94-year-old faces losing her home of 60 years as rent nearly triples

A 94-year-old woman in Florence faces losing the home she has lived in for more than 60 years after her landlord said her rent would rise from €450 to €1,200 a month.

Franca’s contract expires in February, and her family says she will not be able to afford to renew it on the new terms. Her case closely echoes that of María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, the 87-year-old who became a symbol of the fight for housing in Spain after a steep rent rise led to her eviction in Madrid. She died in hospital a few days later.

“My mother gets a minimum pension and my father’s survivor’s pension. If she had to pay €1,200 in rent, she would be left with practically nothing to live on, not even enough to eat,” her daughter told Corriere Fiorentino (source in Italian).

She has asked not to be named because she has not yet been able to bring herself to tell her mother.

The 70-square-metre flat has been Franca’s home since the early 1960s. She lived there with her husband, and her daughter was born there. According to her daughter, it is the only place her mother feels truly at home, filled with photos of her grandchildren, paintings of Florence’s narrow streets and mementoes from her daughter’s wedding.

The building contains several flats, all owned by the same landlord. It was once home mainly to Florentine families, many of whom had lived there for generations, but the tenants have changed over the years.

As far as her daughter knows, the flats are not being turned into holiday lets and remain ordinary residential tenancies. She believes, however, that the new management wants to squeeze far higher returns from the properties.

“They phoned me to tell me they would not renew the contract for my mother,” she told the newspaper. “The contract was renewed every two years. They let me know that, for her to stay there, the rent would have to go up to €1,200 a month. But how can you ask for that kind of money from a 94-year-old pensioner?”

The family accepts that the rent cannot stay the same forever, and her daughter says she would help cover an increase so her mother could spend her final years at home.

“We could manage a small increase, I could help her out. But going from €450 to €1,200 is something else altogether. It is an impossible amount. And what pains me is that there was not even any chance to open a proper negotiation, to try to meet halfway.”

She has since turned to the tenants’ union Sunia for help.

Franca’s case comes amid a wider squeeze on tenants in Tuscany, where 2,427 eviction orders were issued in 2025. Florence accounts for around 35% of all enforcement requests filed in the region.

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