Catania

Italian housing cooperatives come in two forms. A cooperativa a proprietà indivisa (an undivided-ownership cooperative) keeps the building and houses its members for as long as they stay. A cooperativa a proprietà divisa (a divided-ownership cooperative) builds, then gives each member the title to a flat. Sicilian law backed both. It set a lower income ceiling for members of undivided cooperatives, at 8 million lire a year, than for those who would own outright, at 10 million. Ownership was the easier route, and it is the one most Catanesi cooperatives took.

The tradition grew on regional money. In 1975 the Regione Siciliana passed a law to encourage building cooperatives. Two years later it created a revolving loan fund of 160 billion lire at IRCAC, the regional credit institute for cooperatives. Subsidised homes had to rise inside the piani di zona (zoned plans for low-cost housing under national Law 167 of 1962). Cooperative building therefore followed the same map as the public estates, on the city's edge.

The sector today falls into three clusters. The first is the legacy of those decades. In 2015 Sicily still had 148 cooperatives in Legacoop Abitanti, the housing arm of the Legacoop federation, more than any other region. The second is small and social. Trame di Quartiere, a cooperativa di comunità (a community cooperative run by and for its neighbourhood), was formalised in 2020 in San Berillo and mixes neighbourhood research with shared housing. The third is the social cooperatives that run homeless services, such as Il Mosaico at the city's reception point. Their problems differ. The building cooperatives need land and cheap credit to start again. The community groups need buildings and steady money to keep going.

Governments now treat cooperatives mainly as partners in social housing, not as a tenure to expand. The national housing plan leans on developers and on recovering empty public flats. Catania's own community-housing projects were won through national and philanthropic calls, with cooperatives as one partner among several. Comparative research on public-cooperative partnerships shows what a firmer role could look like: public land on long leases and patient loans, exchanged for homes that stay affordable for good. That trade is exactly what the politics of the city has yet to offer.

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Rome's answer to the crisis is the Piano Casa Italia. The Council of Ministers approved it on 30 April 2026. It promises about 100,000 homes in ten years and more than €10 billion of public money. Decree-law 66/2026 then put €1.7 billion into bringing 60,000 unusable public flats back into use. Of the new building it enables, 70% must serve first homes, let or sold at least 33% below market. Parliament passed it in July 2026. Tenant organisations called it inadequate to the emergency. It follows the government's 2023 decision to cut the national rent-support fund to zero.

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Each level of government holds a different piece. Rome writes tenancy law and funds national programmes. The Regione Siciliana has its own housing laws and oversees the IACPs. On 27 May 2026 Renato Schifani's regional government added about €183 million of EU funds, taking its housing budget to about €246 million. The money covers public and social homes, energy upgrades and student beds. The city holds the land-use plan and part of the stock, but little money. Catania entered dissesto (a formal municipal insolvency, with debts settled by a state-appointed commission) in 2018. In July 2026 its chief accountant listed €141 million of new liabilities, about €35 million of them claimed by the IACP. The council asked to stay in dissesto for longer. Mayor Enrico Trantino of Fratelli d'Italia, elected in 2023, frames housing within a €400 million programme of public works.

Support for community housing arrives through competitive calls rather than a standing programme. PINQuA, the national programme for innovative housing quality, awarded €14.5 million to Librino Città Moderna in 2021. Fondazione Con il Sud, a foundation that funds social projects in southern Italy, backed collaborative housing in San Berillo through its social-housing call. The PNRR (Italy's EU-funded recovery plan) paid for a Housing First scheme for the Catania district, worth €1.09 million. It stalled because the buildings chosen turned out to be unavailable.

On empty buildings, policy is still piecemeal. In the historic centre, via Telefono has been closed since a building collapsed in 2017. Francesco Bassini, president of the First Municipio, has proposed a regional law to transfer abandoned buildings into public hands. In San Berillo the council approved buying three private buildings for €545,000 to create an urban centre. The Comune also manages 149 properties confiscated from the mafia. One of them, a former boss's house, is becoming an albergo sociale (a hostel for homeless people).

Safety and climate goals point to the same stock. Catania was declared a seismic zone in 1981, yet 87.8% of its homes were built before then. Italy's building tax credits, the Superbonus for energy and the Sismabonus for seismic works, moved €6.9 billion of investment in Sicily. Italy then missed the May 2026 deadline to transpose the EU's revised energy performance of buildings directive (EPBD), and seven in ten of its homes sit in the three lowest energy classes. Owners of whole blocks can retrofit at scale where individual owners cannot. Housing Europe's review of climate adaptation in public, cooperative and social housing makes the same argument. Research on energy poverty adds that the tenants of cold, costly homes are usually the least able to pay for fixes.

The loudest local quarrel is over short lets. Senator Salvo Pogliese, a former mayor, rejects EU limits and credits short lets with about 5,000 jobs in Catania. The tenants' unions reply that the city is a high-stress market in which only agreed rents should be allowed. Catania's own action so far is enforcement of the national code: officers made 450 inspections in spring 2025. A European Parliament study of short-term rental rules maps the tools other cities use. Palermo shows where inaction can lead, with vacant homes and evictions rising together.

Librino is the city's largest experiment and its hardest lesson. In 1970 Catania asked Kenzo Tange to plan a self-contained satellite town for 70,000 people. The housing was built, but many of the services were not. By 2015 some 80,000 people lived among giant blocks and untended green space, as Il Sole 24 Ore described it. Planners at the University of Catania have called the new town a total failure of modernist planning. They also document the grassroots groups slowly repairing it.

Palazzo di cemento shows how that repair works in practice. The block on viale Moncada stood unfinished for about 40 years and became a stronghold of the drug trade. In January 2021 its 96 flats were finally assigned to public-housing tenants. The work was paid for with savings from other tenders. It proved that an abandoned shell could become homes, and it showed the cost of waiting four decades to do it.

The Torri di Librino follow the same path. The IACP kept ownership of two long-unfinished towers but let the city complete them, for about €12.5 million. Mayor Trantino said in October 2025 that they would return 72 public flats by the end of 2026. Nearby, Librino Città Moderna is building 64 public flats in two energy-class-A buildings. Work began around March 2024 and then stalled. Families now expect to move in during 2027, after the PNRR deadline of June 2026 for such projects.

Trame di Quartiere began in San Berillo with a community mapping in 2011. The district was the scene of Catania's great clearance. From 1957 its old streets were demolished and residents were moved to San Leone, far from the centre. Carla Barbanti of the cooperative puts the number uprooted at 30,000. Since 2015 the group has worked from Palazzo De Gaetani, a nineteenth-century building lent free by its owner. There it runs a social café, and upstairs, with partners, the SottoSopra collaborative-housing project. People of Italian, Nigerian and Gambian origin share its flats.

Social Housing Indipendenza is the IACP's move towards a new kind of tenant. It replaces an old building with 21 efficient social flats. They are meant for people the ordinary waiting list often misses: women leaving violence, separated fathers and young couples.

ERSU Catania, the regional student-welfare agency, plans to take its residences from about 400 beds to at least 800. That matters beyond campus, because every student housed is one fewer bidder for a family flat. Homelessness is the harder case. Housing First guidance from across Europe is clear that the home comes first and the services follow, which is exactly where Catania's own scheme stalled.

Taken together, the pieces are on the table. There are public towers being finished, a community cooperative with a working model, a university that studies its own peripheries, and a quarter of the housing stock standing empty. What the city has rarely had is an owner patient enough to hold land, money and residents together over decades.