Reality is often different from how it is told. The premier’s announcement that she intends to build 100,000 new homes at subsidized prices within 10 years lands on a country where housing distress is on the rise, weatherization is reaching unprecedented levels despite the population decline (according to Ispra, about 7.16 percent of the national territory is now irreversibly urbanized), the existing building stock is among the most energy-intensive in Europe, and integrated urban regeneration processes have been suffering cuts and disinvestment for decades. While new construction is promised, more than 65 percent of Italy’s buildings are in energy class E, F or G (i.e., at the bottom of the rankings), millions of families live in inefficient homes that are expensive to maintain, and cities face a mix of housing loneliness, existential precariousness, unaffordable rents due to wage freezes, gentrification and overtourism. The dichotomy between announcements and the everyday is evident: without an integrated medium- to long-term strategy of deep and widespread redevelopment, the new built is likely to add to the old without solving its structural criticalities.
This disarming picture is further enlarged by the wide-angle lens of the Nomisma survey for Cna, according to which the demand for efficiency is already ripe: 54 percent of households intend to retrofit their homes in the next three years, driven by the burden of utility bills that today puts 9 percent of households in difficulty, but 4.7 million households lack the necessary resources. The 50 percent deduction, confirmed in the new budget law, prevents a collapse in demand, but does not offer the necessary stability: the sector looks set to close 2025 with a 3 percent drop in sales and orders.
The paralysis of the National Energy Efficiency Fund.
In this unstable scenario, the paralysis of the National Energy Efficiency Fund is very serious. The Court of Auditors, in fact, has certified that out of 284.8 million available, only 18.4 million have been mobilized, while the guarantees section-more than 77 million-has never come into operation. The failure to update the 2017 decree and the clash between Mase and Mef have rendered the instrument inoperative, with a real contribution to reducing final energy consumption, in line with the Pniec, of just 4,000 TOE, instead of the expected 700,000. A failure that weighs on businesses and especially on the most fragile households that would need precisely guarantees and subsidized credit to access upgrading.
The delay in the transposition of the Green Homes Directive significantly aggravates, then, an already fragile framework. Without the National Restructuring Plan, which has not yet been presented by the government, households and businesses remain without an essential planning framework to plan investments, interventions and access to credit. Every month of delay means losing industrial competitiveness, slowing technological development and leaving the country behind while Europe accelerates on minimum energy performance standards, digitization of buildings, integration of renewables and advanced district models such as Positive Energy Districts.
The Directive is not a bureaucratic constraint: it is a modernization tool that prepares the building system for the arrival of Ets2, the new European carbon market that from 2028 will make it more expensive to pollute in the construction and transport sectors. Delaying its implementation, therefore, means exposing households and businesses to higher CO₂ costs, generating technological lock-ins, accelerating property value loss, and preventing the planning of medium- to long-term structural interventions.
Policies do not keep pace with technology
Italy’s lack of clarity and foresight, however, is part of a global trend. The International Energy Agency reports that despite a commitment at Cop28 to double the annual rate of efficiency improvement to 4 percent, as of 2019 real progress is stuck at 1.3 percent, with a forecast of 1.8 percent for 2025. Policies are not keeping pace with technology, energy demand is growing in the sectors most difficult to decarbonize (such as industry), and the spread of inefficient air conditioners for cooling is increasing consumption.
Italy, despite having mature technologies and innovative models – heat pumps, photovoltaics, storage, home automation, Lca, energy communities – fails to transform this potential into a systemic strategy. The Nomisma-Cna report indicates the direction: stable incentives for 5-10 years, with rates no lower than 50 percent and reward mechanisms for the best performing interventions; progressivity of deductions to support lower and middle incomes; reintroduction of credit assignment; and a more active role of the banking system with green mortgages, bridge loans and credit lines calibrated to the expected efficiency.
In addition, there is also a need for modern devices such as Energy Performance Contracts (Epc) that enable both the financing of interventions through the savings generated and the support of advanced spatial models: the new frontier of energy communities are capable flexibility services that allow for “dialogue” with the grid, as well as the provision of digital platforms for intelligent building management, along with predictive monitoring and control systems.
The real crossroads
In conclusion, housing today is the real crossroads between energy, economy and social justice. Continuing to construct new buildings without regenerating the existing, including through selective demolition of particularly degraded stock, minimizing the opportunity for functional redevelopment of underutilized assets, means ignoring the material and social reality of the country and forgoing one of the most powerful levers for reducing inequality, consumption and vulnerability.
If Italy really wants to address housing deprivation, it must take on deep redevelopment as a national priority: through highly engineered prefabrication technology and through the use of the most flexible digital technologies available today, buildings can be made efficient, healthy, affordable and integrated into the energy networks of the future.
The energy transition is not a cost to be contained, but the most important and intelligent investment of our time, to truly enable a strategic social infrastructure that creates value, skilled jobs, energy security and industrial competitiveness. Any delay is not neutral: it erodes economic capital, impoverishes real estate, increases household spending, and weakens the country’s ability to design and govern its future.
