In Italy students are protesting for the overpriced rents

Many students attending Universities in the capitals of Italy are finding it increasingly hard to find adequate housing and rents. This is why many of them have camped out in tents, as a sign of protest, in front of some of Italy's major universities. Opening the ranks was Ilaria Lamera, a 23-year-old environmental engineering student from Bergamo, who lived for about a week - starting in early May - in a tent outside the Milan Polytechnic, in Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, where she was soon joined by eleven other tents and twenty or so students camped out in protest. «The costs in Milan do not allow students coming from normal families to rent rooms. I found 700 euro singles excluding expenses, I couldn't afford them,» Lamera told La Repubblica in an interview. But the housing emergency does not only concern students in Milan: protests of similar natura to those in the Lombard capital, where rents have risen by 40% in the past eight years, have also been seen outside Sapienza University in Rome, at the University of Cagliari and in Pavia, and in front of the buildings of the Tuscany and Piedmont regions.

Bologna

Milano

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Napoli

The high rent crisis is a problem that Italian university students have been particularly affected by since last autumn, due to the consequences of inflation and the return to live classes - after the stop due to the health emergency. According to a report by Immobiliare.it Insights, prices for single rooms have risen by 11% since 2021, reaching an average of EUR 439 per month. Typically, the rent for a room in Milan is around 800 euros, compared to 600 in Rome and 500 in Bologna. The recent escalation in the cost of rents, especially university rents, is just the latest escalation of an upward trend, and institutions are aware of it - this is why it has been decided to allocate over 900 million of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRPR) to university housing, with the aim of creating around 60,000 more beds than the existing ones by 30 June 2026.

Local politicians from the cities involved have intervened on the issue. «We are on the side of the students demonstrating: we are well aware of the critical issues, and that is why a fund has been set up to finance housing contributions,» said Sapienza university chancellor Antonella Polimeni, after meeting the protesters. Milan's mayor Beppe Sala - together with the chancellors of the city's universities and two councillors - also met a delegation of students, while the president of the Rectors' Conference, an association with an institutional role that brings together state and private universities, reported to be looking for a solution together with the university minister, Anna Maria Bernini, to build student halls of residence. The problem with these facilities is that they often do not have enough rooms, and in some cases are given to private individuals to manage, with the risk that standards are not guaranteed to make them affordable for students. «In the calls for tenders the obligation for private individuals to allocate 20 per cent of accommodation to students on the right to study list has been dropped. Now the constraint is replaced by the word 'priority' and fees are not mentioned,» researcher Sarah Gainsforth, an expert on housing issues, pointed out to Repubblica.

According to the latest report on the right to university study by the Ministry of Universities and Research, at the beginning of November 2022 the number of beds in student halls of residence had dropped by 7%: from just over 40,000, around 3,000 beds were gone compared to pre-pandemic times. With the health emergency, many rooms went from being doubles to singles, generating a loss that has not yet been made up.