Rome: a million residents in apartments with no water or toilets

Rome already had a housing problem: a million tenants crammed together

In imperial Rome, far from the marble palaces of the Palatine, the vast majority of the population lived in rented insulae: apartment blocks thrown up in a hurry with rotten timber, poor plaster and crude bricks. Up to six or seven storeys high, with no running water, no chimneys and no toilets on the upper floors. People cooked with charcoal braziers and lit their homes with oil lamps. Any careless moment at night could wipe out entire blocks. The debate over whether this looks too much like the present is nothing new, but it is worth examining with numbers.

What an insula was and who lived in one

The business was simple: property speculators put up rental buildings to squeeze every last sesterce out of the plebeian families arriving in the capital. On the lower floors there could be something close to a modern home, with several rooms and running water from the aqueducts. Upstairs, where rent was cheaper, there was none of that. Authors like Juvenal described with bitter irony the constant antiestéticar of collapses from cracked foundations and of fires trapping neighbours with no fire escapes.

The comparison with the present is the debatable part. Some argue that the rest of the world was lucky to live in a one-room hut, with a chimney, relieving themselves in the fields and fetching water from the river until the twentieth century. Seen that way, what is surprising is not Roman precarity, but that something like a modern flat already existed in the second century. The nuance comes from those who point out that running water and several rooms were for the rich: most people had a single room, and sharing it was the norm.

The parallel with the twentieth-century apartment block

It is the leap in scale that breaks the analogy. The blocks of the 1940s have a habit of not collapsing, and that is no small detail. Domestic electricity in New York did not arrive overnight either: fewer than 5% of households had it in 1900, the great leap came in the 1920s (from 35% to 68%), and by the 1930s to 1950s it was practically universal. The Rome of the insulae never saw that leap. Life was short for rich and poor alike, though less so for the rich: for a slave to reach 50 was impossible, and for a poor person a very remote hope.

Squatters, usucapio and the price of a roof

There was a legal figure, usucapio, the acquisition of property through continuous possession for one or two years, but it required good faith and an owner who did not claim the property. It did not serve to justify the open, confrontational occupation of someone else's home. There were, however, huge numbers of people occupying public or private spaces irregularly: tombs, ruins, shanties, porticoes. The problem of the homeless was real and visible in a city of nearly a million inhabitants.

The price, as always, allows opposing readings. Some joke about astronomical rents in sesterces, while others reply that those speculators offered rooms at an affordable price in imperial Rome. The question of what something like that would cost today remains up in the air.

The pater familias and the permanent contract

A recurring argument in the comparison is that of the head of household who supported vvife and children on a single wage, with no temporary contract. The nostalgia for stable Roman employment has its comic side, especially when you consider the alternative: irregular work, eviction and a lack of rights. Daily life in imperial Rome was a daily exercise in urban survival on the edge of catastrophe, and no contract fixes that.

With these materials, the prediction is simple and treacherous: as long as there are big cities, there will be those who bet on building cheap and renting dear. What we do not know is whether the next technological leap — the equivalent of the lift or the light bulb — will arrive before the next collapse.