Save home: reduced heights and surfaces, green light for mini-dwellings

Houses with a height of 2.40 metres and a surface area of 28 square metres for two people and 20 square metres for one can be inhabited. Waiting for Salva Milano, the amendment that should clarify the regime to be applied to urban redevelopment operations by putting an end to the investigations of the public prosecutor's office in Lombardy's capital city, one of the most eagerly awaited (and immediately contested) novelties arrived yesterday evening in the law converting the Salva casa decree (Dl n. 69/2024, rapporteurs Dario Iaia, Fratelli d'Italia, and Erica Mazzetti, Forza Italia).

As called for in recent weeks by the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, the stakes for determining whether a house meets hygiene and sanitary requirements are being changed: a rule dating back to 1975 is being partly superseded.

There is no organic reform of the requirements for habitability, as requested by many, but instead it is foreseen that the designer responsible for the intervention will be able to certify the conformity of his work with the hygienic and sanitary regulations in a series of cases, which are exceptions to the general rules. Thus, rooms with a minimum height of less than the 2.70 metres currently required by law are permitted. It will be possible to go up to the maximum limit of 2.40 metres.

Not only that. One-room apartments will be able to drop below the current quota (28 square metres), stopping at 20 square metres, while two-room apartments will be able to go from the current 38 square metres to 28 square metres. These exceptions will be conditional on renovation work that leads to the improvement of the property's hygienic-sanitary characteristics or a renovation project that improves the accommodation's hygienic-sanitary conditions, for example by optimising ventilation and air feedback.

The amendment looks, however, towards a structural revision of habitability requirements. And it points in the direction indicated by companies and planners: for them, the requirements of 1975 are now anachronistic and scarcely reconcilable with the need to reuse city spaces. From the leader of the PD group in the Chamber of Deputies, Chiara Braga, on the other hand, comes criticism: "Salvini clears the 'little house of the seven dwarfs' and decides to reduce the minimum dimensions for the habitability of one-room flats to 20 square metres. And meanwhile he also reduces the minimum height of habitable rooms. A wicked choice that will pave the way for ever less liveable and ever more expensive housing'.