By Roberto Bruna
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Carlos Montes, acknowledges that the situation is serious and that the task is extremely difficult. “The housing crisis has led many families to have no confidence in public policy and in what the State does, and the first thing we must do is show willingness to provide solutions,” he adds.
But the organizations of residents and close family relatives are beginning to run out of patience, so they wait expectantly for what President Boric may announce in his Public Account. “We know that this government arrived with pure good intentions, talking with movements and committees, setting up working groups. We still feel that it is our government, but so far we have not seen signs, neither greater progress nor agility in actions”, lament some leaders, while several experts call on the Minvu to moderate expectations, since it is impossible –they point out– to undertake the task of building the 260,000 homes committed to in the campaign.
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Both housing experts and community organizations maintain that there are a multitude of signs to which the Government must urgently pay attention. An example is the blocking of access routes to large cities by means of barricades, as occurred the time when the residents of the Mauricio Fredes intake (which is home to some 90 families) interrupted the Vespucio Norte highway at the height of the exit 12, in Quilicura, generating a kilometric block. Not to mention the interruptions to traffic on high-traffic avenues, like last March 8, when the members of Ukamau advanced the commemoration of Women’s Day with a march through Alameda in the middle of rush hour, causing havoc in traffic. The same goes for the demonstrations of people who risk their lives climbing on public infrastructure to make their claim visible, such as on Wednesday, October 27, when four residents of the Autonomous Housing Movement hung from the viaduct at the Grecia roundabout, generating another disturbance in this important road junction. The same is indicated by tragedies (increasingly recurrent) such as the fires in the battered downtown tenement houses, as happened this Sunday, May 29, on Avenida 10 de Julio, an event that cost the lives of a 15-year-old teenager and her 65-year-old grandmother.
But there are other signs, those that refer to “that increasingly acute and irrational violence that we are seeing in neighborhoods, in schools, in public spaces,” as Santiago Castillo, a young population leader from Lo Hermida, warns in the community of Peñalolén, who points out a set of situations that point to an outbreak in a gestational state, almost in the making.
It might seem like an excess, but Sebastián Bowen, the executive director of Deficit Cero – an initiative aimed at correcting the housing deficit that affects the country from north to south – agrees with this diagnosis, pointing out that, in effect, this time bomb has already exploded and demonstrated its enormous destructive power. Without going any further, Bowen dares to point to the deficit of around 700,000 homes as the basic factor in the popular revolt of October 2019. “Without a doubt”, he answers the question of whether he believes that this severe housing deficit carries a destabilizing power. “We must be very clear: when we analyze the increase in camps in Chile, we will realize that the growth is very strong in the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, which is when around 70 camps are created throughout Chile,” he declares.
“It is clear that it is at the base of the social outbreak. What reading can we make of the outbreak? Well, it is an expression of disbelief and distrust towards the institutions to solve citizen problems. Well, in the specific case of taking over land, we see that it is an action that speaks of a renunciation and mistrust of institutional instruments in housing matters, such as subsidies. When these policies within the market are insufficient to access housing, then people no longer have another option but to take over the vacant lot that exists in the neighborhoods where they live as households”, he maintains. “Many cannot continue paying rent either. In Chile we have around 400,000 families that spend more than 30% of their income on this item, well above the OECD standards”, points out Bowen, former executive director of Techo.
Santiago Castillo, who heads the Lo Hermida Fighters Association, an entity that brings together more than 400 families, believes that the Chilean State has run out of time, just as its neighbors have run out of patience. Castillo maintains that the situation in the towns and in the camps has become dramatic, since the idea has been strongly installed that only they, the most vulnerable, are paying the costs of a generalized crisis exacerbated by the pandemic. The rise in the cost of living seems to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, since it drives away more and more the desire for home ownership. Even renting already seems like an elusive dream.
“We feel we are paying for this crisis alone, which three years ago entered a very dark stage. They must understand that today it is costing us more and more to save to apply for a home, rents are more and more expensive and overcrowding is getting worse day by day”, he declares, while highlighting another corrosive phenomenon for the social fabric.
“Coexistence today is becoming very difficult for families that share the same roof. Every family nucleus deserves its intimate space. Imagine living crowded, with boys and girls… all of that is very complicated”, he expresses. The situation has become so volatile inside homes that the only way to decompress the environment is to find air in a public space that is already precarious. “And the public space has deteriorated enormously. It is what I see in La Pincoya, in La Bandera, in La Victoria. Overcrowding is causing enormous psychological problems in women and in the youngest, especially. That is why we are seeing these degrees of social violence”, points out the young resident.
The leader of Lo Hermida is quick to warn that “micro-outbursts of violence” are being recorded daily, or violence that, like all energy, is channeled without apparent direction or meaning, in an isolated manner, lacking any synchrony and coordination. The leader Victoria Herrera, from Ukamau, endorses what was stated by Santiago Castillo, and adds more, so that they can, she says, measure the seriousness of the situation for those who have the happiness of having their own space where they can develop their lives: “I must recognize that there is an accumulated and latent frustration, and that it is also intergenerational, since it is transferred to sons and daughters. This, because we become aware that we don’t have a place where we can rest after work, we can’t recreate ourselves in our own space, in short. It is very hard to know that we cannot give security and comfort to those we love.”
Herrera says that frustration is in the air and that it is turning into barely contained rage. “We know that this government arrived with pure good intentions, talking with movements and committees, setting up working groups. We still feel that it is our Government, but up to now we have not seen any signs, neither greater progress nor agility in actions. Our Maestranza neighborhood second-stage project has already suffered delays, and that frustrates people,” she notes.
Almost as a warning, Victoria Herrera asks the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism to speed up the pace. “We hope that these intentions begin to materialize and that the commitments are fulfilled,” she emphasizes. The Ukamau spokeswoman, Damaris Astete, endorses line by line what was expressed by her partner: “So far we have seen manifestos of good intentions, but we must point out that we have not seen concrete actions in the short term that allow us to quickly address the housing emergency in which we are (…). We understand that there is a period of installation and adjustment, and of course we are available to dialogue, to propose alternatives, but we will also know how to make ourselves heard in the event that no progress is made in the commitments. We must move from good intentions to concrete actions. We want this to be our Government and we are ready for it”.
“The problem is serious,” acknowledges the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Carlos Montes, a man who has the political experience to realize the seriousness of each situation. “Of course this is serious. What risks does a major social phenomenon have? It certainly does,” adds the Secretary of State, aware of the need to control expectations that often tend to overwhelm the real capacities of the State, especially when it is a long-standing problem. “The housing crisis has led many families to not have confidence in public policy and in what the State does, and the first thing we must do is show the will to provide solutions,” he underlines.
THE DEADLINES RUN AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT
On December 11, 2021, a few days before the second presidential round, the then candidate Gabriel Boric arrived at La Castrina Park, San Joaquín commune, to present his 12 commitments to face the severe housing crisis affecting the country. In that act, the now President expressed his intention to build around 260,000 quality housing solutions. That is, housing solutions with green areas, with access to services and equipment, etc. In short: nothing that resembles what the State did in the 90s of the last century, when it prioritized the number of houses over their quality, thus favoring the emergence of a series of social phenomena that were particularly pernicious for healthy coexistence and the normal development of people.
“That’s what we saw with Mejoras de Mena, the Copeva houses… but pay attention: it was a model that was exported to other countries,” says Miguel Pérez, director of the Master’s in Latin American Anthropology at the Alberto Hurtado University and associate researcher at the Centro of Conflict and Social Cohesion Studies (COES), an expert in the field. Asked about the permanence of this public policy over time, Pérez recalls that the idea responded to the paradigm of its time: “It was a world example of the 1990s, and it was efficiently used by the Concertación, which reached a peak of 80 or 90,000 housing in the first decade, something that no one had ever achieved. That is why it was applied by other countries. At the time, it was thought that all the demand could eventually be answered via a subsidy,” Pérez recalls.
But the city grew and the available land was exhausted. Already in 2011 the subject began to take on water. That is why the researcher affirms, in a way that is as exhaustive as it is disturbing: “There is nowhere to build 260,000 homes in four years,” he maintains emphatically. “There is no land, there is no construction industry… there is simply no way how to do it,” says the author of a reference work called The Right to Dignity: Housing Struggles, City Making, and Citizenship in Urban Chile, a work in which he dissects a housing policy that, emerged in dictatorship, is in the most absolute bankruptcy.
Pérez maintains something even more disconcerting: “The State does not even know what land it has.” And in this aspect the COES investigator is emphatic, unfortunately for those who have been waiting for more than 10 years for a home: “The State does not know how much land it has. There is much talk of creating a public land bank and all that, but it is not known how much land belongs to the State. I was touched to see it with residents of La Pintana, those who said ‘that land is useful to us’ and asked whose land it was and nobody gave them an answer. Then they themselves had to go to the Real Estate Registrar and discovered that the land was from Chiledeportes. The Armed Forces also have their reserved land, but (the Ministry of) National Assets must carry out a cadastre to facilitate the construction of housing in Santiago”.
To make matters worse, there is also no clarity on the exact number of housing units that need to be built. “Nobody knows for sure. In the 2017 Casen survey, there was talk of 500,000 homes, but these are very rough numbers. The Chilean Chamber of Construction made a projection and, being very conservative, placed the figure at 750,000 homes”, adds the researcher. It is only clear that 80% corresponds to close families, points out the leader of Lo Hermida, Santiago Castillo. “And it is stated that there are 80,000 families living in camps. That is, 80,000 families who were so desperate that they went to a camp with all that that implies. They are humble families, from the village,” says Castillo, recalling the precarious conditions of living in a place without sanitary facilities, with houses devoid of materials and construction techniques that allow them to face the cold weather in winter and the intense heat in summer.
More disturbing is what the executive director of Deficit Cero, Sebastián Bowen, adds. “Behind the housing deficit there is a social deficit that prevents us from identifying the housing demand. We don’t know which families are there, where they live, how they are made up, what kind of solution they need… nobody knows for sure. We have number estimates, that 10% of households do not have access to housing,” he says.
According to Bowen, all housing solutions are focused on a single instrument: the financing of the demand for the acquisition of a property. “In the beginning, families were organized in committees of relatives, but today that is no longer enough. We need to organize the demand to design different solutions for each family group or community. We need to diversify in solutions, for example, around the urban regeneration of degraded neighborhoods, the rental of public housing at an affordable price, assisted self-construction, balanced densification… There we have another management deficit, and that has to do with the fact that we have not designed diverse solutions that adapt to the requirements of the territories and families”, he emphasizes.
But Minister Montes warns that they have already taken up such a suggestion and that they are working on a set of initiatives that add new alternatives. “We have a variety of paths, but we are also diversifying in technologies. We are going to show up with a lot of industrialized housing,” says the minister, which will allow construction to be “faster, at a lower cost, and also of good quality.” He acknowledges that other challenges have came up in recent years, which arose in the midst of the pandemic: “We have a problem with the value of materials. We have also seen many people setting up their first companies with their pension fund withdrawals,” he adds.
According to Miguel Pérez, the policy focused on subsidies ended up collapsing in 2011, when the communities of close families “contest a housing policy that eradicates families, that is, families from Quilicura are taken to live on the outskirts of Puente Tall. This situation generates a process of political reorganization that has been hardly talked about, and organizations like Ukamau, the Pobladores en Lucha movement, etc, emerge. And what happens? This reorganization, which is seen a lot in Peñalolén, La Florida, Central Station, makes the picture more complex, because it forces new housing standards to be set for people who want to build their homes in their commune of origin, and there is no land in those communes to materialize their projects”, says the COES researcher.
“We have the case of a project of the Don Bosco relatives committee, in Florida, a case that I followed for several years, and they managed to materialize it in 2020 after spending 14 years in a committee,” he details.
Minister Carlos Montes acknowledges that there is a problem with the figures in his portfolio, as the experts consulted by El Mostrador maintain. He even acknowledges that there is no exact number on missing homes. His explanation is simple: “We do not have an updated census; the last one is the 2017 census. And we also have the arrival of migrants, the impact of the pandemic…”, adds the head of the Minvu, thus listing those factors that , imprecise in themselves, complicate this equation. However, Montes prefers to place the deficit around “a little more than 600,000 homes.”
A FACTOR THAT ENTANGLES EVERYTHING
But there is another phenomenon that, at least in the last 10 years, has burst into force, to introduce greater obstacles in the search for comprehensive solutions such as those demanded by citizens for that 10% of families that cannot access decent housing. What is it about? “We know that the problem worsened a lot in 2017. In the Government of (Sebastián) Piñera there was a greater lag, but migration was also added, which leads to the erection of massive camps like the one we see in Cerrillos, where there are around two thousand families, and 80% of them are foreign citizens who do not have documents, many do not have residence, do not know about these issues, etc.
Bowen, the executive director of Deficit Cero, states that “this overflowing housing system forces many people to look for informal solutions that are also abusive”, which deepens the inequality and urban inequity that is observed in all the cities of Chile. In fact, this “informal market” – as the experts say – generates fertile spaces for the emergence of true mafias that parcel out land that does not belong to them.
The researcher Miguel Pérez comments that the irruption of this phenomenon generates higher levels of social conflict, especially when these people assume this characteristic from the fact that irregularity is a common feature in their societies of origin and, furthermore, because they know they are at the margin of any public policy. In other words: if it is already difficult for Chilean men and women to access a home, then what is left for them but to prematurely give up the longing for their own home within the law.
“We have irregular plots that are sold to the highest bidder. The problem with the camps made up of foreigners is that they do not necessarily have a political organization, nor do they have contacts with some parties… I think it will be difficult for these camps to be eradicated, and the migrants know this to such an extent that they build with solid materials, unlike the Chileans, who see in the camp a transitory step towards a definitive solution”. The problem is assumed by Minister Montes: “Some come to integrate and others generate a fairly complex picture, because they have different habits, they are different cultures”, something that, according to the head of the Minvu, will require an even broader approach.
“Regarding the camps, we will have to eradicate what is possible to eradicate,” says Montes. “Especially by way of urbanization with self-construction, or building houses in some places, and we hope that people see that there is a path and that it can guide them to demand a better institutional path instead of questioning everything.”
Bowen believes that the diagnoses are already clear and that it is only possible to act on the basis of the organization of demand (that is, establish which families need housing and what type of solution they need), the design of different housing solutions, the reduction of urban segregation and a public-private dialogue, since “a policy like the one we need requires an investment of between 1% and 2% of GDP per year.”
“The 2% per year allocated to this issue is not something that can be financed only with public debt. We must also summon people and private enterprises with new mechanisms for raising resources”, he adds. “It’s expensive, but this creates value, drives investment and employment,” he adds, while recalling that this Friday, May 27, Law 21,450 on Social Integration in Urban Planning, Land Management and Housing Emergency Plan was published, “and that mandates the Executive to now generate a housing emergency plan, structuring goals, deadlines and new instruments to respond to this challenge.”
And the challenge is big, in the opinion of the leader of Ukamau, Victoria Herrera. “We are people who seek dignity, and this frustration can flare up again, and that flare-up can happen without a program, and it can reproduce and branch out and no one could contain it. Today we know that the doors have been opened to work together with the Government, but that is no longer enough.”
By way of conclusion, Santiago Castillo, from the Luchadores y Luchadoras de Lo Hermida Association, affirms: “We want to contribute to the resolution of our problems because we don’t want them to give us anything. The last 10 years have seen a lot of growth in housing organizations throughout Chile. That is why we are organizing a national meeting of residents for this June 25 with organizations from all over the country, to discuss the commitments that the Government delivered in La Castrina Park in December of last year. And then we will evaluate”, he points out.
The Minister of Housing and Urban Development, meanwhile, knows that a storm is looming on the horizon at any minute. “What’s coming? We have to listen a lot and talk a lot, but at the same time to show a horizon that the institutional path is going to open up solutions.” Something difficult “when families wait 15 or 16 years (for a home), then trust is lost. But that’s where we are,” says Carlos Montes.