CBOs and Public Institutions Attempts to Guarantee the Right to Housing for Migrants: Burden Shifting or Burden Sharing? an Insight on Initiatives Promoted in the Veneto Region (Italy)

Housing is a fundamental right for all individuals, recognized by many international and national charts and laws. For migrants it is, if possible, even more important since it is among the primary assets in their process of socio-spatial inclusion and rooting (Muñoz, 2018, Boccagni 2020). Only by ensuring access to stable affordable housing, migrants can engage in homemaking practices and access urban services and resources, thus fully enjoying the right to the city.

In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, migrants are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, experiencing high levels of housing precarity and deprivation (Lombard 2023, Darling, 2016) and the most exposed to discrimination both by the private and public housing markets (Marconi, 2022).

Since 2019 the Unesco Chair on the Social and Spatial Inclusion of International Migrants I direct at the University Iuav of Venice has been carrying out action-research in the Veneto region (Italy) to explore.: i) the factors underpinning migrants’ housing precariousness and ii) successful initiatives promoted at the local level to help them overcoming structural and cultural barriers preventing their access to adequate housing. This paper is based on qualitative data gathered through interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders, participant observation in practices and the establishment and coordination of a Regional Board on migrants’ access to housing convening civil servants and CBOs professionals.

Four initiatives will be presented as emblematic examples of intervention. They will highlight how, -within a framework of inadequate national and regional housing policies – some projects promoted at the local level by CBOs and/or public institutions have the potential to introduce innovative and successful tools and strategies to favor migrants’ access to housing. But they struggle to scale up and mainstream into regional policy-making: that is one of the challenge the above mentioned Regional Board is debating.