Increasing the livability of existing buildings, regularizing small building irregularities and making the real estate market more fluid: these are the central issues of the housing policies that, between the State and the Regions, in recent years are redesigning the face of the Italian building heritage.

In Sardinia, the comparison between two key instruments – the Piano Casa and the new Salva Casa – reveals two distinct, but partly complementary, visions of urban development and management of the existing.

On the one hand, a ten-year regulatory framework, made up of exemptions and incentives, created to respond to housing needs and stimulate building redevelopment. On the other, a very recent national decree that intervenes on the micro-irregularities widespread in the built environment, simplifying procedures and facilitating access to the market.

The context is clear: 80% of the Sardinian (and Italian) building heritage was built before the 1990s, often in the absence of updated criteria on safety, sustainability and formal documentation . Yet, every intervention on the existing clashes with a stratified bureaucracy and a fragmented regulatory framework, where national and regional rules often overlap or contradict each other. The common goal is only one: to transform the built from ballast to resource.

Born in 2008 with the decree law 112, the House Plan had a precise objective: to promote the expansion and redevelopment of the existing building stock, even in derogation of the urban planning tools, to respond to the growing housing need. In Sardinia the first application came in 2009 with the regional law 4, which introduced extraordinary provisions for the redevelopment of the existing building stock through adaptation, expansion and recovery interventions also providing for a series of volumetric incentives (up to 30% more increased in some cases by a further 30%) linked to the energy requalification of the buildings.

It is the season of extensions and continuous adjustments. Regional laws 8 of 2015, 1 of 2017 and finally 1 of 2021 attempt to rationalize the framework, introducing more detailed rules on the recovery of attics, basements, ground floors and even removable structures for tourist use. But it is also the season of appeals: the Constitutional Court intervenes several times, limiting the scope of the exemptions and redrawing the boundaries of what is permitted.

To date, the Housing Plan has been updated to Regional Law 9 of 2023 , modified by Regional Law 17 of 2023 and by some rulings of the Constitutional Court of 2024, and some provisions reported in articles 123 to 130 remain in force. These are rules aimed, for example, at the functional recovery and improvement of the existing, without substantially touching the volumes: the Housing Plan is no longer an instrument of expansion, but a device for the orderly maintenance of the built territory.

With the Salva Casa Decree, which became Law 105/2024, introduced at a national level, the approach changes. Here we are no longer talking about incentivizing new cubic capacity, but about simplifying the life of owners dealing with small building irregularities that, while not compromising the stability of the buildings, block their marketability or access to tax bonuses.

«This is a “common sense” rule, as some operators in the sector have defined it: it raises the tolerance thresholds on minor discrepancies (such as small deviations in heights, distances, volume or covered surface area), allows for exceptions for the purposes of usability and clarifies the margins within which one can intervene without incurring sanctions or demolition obligations», explains engineer Sarah Orrù.

It is not a pardon, this is worth repeating. But the Salva Casa intervenes where the regulatory rigidity had produced a block: properties that are formally non-compliant but structurally in order, often blocked due to design quibbles or document deficiencies. And in a region like Sardinia, where the real estate market is often linked to inherited homes, second homes and small interventions that are not always correctly registered, the impact can be significant.

If you look closely, Piano Casa and Salva Casa respond to two different but complementary needs. The first acted on the quantity and quality of living, promoting expansions and redevelopments in a phase of stagnation in the building sector. The second works on legality and simplification, trying to make existing properties fully usable (and marketable).

«Both, however, move within a strategy that – finally – seems to recognize the centrality of existing heritage in territorial planning and economic policies. And the future could consolidate this vision».

The guidelines of the Italian Home Plan, envisaged by the 2025 budget plan (State Law no. 207 of 30 December 2024), are expected by the end of June 2025 : a broader national project that aims to integrate public housing, urban regeneration and regulatory simplification, with direct involvement of the Regions.

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