Area: "Too many defaulters in 24 thousand Sardinian social housing: forced to cut maintenance"
The regional housing agency: with the crisis there is a significant increase in those who do not pay the rent, to make ends meet less interventions in old buildings
Due to the crisis, defaulters who do not pay rent have increased by a lot. And we are talking about belonging to fragile social categories. Meanwhile, the banks are asking for more money. The only solution, to have a balanced budget, was to cut maintenance. Of old houses, often in precarious conditions.
They jumped through hoops, in Area (Regional Housing Agency), to try to make ends meet in the forecast document for the three-year period up to 2024, which bears the signature of the extraordinary commissioner Adamo Pili (in office when the order has been drafted). It is written clearly: " It is necessary to highlight the great difficulties encountered, in the drafting of this document, to obtain budget balances".
The agency manages around 24,000 lodgings throughout Sardinia. A real estate asset, the document reads, "characterized by a high degree of age and a substantial number of vacant homes, so-called waste, which require ordinary and extraordinary maintenance to be reassigned".
The type of user, obviously, precisely because they need housing at subsidized rent, belongs to medium-low social categories: «The current economic crisis, in causing greater impoverishment» precisely in those segments of the population, «has led, from on the one hand, to an increase in requests for public residential housing, on the other, for housing assigned for rent, has caused an increase in arrears".
And this is the biggest problem. Because, Pili writes again, the Company does not benefit from any operating contribution from the regional administration. The income, "deriving mainly from rents and on which a large percentage of arrears weighs, is meager compared to the company's fixed costs and the financial needs of the individual services".
In addition there are the problems of the treasury service, the commissioner writes. For the current three-year period, the bank did not guarantee the same conditions as the previous one. And it will cost 740 thousand euros more.
The Company, not having the possibility of reducing fixed costs "and even less of increasing rents, determined on the basis of objective and subjective parameters governed by regional legislation" to obtain a balanced budget, "had to act on the only items of manageable expenses, i.e. current expenses of a variable nature" . That is ordinary maintenance. Houses are at risk of losing pieces.
