Simonetta Boni, 52, was born and raised in Venice. In May 2016 she and her family lost their home because the landlord suddenly raised the rent from €800 per month to €1,500. “I went to social services but they didn’t help me – they said there were many cases like ours,” she says. “That’s why I decided to occupy an empty house.”

Many Venetians have been forced out of their homes because of the high cost of living, which has been linked to mass tourism. Ten years ago there were 60,000 residents in the historic centre; now it’s 53,000.

One of the main problems is landlords renting their apartments to tourists via Airbnb or turning them into hostels and B&Bs. Every year Venice is visited by 20million tourists – and loses about 1,000 residents.

Rather than join the exodus, Boni decided to stay in Venice. She turned to Assemblea Sociale per la Casa (ASC), or Social Assembly for the House, a grassroots movement fighting the depopulation of the city. With its help, she and her family occupied an empty apartment in Cannaregio, one of Venice’s working class neighbourhoods.

Since 2012, ASC has helped families under threat of losing their homes by either attempting to physically block their eviction orhelping them occupy abandoned houses. Nicola Ussardi, a local salesman who co-founded ASC, says the first demonstrations attracted a large number of people who had previously been apolitical – “a sign that housing is a serious problem in Venice”.

Last month ASC successfully blocked the eviction of a woman from her home of 50 years. “The owner wanted to kick her out in order to make a bed and breakfast, despite the fact that he already owned two in the same building,” says Ussardi. “The evicted resident is the new symbol of this city. Residents are almost becoming the enemy of the owners, who prefer to rent to tourists.”

For people who do lose their homes, ASC activists fix up abandoned, dilapidated houses for occupation. In six years they have taken over 70 apartments, all of them in Cannarego and Giudecca, another working class neighbourhood; they now host 150 people, including families, singles and young couples.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An abandoned house in the Cannaregio district of Venice. Photograph: Marta Clinco

The occupations are illegal, but Ussardi is proud of what ASC does. “We do not steal the house from anyone – we chose apartments that have been abandoned for years and are full of mould and rats.”

Many of the houses need work before they are fit for occupation because they have been closed for many years, says Giulio Grillo, an architect who occupied a vacant house in Giudecca. With other activists, he co-founded Re-Biennale, an association that uses discarded materials after the Venice Biennale to fix them up. “We have made an agreement with the curators of some pavilions – we dismantle them and get to use the materials,” he says.

Biennale materials were used to restore an apartment in Giudecca currently occupied by Davide de Polo, a 38-year-old stagehand working in the film industry, and his family. De Polo and his girlfriend decided to occupy a house a few years ago when they found out Chiara was pregnant.

“I earn €12,000 per year, so how can I cannot afford a rent of €800 or €900 per month and feed my daughter?” says De Polo. “Leaving the city isn’t right. We [occupiers] are the alternative to the death of Venice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giulio Grillo, who co-founded Re-Biennale, which uses materials discarded after Venice Biennale to fix up properties for occupation. Photograph: Marta Clinco

World capital of mass tourism

Other Italian cities, such as Turin, Rome and Milan, have had movements of occupied houses since the 1970s. But there it’s mostly poor people who occupy. What sets Venice apart is that the squatters are members of the impoverished middle class. They could never afford to buy a house – and now that tourism is causing rent prices to soar, they cannot afford to rent one, either.

Shaul Bassi, a professor of English literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, says the housing crisis is just the tip of the iceberg: the city’s social fabric is crumbling under the weight of mass tourism. “It’s schizophrenic. On one hand, Venice is incredibly democratic because everyone walks, and outside the touristy areas Venetians of all social classes share common spaces. And yet if I need a household item I can walk for hours and only find bars, restaurants and souvenir shops.”

This year Venice was defined as world capital of mass tourism in a report by Airbnb, surpassing Barcelona, Bangkok and Amsterdam. On a daily basis there are 73.8 tourists for each Venetian. Matteo Sechi, who runs a website about Venice’s depopulation – and even installed a population counter in a pharmacy in the Rialto district to raise awareness – has noticed the city changing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Davide de Polo and Chiara Pluchinotta. Their banner reads: ‘We are not leaving because we love Venice.’ Photograph: Marta Clinco

“Venice is getting older. Young people leave because it is impossible to find a home. I pay €1,000 in rent for a small apartment. If I moved just out of town, I could pay half of this, and my landlord could earn twice as much if he decided to rent to tourists instead.”

Authorities have tried to temper tourists’ influence over the city, installing mobile gates to close some streets at peak times and divert them to less frequented areas. But ultimately there are just too many of them. According to recent research by Jan Van de Berg and Paolo Costa, Ca’ Foscari professors, in order to be sustainable, tourism in Venice needs to drop from 77,000 to 55,000 visitors per day.

But whether ASC has any chance of winning the battle for residents is hard to tell.

Carlo Spinazzi, a 58-year old shopkeeper, lost both his shop and his house a few months ago. “My girlfriend and I paid the rent for 14 years – but then we failed to pay for two months, and [the landlord] immediately evicted us.” Social services refused to help, so they occupied an apartment in Cannaregio that had stood empty for three years. “My girlfriend was sick,” says Spinazzi. “Where else could we go?”

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