'Now the Commission will have to give centrality to the housing emergency'

But how is this possible? The market is free anyway...

We need to work on finance and the prospect of stabilising rates. What is needed is finance that is able to look to the next 20 years, without the rush to cash in immediately, with capped prices. I call it 'patient finance', on a human scale, capable of creating adequate financial instruments, which can be content with lower profitability but which knows the value of the social impact of its choices and which helps reduce risks and social conflicts. For now, the typical instrument of this vision is the EIB.

Do you want a Bei more committed to social housing?

Certainly social housing should be rewarded. But we must not stop at this instrument. With European guarantees the other banks, and the world of finance in general, would also come. We must reward the virtuous mechanism of those who continuously invest what they collect.

The recent enquiries in Milan, on alleged building abuses, apart from the outcomes, lead us to reflect on the way cities are growing. What do you think?
That when faced with a high-impact event we are forced to ask ourselves where the city is going and what kind of development we want. Milan is an example of a contradiction: building development on the one hand, the inability to accommodate everyone and give housing answers to residents on the other. In this it is becoming a city that excludes.

Those houses in those skyscrapers someone bought them though.

Certainly, but they have not served to give housing answers to residents in need, they do not give social answers. And they are often just speculative purchases. To understand that this is so, it is enough to juxtapose two parameters: the average salary and the value of houses. It is all too easy to see that there is an imbalance. And let's remember that without a home there are cascading consequences in the world of work as well, because if you don't live in a place you won't even seize job opportunities and companies looking for employees won't find them.

This process could be counteracted, at least in perspective, by enhancing the city's suburbs and increasing public transport, don't you think?

I hope so, even though a city like Milan has so far been very self-referential, the various municipalities sometimes do not talk to each other simply because there are different political majorities. But by now we have to think as vast areas, metropolitan cities. And so transport must, like the housing issue, become central to the new Europe. They are practically two sides of the same coin. Italy is also based on the municipalities, the territorial level is fundamental for us.

What are you doing?

We continue to invest in development on the outskirts of Milan, in Sesto San Giovanni, then we will launch energy communities, another central theme for which there are few resources. And then we continue with the redevelopment of heritage.