Palermo

Italian housing cooperatives come in two forms. In a cooperativa a proprietà divisa (a divided-ownership cooperative), members join to receive a home in full ownership and the cooperative usually winds down once the flats are handed over. In a cooperativa a proprietà indivisa (an undivided-ownership cooperative), the cooperative keeps the building and members hold an open-ended right of use. Members pay in through a quota sociale (the share that buys membership), a prestito sociale (a member loan) and a monthly canone di godimento (a use fee). In Bologna, two undivided cooperatives charge an average of €5.12/m², about 60% below the open market.

Sicily took the divided route. Its cooperative building grew on regional subsidy laws of the 1970s and the national housing law of 1978, which AGCI Sicilia still lists as the basis of cooperative programmes. Those decades were also the aftermath of the Sacco di Palermo (the "sack of Palermo"). In five years around 1960, over 4,000 building licences were signed, and the population grew from 503,000 in 1951 to 709,000 in 1981. Public housing followed the same outward push. The ZEN 2 competition of 1969, won by a team including Vittorio Gregotti, produced the estate that still defines the northern edge.

Today the sector clusters in three groups. The first is the legacy of ownership cooperatives from the 1970s and 1980s, now largely dissolved into ordinary condominiums. The second is the national federations. Legacoop Abitanti counts more than 300,000 homes built, and the three federations together report 4,364 housing cooperatives. Their Sicilian arm, Legacoop Sicilia, has only recently turned back to housing in Palermo. The third group is social cooperatives and third-sector bodies that run services rather than own buildings. They manage Housing First flats and homes confiscated from the mafia. They face different problems: the old cooperatives have little left to manage, while the new actors lack land, capital and long leases.

Organisation in focus

Legacoop Sicilia

Coordinates Sicily's housing cooperatives, co‑signed 2026 social‑housing protocol, promotes regional cooperative development.

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Across Europe, Housing Europe's survey of cooperatives shows the sector scaling where states offer land and patient loans. A comparative history in Housing Studies makes the same point about the state's role. Palermo now tries a version of that bargain. On 7 September 2026 the Comune, Legacoop Abitanti, Legacoop Sicilia and the craft federation CNA Palermo signed a social-housing protocol. It starts by mapping usable buildings, confiscated ones included, and aims for each public euro to draw up to €4 of private money.

The national answer is the Piano Casa, approved by the Council of Ministers on 30 April 2026 and issued as Decree-Law 66/2026. It promises about 100,000 homes over ten years and more than €10bn of public money through INVIMIT (the state property-fund manager). It aims to bring about 60,000 empty council homes back into use under an extraordinary commissioner. Private developers get faster permits if at least 70 of every 100 homes are convenzionata, priced at least 33% below market. Parliament converted it on 2 July 2026. The same government had cut the national rent-support fund from €330m in 2022 to nothing in 2023.

Tenant unions answered the same day. As Il Fatto Quotidiano's report on the vote records, Sunia, Sicet, Uniat and Unione Inquilini called the law inadequate. They argued that €970m over five years cannot repair the empty stock, against about 350,000 families on waiting lists.

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Il Piano Casa è legge con la fiducia. Salvini: 'Ora si deve correre'. Le organizzazioni degli inquilini: 'Inadeguato all'emergenza'

The Piano Casa vote, with both the government and tenant unions on record.

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The Region holds the purse for council housing. President Renato Schifani's government raised its EU-funded housing line to about €246m in May 2026. A bill before the Sicilian Regional Assembly would merge the ten IACPs (the provincial public-housing institutes) into a single agency, ASPA. Palermo's own landlord role sits with the Comune. Mayor Roberto Lagalla, elected in 2022 with 47.63%, put housing emergencies under assessore Fabrizio Ferrandelli. The city says it handed over more than 140 homes in a year and admitted 488 households to its new emergency list. Its social-housing agency helped 507 families keep their homes in 2024. Il Post reported the assessore sleeping in a council flat at ZEN to face down illegal occupations.

The estates get the capital. Borgo Nuovo is being rebuilt on the so-called Caivano model, with €25m from central government and €17m from the city, including prefabricated homes in natural materials. A masterplan for ZEN bundles 21 works worth over €50m. Old Gescal money (a defunct payroll levy for worker housing), frozen for two decades, must be spent in ZEN, Sperone and Borgo Nuovo by January 2029.

For cooperatives, the concrete instrument is property, not subsidy. Law 109/1996 (the statute on the social reuse of assets seized from organised crime) followed a Libera petition and lets councils hand those assets to families and associations. Palermo holds about 1,400 confiscated properties. Around 276 serve the housing emergency and 217 go to the third sector. A €794,000 maintenance contract now keeps them habitable. Earlier, the state lender CDP (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) backed a €60m social-housing plan for Sicily through Fondo Esperia.

Empty homes get less attention than empty council flats. There is no vacant-homes tax and no conversion programme for idle offices. Short lets are managed through revenue instead: since July 2025 guests in holiday flats pay a tourist tax of €4 a night, and every let needs a national identification code, the CIN. Tourism assessore Alessandro Anello has ruled out any freeze on new licences. On the tenants' side, Sunia Palermo opened a standing working group with the city in July 2026.

Climate rules arrive from Brussels. Italy voted against the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive in 2024. It still has to cut residential energy use 16% by 2030 and 20-22% by 2035, and it has missed the first deadline for its renovation plan. Sicily lost 773 ha of soil to building between 2023 and 2024. Reusing seized flats and empty council homes is, in practice, the city's cheapest way to meet both targets.

Housing First Palermo is the newest proof that seized buildings can become homes. Since late August 2026, 12 people have lived in flats near via Don Orione and via del Quarnaro. The project offers 25 places over two years with EU recovery funds. A consortium led by the social cooperative La Panormitana runs it with the Waldensian centre La Noce.

Lighthouse project

Housing First Palermo

Housing First in Palermo, run by a social-cooperative consortium.

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La Casa della Cooperazione takes the same idea to a whole building. A confiscated property on via Ponte di Mare now hosts a solidarity café, shared desks and services. The development NGO CISS leads it with €350,000 from Fondazione CON IL SUD, the southern-Italy foundation. It shows how Law 109 can hand real estate to a cooperative economy rather than only to the council.

The Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa is Palermo's largest piece of adaptive reuse. The Ducrot works once made furniture designed by Ernesto Basile. The city bought the site in 1995 and filled 55,000 m² of sheds with the Academy of Fine Arts, a film school and foreign cultural institutes. Open Heritage, a European study of community-driven reuse, describes the model it follows: public ownership, many tenants, slow conversion.

Ecomuseo Urbano Mare Memoria Viva works on the coast the Sacco left behind. Since 2014 it has occupied a former tram depot at the mouth of the Oreto. Its neighbours curate the story of a shoreline buried under demolition rubble. It is a lighthouse for the southern districts, where land is cheap and neglected.

Moltivolti anchors Ballarò, the market quarter under the most tourist pressure. Founded in 2014 by a team from eight countries, it runs a restaurant, coworking and a small guesthouse that keeps its earnings in the neighbourhood. Nearby, the parish-led community of Danisinni built a social farm and emergency rooms in a valley of about 2,000 residents.

Borgo Vecchio Factory began in the market quarter of the same name in 2015. Children painted fifteen murals on the lanes where they live, with the associations Per Esempio and Push. The street art drew visitors, and it also gave a poor district a say in how it is seen. That tension, between being noticed and being priced out, now runs through every central neighbourhood.

ERSU Palermo, the regional student-support agency, plans to double its 835 student beds by the 2026/27 academic year. Every student in a residence is one fewer furnished flat competing with families in the centre. Together these projects share a method: take a building the market or the mafia left behind, and give it to people who will stay.

Organisation in focus

ERSU Palermo

The regional body for the right to study that runs Palermo's student residences.

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