Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [15]
The situation is a tragedy, not because of change (Rome has never been a static city and since ancient times has often absorbed varied cultural influences~, but because the displaced families are bewildered and disoriented; easily fall prey to racist and neofascist social demagogues; and see their familiar places "restructured" to make way for people who usually have little interest in the spaces of collective memory. With the pattern of eviction, the old economy also collapses. As one man, a printer, pointed out, the forestieri, the "outsiders" who are now buying up the restructured residences, ignore the local shops: "But here they don't spend anything; they just come here to sleep." The rents they pay, he added, have pushed the overall level far beyond the means of most workers and merchants. And the money goes mostly to absentee landlords.
It is a tragedy because it erases all alternatives to the neoliberal vision of the good life. It is a tragedy because its prime movers prefer to keep decent housing vacant rather than allow existing residents to remain at affordable rates, perhaps hoping that isolation and physical neglect will finally drive this riff-raff away for good, especially as building decay constitutes a legal reason for refusing to extend a rental contract under the 1998 law; and because in the same process proprietors shut down artisans' workplaces in the expectation that their patience may be rewarded when high-end restaurants and boutiques replace the artisans at vastly inflated rents.24
One shop space was left empty for two decades and attracted the interest of a bicycle repair mechanic. The proprietor repeatedly agreed to appointments, only to stand the mechanic up repeatedly. "He's making a mockery of people," scowled the disgruntled artisan. One property-a palazzo in Via degli Ibernesi that was the site of a ferocious decade and a half of resistance to eviction by the remaining tenants-was only equipped with running water in 1997, and that only after considerable legal and political pressure by those still living in the building. Proprietors apparently calculate that the rents they lose in even two decades of disuse will be amply compensated when they finally rent to a wealthy tenant, a circumstance that dramatically illustrates the rapidity with which both rents and real estate prices are shooting "to the stars." The systemic neglect that results has devastating consequences. In the vacant spaces thus created in at least one building, the proprietor, a bank, sent workmen deliberately to squash all the piping so that the apartments themselves became completely uninhabitable and could therefore not serve as squats. Wealthy proprietors are willing and able to pay the higher taxes levied on vacant properties. The voices of former residents now silenced, these deserted apartments now trumpet the speculators' message that the only viable cure for degradation is gentrification.
All this is a tragedy, too, because it happens with the complaisance of left-wing authorities who have surrendered to the allure of neoliberal market logic in virtually every aspect of city management,25 thereby handing an easy victory to the so-called social Right that had itself evicted many thousands of citizens during its heyday under Mussolini.
It is a tragedy because it builds on the practices of a church that preaches generosity, the avoidance of unnecessary luxury, and tolerance for those whose circumstances are different, but practices none of these things despite the indisputable goodwill of individual members of its sometimes genuinely