Interview: RentStrike Bolognina
We had an interview with the tenants of via Serlio in Bologna who are on rent strike
In Via Serlio, 6 in Bologna, precisely in the Bolognina district, there are several people who have been on rent strike since the beginning of April, the strike is due to the difficult economic conditions that the tenants have been facing with the coronavirus emergency. All the apartments in the building are managed by the same owner, a real estate company based in Rome. In the following interview we can get some aspects of the story from these people.
Radio Punk: Hello! First of all, tell us a bit about who you are, what work you did before Covid-19, give us a general presentations of yourselves.
Tenants: We are the tenants of Via Serlio 6, a building on rent strike.
The thing we have in common is that we belong to a precarious generation (25-40 years old), in fact, we do the most disparate jobs: among us there are teachers, workers, call center workers, social workers and social health workers, young lawyers, gardeners, students, documentary filmmakers, musicians and entertainment workers. All freelancers or with fixed-term contracts for which, by now, there is no longer any type of guarantee or work protection. For these reasons during the lockdown period we decided to suspend the payment of the rent and go on strike, creating a collective called RentStrike Bolognina.
RP: In order to contextualize, tell us about the neighborhood you live in for those who are not from Bologna and how your relationship with the neighborhood is. Since the beginning of this strike, has the relationship with them changed? And if so, how? Have there been episodes of solidarity or has it got worse?
T: The neighborhood where we live, the Bolognina, was once one of the most popular areas of Bologna. Here there are many public housing and this has made it one of the most mixed neighborhoods in the city. Today it still has a predominantly working-class composition, it is inhabited by many migrants and young workers. So the solidarity received from the neighbors has always been very strong, plus it is one of the neighborhoods with the highest eviction rates, so it is very sensitive to issues related to the right to live.
Since 2004, however, following the renovation projects provided in the new Master Plan, approved by the Cofferati council, the district has been facing a gentrification process. Moreover, its geographical location has allowed many of the properties to be used for short-term rent, airbnb and other forms of building speculation (for instance the opening of the Student hotel, a luxury hostel that will be built inside the former Telecom building in Via Fioravanti – once a building occupied by homeless families, of the Bologna housing movement, then cleared in 2016), so, in recent years, the price of rent in the neighborhood has almost doubled.
RP: When and how was the decision to go on strike taken? Did you try other ways before reaching this initiative or did you immediately realize that it was the only chance to fight?
T: When we found ourselves stuck at home without work, without money and without any kind of real income support, we started doing the first condominium assemblies, and, since stopping paying rent is the fastest way to recover indirect income, we decided to contact the owner to propose a rent suspension for the duration of the emergency. We sent a letter, from the law firm where one of the tenants works, and started dealing with the real estate company’s mediator. (until today with no luck)
RP: So far, how is the situation? Have you received any answers and if so, which ones? What are your next moves?
T: After the reopening of work activities, so since June, we have gone from the strike phase to the self-reduction phase. Many of us have started working again, even if not at full speed, so we decided to move from suspension to self-reduction of rent. In a nutshell, we tried to take advantage of one of the lease support measures promoted by the Municipality of Bologna, which provides incentives for homeowners who decide to upgrade the rent from free market to agreed rent, lowering the rent by 20%. Unfortunately, in our case, the owners has never shown themselves available for dialogue and have always demanded the sums not paid on the rent, so much so that they sent us a letter of formal notice.
RP: Tell us a bit about the Rentstrike platform and why you decided to “join” this one and not others. Do you have any relationships with other platforms that are active on the topic of rent and the right to live?
T: It is often said that it doesn’t take courage to do something you have to do, in our case none of us was willing to sacrifice that little that we had to feed the income of a real estate company that owns 15 million euros of assets, many of us have previous experience in the world of housing occupations and the struggle for the right to live, so almost immediately we recognized ourselves in one of the slogan launched by the international campaign RentStrike “no job and no money no rent”.
The issue of rents and the right to housing is not new in our country as in other cities and is very much felt in countries like the USA where there is practically no welfare and therefore not even adequate housing support. The international campaign was launched in Los Angeles by some groups who, like us, have self-organized themselves to demand what should be rightfully ours: A HOUSE. So it was very easy to try to create a self-organized community inside our building to support the international rent strike campaign.
RP: Have you managed to involve other people in difficulty in your area or in other cities in some kind of dispute?
T: Almost immediately we tried to use the social media to spread the rent strike campaign, and some of us have provided their expertise to support all those people who, like us, could no longer pay the rent, many have written to us and many have been followed in negotiations with homeowners. So we discovered that small properties were more sensitive to the housing emergency situations generated by the health emergency, while large owners like ours treat people like numbers and always have profit as the sole purpose of their actions, showing total disinterest in the dramatic economic situations that the pandemic has generated and continues to produce.
RP: You have been interviewed and you have been featured in various media. What impact has this media exposure had? Did it benefit your situation?
T: Probably the only benefit it produced is to spread the campaign of the strike to more people, it probably also helped to stimulate the choices of municipal administrators who, thanks to the various protests, started to talk about the problem of rents related to the extraordinary emergency situation.
In our case, however, the media exposure has produced the opposite effect: the owner has immediately shown a total closure to the negotiations, totally headless of the image damage produced by the media exposure of the affair, in which the existence of two opposing parties has clearly manifested itself: those like us, the ordinary people who are struggling to get to the end of the month, and the multi-millionaires who are only and exclusively concerned about their profits at the expense of everything, even dignity and rights.
RP: Speaking of media. Were the articles or videos that came out true to what you communicated or were they sweetened or worse censored in some parts? If so, this is the right space to say what has possibly been edited/omitted.
T: The media exposure in which we were overwhelmed was partly intentional, because as we have already said it has allowed to spread the campaign and then the possibility to stop paying rent to many people in trouble, of course just being literally bombarded by the demands of journalists of all kinds we had to impose a certain, let’s say, radical leftist policy to our community and the strike, so we refused interviews and interventions in television programs just to avoid the ambiguity with which certain press manages to revive social problems, like this one.
RP: Did you receive feedback from the rest of the city or from the rest of social realities? How do you see the scenario in Bologna and in the rest of Italy and the world on this kind of struggles for home?
T: The struggle for the home is one of the most important and fundamental struggles, precisely because the home is a necessary good without which existence and dignity are debased and cancelled. However, we like to talk, more than about the struggle for the right to the home, about the struggle for the right to live, which deals with issues other than those more closely related to the simple satisfaction of a need like the home, from the self-reduction of utility bills for water and electricity, also considered a common good, to the so-called “expropriations in supermarkets and bookstores, struggles that have the ability to make people start talking about food sovereignty, the right to culture, the right to health, the environment and the right to the city.
RP: Prospects for future struggle in general. What awaits us from now on? What do you think we need to do to regain ground and stop succumbing and pay the horrors of power and capitalism on our skin?
T: It is very likely that the health crisis will turn into an economic crisis and this will reproduce, as already happened with the economic crisis of 2008, a context of deep poverty and extreme poverty in our cities, it is up to us to understand how to act, passivity and acceptance are absolutely harmful for us only social struggles and resistance have shown, in history, to be able to assert important collective results. We believe that we will soon witness (as it is happening in America with the black lives matter movement) a new wave of struggles for the right to social redistribution, which will have as a priority the fight for the improvement of the uneasy condition in which we find ourselves living, and we certainly do not want to be caught unprepared.