L’accesso all’abitazione. inefficienze normative e risposte dell’autonomia privata

The glaring departure – in Italy as elsewhere – from the development of a democratic and social state, which is sensitive to the primary needs of the individuals and responds through redistributive mechanisms, shows its own problematic effects in the context of welfare policies. Among the areas in which the most significant criticalities are to be reported, the area of the safeguards and protections of housing needs has a primary importance. The difficulties in accessing housing solutions, which have worsened in recent times even in many advanced economies, derive indeed from deep-rooted socio-economic dynamics, but they also suffer from the inefficiency of public responses to the requests that come from people in distress. This inefficiency, in turn, derives from a serious shortage of economic resources, which prevent States from providing direct subsidies, as well as from the clear reluctance of the same States to introduce strong regulatory provisions, capable of affecting the conditions established by the market. In the light of a preliminary reconstruction of the abovementioned problems, the paper proposes an overview on some solutions to housing needs that have emerged from private autonomy, with the aim of examining the consistency of similar tools with the legal framework in which they are set down, and of detecting the critical issues that arise from the general tendency to abandon democratic and institutional mechanisms in order to rely, instead, on spontaneous forms of solidarity.