Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [163]
CHAPTER N I N E
Tearing the Social Fabric
ajor changes came to Monti and its residents in the i98os and especially after the "liberalization" of real estate laws in 1998. The sudden infusion of big money in the local real estate market opened up new fields of action for the techniques of intimidation that had hitherto protected local people from true outsiders. Now it was the outsiders who had mastered these techniques, and even improved on them. With the intimidation came a rhetoric of urban renewal and conservation; the response from the remnants of the traditional left was predictably supine. Moreover, the principal moral authority of the Right-the church-was soon deeply implicated, along with the developers and the city administration, in the same processes of reorganizing the historic center as a source of profit. Few residents owned their homes; now, often after generations of residence, even fewer could remain in them.
Renters and Owners
Rents had long remained low in Monti because old houses were not considered desirable habitations; the fashion for living in a historic district only really emerged in the 198os. In some parts of Italy, people living in the same building had paid wildly disparate rents; the introduction of rent control produced the effect of raising the lowest rents by considerable amounts, benefiting landlords rather than tenants. One of its goals had been to discourage the practice of keeping apartments vacant and thereby aggravating the growing postwar housing shortage. In Monti, however, where the idea of living in old houses had only just begun to seem attractive to a few highly educated individuals, the new uniformity of rent levels did not entail massive change; it simply stabilized existing arrangements. Since a high proportion of Monticiani had low incomes, moreover, the new dispensation, which made an artificial and arbitrary distinction between those with incomes of above and below 8,ooo,ooo lire per annum, protected the financially weakest sector from eviction for a few more years. Most Monti tenants, already accustomed to viewing their low rents as an inalienable right, did not see the looming danger.
Unfortunately, one effect of this artificial depression of rents was to prompt some smaller proprietors to sell off their properties; they could not make enough money from them to pay for building maintenance and extract a living for themselves at the same time. Some landlords also decided to leave apartments vacant, arguing that they were not able to demand adequate rents (and could not compete with the black market); the money was simply not worth the effort. Some of these landlords decided to wait out the remaining tenants, speculating that the overall value of a palazzo would far exceed the sum total to be gained by renting or selling the apartments one by one. A few locals did buy out their own residential quarters, and these prescient individuals now live in relative security and prosperity as a result. Much of the real estate that changed hands at that time, however, was acquired by corporate speculators who could afford to wait.'
Because most shops and other work spaces were exempt from the equo canone, the requirement of the earlier law that in each building all rents be on a similar scale, some speculators were also able to raise the rents on these spaces by dramatic leaps in all the historic centers, including that of Rome; it is at this point that gentrification really begins with a proliferation, initially slow but then accelerating, of boutiques and artists' studios. While domestic quarters could not easily be converted into such spaces under existing zoning restrictions, the inflated rents that were demanded for existing shops and ateliers began to favor activities that required specialized skills, displacing the ordinary artisans who had hitherto provided basic services and goods for local customers who themselves could not afford high prices. In a few cases, moreover, proprietors