partitions, mezzanines, etc.); discrepancies that could have been regularized at the time of the intervention, but are not regularizable today due to the "double compliance" discipline that does not allow obtaining permission or notification in regularization for many interventions, dating back in time. And again, to allow changes of use of buildings between homogeneous categories.
The reasons for the intervention
These guidelines - the ministry explains - on which the offices have moved, following also the proposals collected in previous meetings on the topic, and which led to the draft legislation, were presented during the meeting on the housing plan, held at the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister Matteo Salvini with the Department for Economic Planning and Coordination of Economic Policy and about 50 institutions, entities, associations, professional orders, and foundations in the sector.
Reactions
"A minister who has done nothing for housing in two years, except zeroing the funds for rent for people in difficulty. What else could be expected from Salvini but yet another announcement of building amnesty? He calls it 'building peace' but in reality, it is the electoral promise to regularize abuses, illicit renovations, and superstructures. A way that mostly rewards those who act outside the law, always hoping to get away with it while endangering everyone's safety. This is how the leader of the League supports his party in trouble and in full decline of consensus," says in a note Chiara Braga, Pd group leader in the Chamber of Deputies. "Minister Salvini in managing housing policies is absolutely disastrous. We need a national housing plan to support rent and to relaunch public residential construction. Resources are needed to recover and requalify in order to provide concrete answers to young couples, workers, and citizens who either rent privately or through public housing must be able to find a different response. Minister Salvini is absolutely immobile on these grounds. In compensation, he relaunches a very harmful amnesty that was not felt necessary," says the Pd housing manager Pierfrancesco Majorino.
Stefano Betti, vice president of Ance (National Association of Building Constructors), has a different opinion: "It is not an amnesty, the measure aims to solve small formal discrepancies within the houses, discrepancies before 1977, these are absolutely minimal things inside the lodgings. It is an interesting measure in the short term, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the solutions that need to be found in the medium and long term," explained Betti, emphasizing that first of all, both the Unified Building Code and the National Urban Planning Law need to be "reviewed", tools now "old" and "not adequate" to work in the context of an "urban regeneration".
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