Expanding inclusionary housing in Italy

The provision of social and affordable housing is a crucial objective in current debate and literature. In the absence of national guidelines, cities and towns in Italy are testing various ways to use planning instruments and housing policies. To a large extent, inclusionary housing (IH) programs play an increasing role in local plans. The results are often noncomparable, mainly because they come from different objectives and welfare policies. Nevertheless, they share both the abandonment of the expropriation mechanism as a tool to acquire land for social housing and a serious commitment to create a social mix in new developments. Although the primary purpose is to build social and affordable units, in some cases land value recapture is addressed too. The article aims to explain and explore the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the ongoing IH programs, pointing at their different characters in different contexts, as a consequence of regional laws and local rules. The underlying question is to what extent such programs fully address public and private needs in the supply of housing, through the negotiation process and the compensation approach, in addition to competitions and bonus incentives as well as more innovative devices such as perequazione (the Italian instrument for the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) and land readjustment).