Rome’s city council is preparing to spend public money rehousing hundreds of people who spent more than a decade living rent-free in a squatted building that the government failed to clear for years, a failure that has already cost Italian taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
The roughly 400 residents of Spin Time Labs, a nine-story former state office block in Rome’s Esquilino district, were evicted at the end of July after a fire broke out in the building, prompting safety inspections and a judicial seizure order. The structure originally belonged to INPDAP, Italy’s now-dissolved social security agency for public employees, which abandoned it in 2010. It was later sold to a private real estate fund, Investire SGR, which spent the next several years trying, unsuccessfully, to reclaim its own property from squatters who moved in during 2013.
Across the country, there are an estimated 50,000 squatter-occupied properties. The Italian government’s failure to enforce owners’ legal rights comes with a massive price tag. A December 2025 court ruling ordered Italy’s Interior Ministry to pay the owners, Investire SGR, $24.8 million (€21.18 million) in arrears, plus a further $242,000 (€207,000) per month, as compensation for the state’s years-long refusal to clear the occupation.
In other words, taxpayers were already on the hook for the government’s failure to uphold private property rights before a single euro was spent rehousing the people responsible for occupying it.
Now more public money is about to hemorrhage. With the council’s offer to buy the building from Investire SGR rejected outright, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri has pledged that city authorities will offer “dignified accommodation” to the displaced residents. The first public housing allocations are expected within roughly 60 days for those who qualify, reportedly including placement in the same city borough and guaranteed school transport.
This situation is not unique in Italy, where squatting has become an occupation enabled by a social system supported by extremely high income taxes. Rome’s city government used public funds to purchase 98 apartments at Porto Fluviale for more than $25.7 million (€22 million) and spent roughly $585,000 (half a million euros) on utility costs at a former squatter colony building in Ostia.
Liberals will claim that the state did not pay the rent and electricity bills for the squatters because there is evidence that they were being charged for utilities and rent and that the bills went unpaid. However, from a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, after the eviction, the state is now covering those costs using public money. The government failed to clear the building for over a decade, a court ordered a payout in the tens of millions to compensate the owner for that failure, and now the municipality has pledged to place the evicted occupants in public housing paid for by Roman taxpayers.
Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, has framed the episode as proof of “a failure of Italy’s Second Republic, which stripped away a pillar of welfare.” This is typical socialist language, vilifying landlords while supporting those who refuse to pay rent and utilities.
Italy’s right, including Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, sees it differently. Federico Rocca, a Fratelli d’Italia city councillor and president of Rome’s Transparency Commission, made this statement after the purchase deal collapsed: “Finally, on the Spin Time matter, legality and respect for the rules wins — those rules that for years were trampled on, with the complicity of the Gualtieri administration,” Rocca said, adding that Roman taxpayers’ money had been saved “from yet another unacceptable operation.”
He went on to note that the property has already cost the public purse over $25.7 million (€22 million), on top of separate sums spent on other formerly occupied properties.
full story at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/08/socialism-its-finest-rome-government-will-use-taxpayer/