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Housing crisis in big cities

Housing crisis in big cities

How many empty homes are there in Milan? Not even AI knows

A few days ago, Corriere della Sera ran a simple experiment: ask an AI how many vacant homes there are in Milan. The result: answers ranging from under 20,000 to over 100,000 units, depending on the source cited. Nobody really knows, not even the machines that are supposed to know everything.

I have an answer, even if a partial one, not from AI datasets, but from years spent reading real estate listings one by one.

The Kijiji jargon

I worked for Kijiji, the classifieds site, and I used to comb through its sections, especially the ones for housing wanted and offered. Over time, I learned to read the recurring jargon. “1 bmb” meant one child. It was the shorthand single mothers used in their listings when looking for a room, often typed in a hurry between shifts. They weren’t just looking for a roof: they were looking for other mothers to share a home with, to build a network, to split the bills, and to take turns watching the kids when the other was at work.

Then there were the listings from teachers, professionals with a steady salary who still weren’t earning enough for a place of their own near the school where they worked, so they’d split a two-room apartment with a colleague. And some elderly people opened up a room in their home to a university student, not so much for the rent, which was often symbolic, but so they wouldn’t spend their days without hearing a voice in the house.

Reading those listings one after another, I understood they weren’t isolated cases. It was a market reorganizing itself from the ground up through makeshift solutions invented by people with no other choice.

My home, in three stages

I moved to Milan in the early 2000s. My first place was a shared double room, at 450 euros a month, split between the two of us. Then I moved into a studio all my own: 520 euros plus expenses, finally on my own. With one detail: I was right across from a restaurant that turned into an unlicensed nightclub after dark. Three nights out of seven, there was no sleeping.

I bought a place as soon as I could, and the first time I got it wrong. The two-room apartment I’d chosen was in a great location, but in a poorly run building, with constant noise problems and endless disputes with neighbors. I sold it and leaped: a brand-new three-room apartment, very expensive for the time, well beyond what I should have spent. For a long time, I struggled with the mortgage. I made it in twelve years, with plenty of sacrifices, and paid it off two years ago. Now it’s mine.

If I had to buy that same home today, on the same salary, I couldn’t. That’s why I want to leave it to my son: so he won’t have to face the same difficulties I did.

Now and then, I still drag the Google Maps pegman onto that street to look again at the door of my old studio and the restaurant that turned into a nightclub after dark, now a quiet, upscale spot.

What I see around me now

Lately, near my home, I’ve started seeing people living in tents. Elderly couples who won’t go to homeless shelters because they’d be separated there, or because they have a pet that wouldn’t be accepted, and they’d rather stay on the street together.

It’s the same dynamic as those Kijiji listings from twenty years ago, just harsher: people organizing, adapting, giving something up so they don’t end up alone or lose the one bond they have left.

Not just Milan

In Rome, my story would have looked different in the numbers, but not in substance: rents have grown more slowly than in Milan, but single rooms, increasingly sought after by out-of-town students, rose 14.8% in a single year, with rents ranging from 400 to over 700 euros a month. And it’s not just an Italian problem. In Madrid, home prices and rents rose by 42% and 48%, respectively, over 10 years, to the point that groups of “saboteurs” have started tampering with short-term rental key boxes to keep tourists out. In Barcelona, Valencia, and Naples, rent eats up 60% to 70% of the average salary. Berlin remains expensive, but tenant protections make it more livable. London and New York, paradoxically, have seen prices and rents fall in recent years. A sign that the housing crisis isn’t a law of nature everywhere is that it results from specific policy choices.

Where it worked

It hasn’t gone this way everywhere. In Vienna, 77% of residents rent, and over 40% of the housing stock is public or social housing, run directly by the city or by subsidized cooperatives: around 220,000 rent-controlled apartments, built across the whole city rather than just on the outskirts, with average rent staying around 10.5 euros per square meter. In Singapore, a public agency raised homeownership from 30% to about 90% of households in twenty years, selling apartments at controlled prices under 99-year leases. In Tokyo, national zoning rules make it possible to build a lot quickly, and homes, not treated as investments, depreciate over time rather than appreciating; rents have stayed relatively stable for decades. And Finland, through its Housing First program, has cut chronic homelessness by 68% since 2008, providing people with permanent housing with no preconditions before addressing anything else.

A reflection

Wages in Italy have been flat in real terms for roughly 30 years. Over that same period, home prices and rents in big cities have risen far faster than income: in Milan, for instance, home prices are up 57% over the last decade and rents by over 70%, with one of the highest average rents in Europe. Fifty years ago, a family with a single income could reasonably aspire to buy a home, raise more children, and put something aside. Today, two incomes often aren’t enough, and that’s partly why the gap between generations has become so sharp: people who entered the workforce in different decades had access to very different possibilities.

I don’t believe this is a law of nature, and Vienna, Singapore, Tokyo, and Finland prove it: it’s the result of choices, made or not made, about short-term rentals, public housing, and tenant protections. But the stories remain: the mothers who found each other through a shorthand in a listing, mine, the elderly couples in tents near my home. Different, but born of the same situation: a home that costs more than most people can afford.

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Chiara Bonifazi