Agenzia casa

The project

Agenzia Casa was established in 1998 by the Municipalities of Lucca and Capannori on the initiative of the Tuscany Region and today it includes the municipalities of Lucca, Capannori, Porcari and Massarosa; it is now managed and funded by Fondazione Casa Lucca, which was created in 2007 by the same entities for the implementation of initiatives and projects intended to concretely support, in the short and long term, situations of personal, family and social hardship that originate, for various reasons, from the lack of decent housing. The specific purpose of Agenzia Casa is to give a concrete answer to those non-EU immigrant citizens who intend to integrate permanently in the area and who are exiting the reception system; the service was then extended to Italian families in housing difficulties.  

The project includes: 

• mediation services for finding housing solutions and concluding lease agreements;
• direct lease interventions;
• management of a guarantee Fund to support financially the beneficiaries and ensure the sustainability of the housing projects. 

Complementary to the services of Agenzia Casa, the Fondazione Casa Lucca provides a consultancy and guidance service, managed by its partners and third sector subjects with extensive experience in the field, aimed at housing accommodation and social support. Through a careful analysis of the local real estate market, in order to allow the matching between supply and demand, Fondazione Casa Lucca aims to find the most suitable answers to individual cases of housing problems. A network of consultancy and guidance services managed by its partners guides the beneficiaries towards the services available in the area aimed at promoting housing by implementing an effective collaboration with social services and third sector organizations. Moreover, trainings regarding rules of housing are organized in order to build trust between houseowners and potential tenants. Finally, for the purposes of combating housing deprivation, it also operates through the construction and management of real estate assets intended to provide hospitality for the short, medium and long term (social rent housing, housing for temporary accommodation and co-housing projects).   

The project has been expanding year by year and now includes a parallel action with the aim of supporting housing inclusion as well as eco-friendly recovery of unused public buildings in unpopulated areas for their repopulation.   Agenzia Casa is therefore an innovative multi-level and multi-stakeholder initiative, gender and cultural sensitive, which was also able to ensure its sustainability thanks to its structure and governance framework. Finally, Agenzia Casa has also proved to be replicable and its model was used for the creation of an additional Agenzia Casa for the Versilia area. 

The impact of the good practice

Agenzia Casa is the first experiment in housing policy that tries to support those groups of the population who are unable to access – due to income or lack of supply – to public residential housing (ERP), but still need a form of support for living. In particular, it was created to support the immigrant population in finding accommodation, made difficult by the owners’ distrust. Individuals and households are supported in identifying a rent-controlled housing solution (ex 431/1998) and, at the same time, through a special fund financed by the participating municipalities, the agency acts as guarantor towards the owners of the houses in coping to periods of non-payment, encouraging their propensity to make their housing assets available. It also aims to limit all those recursive phenomena that operate towards immigrants (such as speculation on rental costs), which force many families or single immigrants to cohabitate and adapt to lower environments, when not completely devoid of current housing standards. For its intermediation and support activities, this “social real estate” uses resources of the Municipalities, the associative world, the voluntary sector and, more generally, the third sector, to make the rental market accessible to vulnerable categories of subjects who are consequently able to undertake a path of autonomy.