Despite the acquittals for the skyscraper in Via Stresa, there are thousands of families who have paid for a new house but are unable to take possession of it due to the construction stumbles of the Sala council. A paralysis that keeps citizens and builders in check.
Mirko is 33 years old. When, at the end of 2024, he and his partner decided to join a cooperative housing project, he thought he was just a few steps away from his first home. The intervention should have started in the summer of 2025, in via Castellammare. Today, almost two years later, he still doesn’t know if and when he will see that construction site open. In the meantime, he continues to live in a city where buying a house is increasingly difficult and where even projects designed to make living more accessible seem to have become bogged down in a dead-end bureaucratic swamp. Claudia, on the other hand, has been waiting since 2020. When she joined the intervention in via Taggia, her son was two years old. Today he has eight. Meanwhile, a second child has arrived, the family has grown, the needs have changed. The house, however, remained only on paper. Six years later there is still no date for the start of work. Then there is Teresa, who tells the story of her son, a member of the Cascina Gatti cooperative. In 2024 he joined the project with the concrete prospect of moving by 2027 into a four-room apartment suitable for a family with three young children. Today the children are about to become four, while the family continues to live in an apartment that is too small, after having already incurred a significant financial outlay and without any certainty about the future. Her concern is contained in a phrase uttered by her granddaughter: “Grandma, will you give me some space in the house for Christmas?”. A question that Teresa says she was unable to satisfy. And it captures the human cost of the Milanese housing crisis better than any statistic. If the situation does not resolve itself, he adds, he could end up leaving his home to his son, to guarantee better living conditions for his family.
Then there are the families of the seized construction sites. Those who continue to pay mortgages for apartments they cannot live in. Those who pay installments and rent at the same time. Those who have been suspended between appeals, seizures, sentences and postponements for over two years. After the full acquittal in the Torre Milano trial, the Suspended Families Committee spoke of “an unjust sentence” paid in recent years by citizens who have seen their savings, projects and future frozen. “When will the time come to cancel the seizure of our lives?”, they were already asking themselves after the release of the construction site in via Zecca Vecchia. Today the formula is even clearer. “We ask that our lives be released immediately,” says Filippo Borsellino, spokesperson for the committee.
It is from these stories that we must start to understand the urban planning crisis that Milan is experiencing. Because behind the legal disputes over the Scia, the implementation plans, the building qualifications and the qualifications there are people waiting for a house. And because after years of investigations, trials, seizures, promises and changes in administrative line, the council led by Beppe Sala seems to have reached the end of its mandate without having managed to find a way out. The first criminal verdict in the long urban planning line arrived with the acquittal of the defendants in the Torre Milano trial, the skyscraper on Via Stresa. An important decision, destined to weigh on the confrontation between the Prosecutor’s Office, the Municipality and operators, but which does not resolve the city’s problem. The formula of acquittal, according to the reading filtering through judicial circles, could in fact mark a decisive distinction between the urban planning illegitimacy of the intervention and the absence of personal criminal responsibility, linked to the uncertain regulatory framework in which builders, designers and officials would have operated.
In other words, the criminal trial on Torre Milano says that, in that case, there is no crime. However, he does not say that the old model can return to how it was. The fact remains that the investigations of recent years have already changed the way of building in Milan, making the use of implementation plans more stringent, the evaluation of the urban planning load more careful and more difficult to proceed with light building permits for high-impact interventions. The latest confirmation came once again from via Fauchè 9, the construction site symbol of the entire judicial season that has affected Milanese urban planning. In recent weeks the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court rejected the builders’ appeal against the demolition order ordered by the Municipality, confirming a now clear line: the building cannot be saved either through a new project or with partial demolitions. According to the administrative judges, the previous ruling of the Council of State had not only highlighted procedural irregularities, but substantial violations of the intervention. It was not, therefore, a question of correcting a formal defect. For the TAR, the irregularities have a “radical scope” and concern the structural and constitutive characteristics of the work. Hence the impossibility of an amnesty, even a partial one. The abuse, in other words, affects the intervention in its entirety. It’s a heavy lift. Because via Fauchè is not just a building story. It is the point at which the Milanese model of administrative simplification clashes with the limit imposed by the judges. The intervention was started as a renovation with Scia as an alternative to the building permit. For the TAR and the Council of State, however, it was a question of new construction, with an increase in the urban planning load that would have required a very different path.
While the courts continue to chart the course, politics still appears to be at a standstill. The result is a city stuck on two levels: on the one hand the construction sites that have come under investigation, on the other the new interventions that are struggling to even get started. This is demonstrated by the numbers presented by the Workers’ Cooperative Consortium. In Milan, 440 homes are at a standstill, including subsidized housing, free housing and homes intended for rental at affordable rents. Five cooperative initiatives are still waiting for the necessary building permits to be issued. Sixteen months have passed since the last meeting with the members without any certain deadlines having been reached. The data weighs even more if read within the Milanese real estate market. In a city where the average price of homes now exceeds 5 thousand euros per square meter and where in the central areas it can reach up to 15 thousand euros per square meter, the blocked cooperative projects would have offered homes at radically different conditions: around 2,750 euros per square meter for subsidized construction, up to around 3,900 euros per square meter for free construction, as well as apartments for rent at controlled rent. The distance from the market is evident. The Lombardy capital continues to attract capital, tourism, students and investments. But it is increasingly struggling to retain those who should live there every day. And the urban planning crisis thus ends up being merged with the housing crisis: fewer accessible homes, more uncertainty, more delays, more mistrust. Blocking those 440 homes does not only mean stopping five construction sites, but also depriving young couples, families and middle-class workers of one of the few opportunities still accessible to stay in Milan. According to Alessandro Maggioni, president of CCL, the Torre Milano sentence is the confirmation of a regulatory short circuit. It is not a point of arrival, but proof that clear rules are needed on building permits, charges and responsibilities, to unblock construction sites and families. It is the paradox of Milan that talks about accessible homes and then fails to unlock those who say they are ready to build those homes. This is also underlined by Vincenzo Barbieri, president of the Lum cooperative: «Milan urgently needs accessible homes. We ask the Municipality for transparency in the investigations. We are not looking for shortcuts, but the correct functioning of the public machine.”
The issue is no longer just urban planning. It’s social, economic, even demographic. A city that rejects the middle class, that makes it prohibitive to buy or rent, and that at the same time leaves cooperative housing projects on hold, risks losing the very population it says it wants to retain: young couples, families with children, workers who cannot afford free market prices. On the judicial front, the release from seizure of Via Zecca Vecchia and the acquittal in the Torre Milano trial have strengthened the request of the Suspended Families Committee to open a permanent table at Palazzo Marino and start a discussion with the government to secure families and the city. For many buyers, the problem of lost time remains, including blocked savings, mortgages on houses never delivered, rents and frozen family projects. «Politics must now remedy the social damage of this paralysis», says spokesperson Filippo Borsellino. The committee also denounces the blockade of municipal offices, where many employees would no longer sign for fear of criminal proceedings. Almost ten years after Sala’s arrival at Palazzo Marino, Milanese urban planning still appears to be looking for a compass. It will be up to the next mayor to resolve the situation. Mirko’s case tells it better than any resolution. “Uncertainty doesn’t just block a building project: it prevents people’s life choices,” he explained to the members’ meeting. At 33, he says, you start to think about a family, about stability, about a future in the city where you live. But when the wait becomes indefinite, “one inevitably ends up wondering whether it still makes sense to stay in Milan”.
