Tuesday, Dec 18, 2007
Italy - rising rents, rising interest rates, stagnant wages - the end of the middle classes?
Bloomberg: Italians Dressed in Sunday Best Forced to Dine in Soup Kitchens
"I never thought I would be in this position,'' said Cepponi, 45, a security guard, dining in a charity cafeteria near Rome's main train station. "I have a job, I had a car, but everything has become so expensive and what I earn just isn't enough." --- Rents today sap more than half the income of families earning less than €30,000 a year, up from a third in 2000. Each day nine tenants are evicted in Rome because they can't afford rent, up from about five daily in 2000. -- One in four homeowners can no longer afford their mortgage payments, which have risen 50 percent in two years.
Posted by drewster @ 01:14 PM (969 views) Add Comment
18 Comments
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1. yorkshireman said...
What a sad state of affairs. These are the real victims of this sad situation. Ordinary people who just want a place to live. What is even more sad is that the criminals who brought about the mess are getting away with it. In the UK, we even give them billions of taxpayers money. Nero Brown fiddling while we burn.
2. seanb303 said...
the same thing is going to happen to us ,maybe even worse
3. Renting2 said...
So, if rent is so high in Rome, will the same happen in the UK? Will the BTLers be laughing?
4. renting2 said...
So, if rent is so high in Rome could it happen in the UK? Will the BTLers be laughing?
5. Pmaupoil said...
I was in Florence the other day. I just could not believe the prices although central Florence is really touristic which could explain over-inflated prices but for the first time I really felt that London was cheaper. Go to a coffee shop to have a drink and a cake and that's 10 quid already!
6. Timbuk3 said...
If only they had a culture of buying flats instead of renting them then they could just keep MEWing to keep spending. (sic) maybe..not
I think this is really sad
7. Debtfree said...
renting2 said.... So, if rent is so high in Rome could it happen in the UK? Will the BTLers be laughing?
No, they won't be laughing.
Who wants to own a place, in an area where everyone that lives there.... has to queue for food at hand out halls ?
Sounds like a future slum where tenants can't afford their rent to me.
8. Camping said...
maybe the pope could raise a few lire by selling off some of that gold in his shed, that would help the poor out and guarantee the catholic church would slip through the eye of that needle...
9. Theboltonfury said...
in Italy it is still relatively uncommon to buy (compared to here) and many will rent for their whole lives
10. Theboltonfury said...
in Italy it is still relatively uncommon to buy (compared to here) and many will rent for their whole lives
11. drewster said...
@seanb, renting2:
The Italian economy has been performing poorly for much of the last decade. If people can get squeezed by rising rents in an underperforming economy, and the UK is already expensive despite the strong economy, then it really doesn't bode well for us if the economy takes a turn for the worse!
One important difference between the UK and Italy is that the latter has no inheritance tax. This means older people tend to keep their large houses rather than downsizing and gifting the released equity to their offspring. From my visits to the country there seem to be many large properties which haven't been looked after very well, which confirms this theory. This overconsumption of housing by retirees would partly explain the overall high cost of housing relative to earnings.
12. enuii said...
This is a side effect of the euro driving low paid jobs (security guard) down to the lowest common denominator. The wealthy will do very nicely as will the eastern europeans for a short time just like the Irish have done for the last 20 years, the loosers will be the unskilled workers in former states of relative affluence and we are seeing this first in Italy, then probably Spain followed by France, the UK and Germany.
Expect rising social unrest.
13. japanese uncle said...
Crooks are snatching billions just by being informed of the headlines tomorrow, all at the cost of ordinary working folks who must pay the price for those crooks to buy the fifth mansion and the seventh limo, or the second private jet. SImply a matter of course. Super rich and the poor without sound middle class, means going back to the feudal states.
14. Tippingpoint said...
On the subject of Rome, the following quotes from the anchient Roman poet Juvenal show how little has changed.
lines 3.164-189 – Umbricius: Virtue and lack of pretension is only to be found outside the City; at Roma everything is expensive, pretentious, and bought on credit.
lines 13.86-119 – Some believe that everything is a product of chance, and so do not fear to perjure themselves on the altars of the gods. Others rationalize that the wrath of the gods, though great, is very slow in coming.
15. wiltshire said...
Social unrest - hopefully you're right Enuii.
I think most of the people in this country have been sold up the river. They've been led to believe that they're richer and more secure whereas in reality the opposite will be proved to be true. Meanwhile, as usual a small elite live like kings with many millions more than they can ever hope to spend. It's not the politics of envy, I just believe there is enough to go around if only the small elite at the top weren't so bloody greedy. We need a good dose of some righteous anger to try to readdress the balance.
The British public have been docile for too long. Take away their toys and see what happens......
16. Cristiano Barbaro said...
As an Italian, I feel obliged to post my take on this issue, at least from my own personal experience. I live in a small town on the Mar Tirreno, and if I was to rent, I would easily have to dish out half my salary, without considering other utility expenses. Fortunately I bought a country home at a very lucky pre-Euro prices, and I got it cheap, because it was a wreck. So as it is I'm sitting on a variable mortgage, but a very small one only a fraction of the usual mortgages my fellow countrymen are taking on these days. The average two bed apartment in my small ton (60,000 people and not a tourist centre) is around 300,000 Euro. So I can quite undertand why people here are going nuts.
Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I saw the mess coming, fact is that I live my life not as the tv commercials want me to live it, but very, very frugally, and I cut every unnecessary thing out and refeuse loans even though they are regularly offered to me. This way, although my salary is not top of the line, my wife and I can live on one salary without too much trouble - but we don't have any luxuries like two weeks in the Maldives and so on. Next month I will convert my mortgage to a fixed rate one, and add a bit more certainty to my life. Other people I know live their lives in pretence of what they are not, flashy phones, loaned holidays, new cars etc... but I feel that many of them will have real trouble coping with reality when it hits. I have even planned to start planting my garden with legumes and other veggies and to keep chickens for fresh eggs; and fortunately my neighbour is a shepherd (free cheese and meat if I play y cards right). Call me nuts, but I'm planning for the worst.
The only upside is that it will make my countrymen more against the coming in of foreigners whose religion and culture is totally antagonistic and incompatible with our own (and by this I don't mean Buddhists), even thought the price will be upheaval - but when I chose the countryside I did not do it for nothing.
17. Urbanbear said...
This is what will happen to us if we let Brown sign away our sovereignty next summer:
see http://www.eutruth.org.uk/
We have been lied to big time!
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