Reportage
Removing homeless families, Rome sweeps its poverty problem aside
Around 22,000 people live on the streets of Rome. Because of new security regulations and an upcoming Jubilee Year, the city has accelerated removals.
The last intervention to remove a homeless encampment took place on September 23. At 8 a.m., state police, Rome municipal police and cleanup teams from the AMA municipal street cleaning service raided Viale Pretoriano, a street bordering the ruins of the Aurelian Walls, which connects the San Lorenzo neighborhood and the Tiburtina Station quarter with the Termini Station area. Due to its location, it had long been inhabited by homeless people, mostly transients.
“30 makeshift dwellings removed, 19 persons identified,” said the police headquarters in a statement, also announcing the installation of physical barriers along the Walls to prevent further access to the area.
In the past months, due to the combined effect of the new security regulations, the fires that broke out in Rome during the summer and the demands of the upcoming 2025 Jubilee Year, there have been more and more removals. In August, the area in Pietralata where Roma's new stadium will be built was cleared of the homeless. Two families lived there. Then it was the turn of the Monte Mario nature reserve, after a fire had broken out and gotten close to the RAI headquarters, blamed on the stoves used by the homeless in their tents. Among them was a person with disabilities, who later refused to be taken in by Social Services. On the same day as the operation on Viale Pretoriano, an occupation in Cinecittà was cleared: the authorities were looking for drug dealers, but only found families with children.
The critical issue is that these operations don’t always come with a corresponding response from the homeless shelters. In Rome there are about 22,000 people living on the streets, but the tent facilities that will be installed for the Jubilee are unlikely to offer more than 1,000 places in total. Moreover, they might hold up in extreme weather conditions but are unsuitable for households with children. “They’re only useful to keep the poor out of sight,” explains anthropologist Federico Bonadonna, who has been involved in social services for years under previous center-left administrations.
With the exception of a number of NGOs and civil associations that have been working with emergency housing or migrants for a long time, there are no voices being raised against the current administration’s methods. Mayor Gualiteri (PD) never really made a convincing case to the Romans: the inefficiencies that have never been fixed have been compounded by the problems caused by to the Jubilee Year preparations (some 6,000 active construction sites in Rome) and the lack of attention paid to the worsening living conditions of low-income families. However, the debate on the left seemed muted – until the latest operation, in Castro Pretorio, which set off a political clash in the center-left-led city.
PD national secretariat coordinator Marta Bonafoni, one of secretary Elly Schlein’s closest allies, issued a scathing statement against the Rome mayor, calling the eviction operation “serious and alarming” and the installed barriers “attempts to erase the most fragile human beings.” She added that “there is a need to unite and build, involving NGOs, movements and the civil society.” Her statements spotlighted something that could no longer be ignored: the rift between the city administration and the grassroots.
Sandro Luparelli and Michela Cicculli, city councilors from the Ecologist Civic Left, condemned the “interventions that we don’t want to see in our city and unacceptable methods.” And even grassroots organizations close to the Rome administration, such as Nonna Roma (which works on poverty and housing hardship), had very harsh words: “We will not passively accept the building of vile forms of hostile architecture, nor will we tolerate repressive policies against the marginalized. The city council must decide whose side it’s on.”
Barbara Funari, Councilor for Social Policies in the administration (and a longtime member of the Community of Sant'Egidio), said she had not been informed of the operation in advance and disavowed it: “I am sorry that this was the line chosen. I am politically and morally opposed to such actions.” NGOs with an active presence in the city, such as the Polo Civico Esquilino, Baobab Experience and Spin Time Lab, as well as Nonna Roma and neighborhood associations, all came together spontaneously in a joint initiative under the banner “Gente Solidale” (“The People United”): “No more evictions and no more barriers, here or elsewhere. What they’re doing is the Jubilee of the rich.”
They demanded that the municipality and the prefecture “stop the evictions they are carrying out in the city, and collaborate with NGOs and residents to build pathways for social integration and not marginalization.” However, the mayor chose to downplay their complaints: “It's a storm in a teacup for something that is quite routine. The vulnerable are being assisted and there is no punitive intent.”
“In the capital, we are seeing a paradox on the left: instead of fighting to guarantee citizenship rights, welfare, the right to housing or at least to decent assistance, political action is only happening at the level of voluntary associations, while the right is openly praising Gualtieri's zero tolerance policies.” Bonadonna says.
He recalls: “In 2007 alone, under Mayor Veltroni, we intervened against 7 evictions for a total of 1,000 people. Gualtieri says it’s a pointless controversy because there is a Social Operations Room. But it must intervene before the forced eviction, to avoid inflicting the trauma of seeing police and vigilantes literally destroying their encampments and AMA sanitation workers throwing all their few possessions out with the trash. The mayor is right when he says that the protection of monuments such as the Aurelian Walls is necessary, but the difference between a left-wing administration and others must also be visible in the manner of conducting removals. It's one thing to protect all people, starting with the vulnerable ones; it's another to clear everything out and only assist later, when and if possible.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/sgomberi-e-cancelli-levento-religioso-nasconde-la-poverta on 2024-10-06