The economic sustainability of residential location and social housing. An application in Palermo city

The aim of this paper is to analyse the interconnections among the so-called “grey area” citizens, who have great difficult to get an own house, and the public (and private) stakeholders that have a key part to play in translating the housing politics into practice. The analysis proposes some economic tools – the analysis of the local real estate market and the “Income-Threshold” – to support municipality in achieving social housing projects corresponding to the family’s financial constraints. The methodology of analysis is applied to data directly collected in Palermo. The purpose is to point out the operational and problematic aspects corresponding to the family’s access to the real estate market and to estimate the financial gap corresponding to the impossibility to achieve that.