Turicchi: affordable housing offers the answer to the housing distress of the middle class

Turicchi: affordable housing offers the answer to the housing distress of the middle class

“As the housing crisis unfolds, a new area of vulnerability is emerging: the middle class. This includes young professionals in their first jobs and entire categories of workers – nurses, teachers and law enforcement officers – who play an essential role in keeping our cities running, but often cannot afford to live in them. This is not just an issue of social distress, but also a matter of the country's competitiveness”, underscored the CEO of CDP Real Asset SGR, Antonino Turicchi, speaking in Milan at REItaly 2026, an event that each year brings together the national real estate community.

“These are individuals not covered by social housing initiatives, for whom the response is affordable housing, with rents lower than market rates but higher than so-called social housing, introduced by the Housing Plan decree”, stated Turicchi, emphasising how this solution is particularly suitable for service-housing projects, designed to support worker mobility through housing at accessible rates. “With our National Housing Fund, we aim precisely to support these types of solutions, also thanks to the distinctive characteristics of the tool that make it potentially suitable in terms of scale: support from the guarantee of the European InvestEU programme it benefits from and the possibility of channelling reallocated NRRP resources to it to address Italy's housing distress”, he concluded.

To date, using its funds, CDP Real Asset has contributed to the development of more than 12,000 social housing units as part of an overall programme totalling 19,000 rent-controlled apartments. In terms of new forms of living – student and senior housing – over 7,000 beds for students have been made available. In the pipeline are another 6,600 beds in student housing and two pilot projects for self-sufficient senior citizens for approximately 600 housing units.