Abstract

The article focuses on the relations between housing difficulties, market structure and family life cycle in Italian society in nineties. These relations are scrutinized from a theoretical and empirical point of view. Past and present standard indicators of housing difficulty are debated and some urban contexts are compared with reference to the correlation among housing difficulty and social precariousness. The aim of the article is also to show the increasing relevance and diffusion, beside the old ones, of a new form of "housing stress", which involves a quite considerable part of Italian families, even not poor, hits old and young generations; nevertheless it is totally neglected by housing policies. The high costs of access to and maintenance of housing, together with the growing dependance of young-adults sons from parents, make housing decision a crucial and quite irreversible turning point of family life, particularly in Italy. Families and individuals are obliged to engage a large part of their economic and human resources over a prolonged period of time to solve housing problem. This is in contrast with the growing needs of flexibility and autonomy marking relations outside and inside the family in urban modern contexts.