RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – After months in confinement, Latin America is slowly beginning to return to street life. However, staying home has been difficult for many, as their house is often unworthy of being called such. A year before this pandemic, which has exposed social inequalities, the World Bank had warned that two out of three families in the region needed better housing, as they did not meet the minimal standards of welfare and security. These changes are pending.
Some homes lack water, sewage, ventilation, transport, electricity or Internet access; a cocktail of shortcomings that can cause occupational and health hazards during long periods in confinement. “Cities have been the epicenter of this pandemic and housing has been the first line of defense and protection, shedding light on a problem that has been left unresolved for decades,” emphasizes Tatiana Gallego, head of the Housing and Urban Development Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In addition, this population lives in peripheral areas, in marginal neighborhoods with no access to basic services, green areas, schools or hospitals.
Despite the evidence that once again emerges with the pandemic, the struggle to have a decent and sturdy home seems to have halted. Asked about the current situation, Catherine Paquette, researcher and urban planner at the French Institute for Development Research (IRD), specializing in Mexico and Chile, is very concerned: “What is happening is very dramatic for the poor and the new poor that we do not yet see [those who will fall into poverty when losing their jobs in the crisis]. It’s too early to know what the pandemic will bring because we are still in a survival stage.” But now that Latin Americans are beginning to get their heads above water and into their new normality, what lessons can be learned from the pandemic?
Small in size and poor in quality: improving standards
The pandemic has once again brought to light a well-known problem: the small size of social housing and the lack of services and sanitation in its neighborhoods.
In Chile, standard social housing for families measured only 36 square meters and in extreme cases no more than 27. Today, Chilean law sets a minimum standard of 55. The French researcher explains that this country was the first to implement a policy of mass production of social housing in the 1990s with very low quality standards. Since the 2000s, things have improved.
Nevertheless, Chileans live thinking about their home. The poorest ones think about how to secure a decent one. The conditions in which they live, particularly in social condominiums inherited from the mass housing production phase, still leave much to be desired. This is confirmed by Marta Benedicto Cabello, a community psychologist specializing in citizen participation, social intervention, and development project management, with eight years of experience with vulnerable communities in several Latin American countries. One day she walked into a house in Alto Hospicio (Chile) where the tenant had been living with feces in her kitchen for over a year. The piping had broken and no one had come to fix it. “When I walked through the door, they said ‘finally someone is coming to help us,'” says the expert. In that area she never saw any land use planning or urban development policies. “They have no green areas, no services, no transport. It is currently among the cities with the worst quality of life in all of Chile,” she says.
But the virus was an eye-opener for some authorities. Jaime José Mañalich, Chile’s Minister of Health and a doctor, acknowledged during the confinement that he had not been aware of the magnitude of the housing issue, nor the level of poverty and overcrowding in his country. This was reported by several Chilean media in late May. Early the following month, the UKAMAU social movement called for a national emergency plan to build public housing and to end the housing deficit and unemployment.
In other countries, such as Mexico, Brazil or Colombia, which also followed the Chilean model in the 1990s, the situation is even more concerning: standards, for the time being, do not change. There are still houses that measure no more than 40 square meters and where basic furniture cannot fit. “In these conditions, in fact, these times of pandemic and confinement are very difficult,” confirms Paquette.
Streamlining procedures: the mistake of considering the house as market
The problems extend beyond the house doors. “Housing is not expressed as a right. It is part of a market and, moreover, the access conditions to decent social housing are not met,” Marta Benedicto denounces.
The average minimum wage in Latin America has increased since 2000, according to Antonio Prado, former deputy executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), but it’s still not adequate: between about 200 and 400 euros per month depending on the country, in January 2020. With the crisis, the region is sinking into a context of regression: the pandemic will bring per capita income back to 2009 levels.
Subject to this economic fragility, how can a family have access to social housing? In Chile, for one, you need to belong to the poorest section of the population with a monthly income of less than 300 euros (the minimum wage is 388.7) and have this amount in a savings account for your home, details Cristóbal Céspedes Díaz, a Chilean social worker specialized in international studies and public development policies. “Before 2015, a bank loan was needed to secure social housing. Not now. Fortunately,” he says before reporting the amount of paperwork that hinders the process. However, access to credit is still in force in many other countries on the continent.
And here lies another problem: many people, particularly poor families, have lost their jobs because of the pandemic, and can no longer pay for their homes. In Latin America, with or without the coronavirus, indebtedness for housing is very high, and it is possible that an apartment, given its poor quality, will not remain habitable as long as the mortgage loan repayment schedule.
Céspedes explains that the “poorest” are paid an allowance with which they can hardly have access to a house with no services nearby and with poor quality materials. Benedicto adds: “There are still many homeless people in Chile, because if the economy is based on building more and more, many other issues are left aside, such as improving and easing access.” The goal of these policies is to keep people tied to the state in order to promote the market, privatizations, and that the neediest will continue to apply for benefits, with no rights to the territory, giving rise to more favelas that no one cares about, according to the expert.
The pandemic exposed the need for a reform to expand social protection to the most vulnerable. In line with this idea, Gallego adds that over the past 12 months, countries such as Mexico or Brazil have launched new support for regulation and titling, in combination with solutions (grants and micro-credits) for improvement, growth and assisted self-production of housing.
Strengthening and supporting neighborhood cohesion
A very important issue for the head of the IDB’s Housing and Urban Development Division is “the perverse effects of structural overcrowding,” which in conditions of compulsory confinement not only increases the chances of contagion within the family, but can also increase violence. The United Nations Program for Human Settlements (UN-Habitat) estimates that a quarter of the world’s urban population still lives in favelas, and the same percentage applies to Latin America. “In those social housing neighborhoods there is great mistrust and fear of neighbors,” says Paquette. “I remember in a fieldwork in Northern Mexico, a family in a social housing group told me never to leave home alone. There were always people in the house because it was common for one of the neighbors to come in and steal,” she says. This lack of cohesion among the people is due, among other things, to the fact that they did not develop their neighborhood, but were installed there, in individual homes, far from everything and their solidarity networks in particular, essential for daily life.
However, after these months of crisis, people started to get to know each other, support each other and organize themselves. “Now it is important to see how we can preserve these forms of neighborhood organizations for the future. They’re very valuable and must be strengthened,” proposes the French researcher. Benedicto and Céspedes would also like to go further. In their opinion, social movements are not as demanding as they should be, given the deplorable situation in which some citizens find themselves. “It’s true that much has been achieved with the movements in Chile, but in Africa, for instance, I haven’t seen anything, there’s no help and the situation in many places is still disastrous and not progressing,” she laments. In search of solutions, Gallego recognizes that social interaction needs to regain its public spaces through innovative methods, such as the IDB’s call ‘Volver a la calle’ (Return to the street).
On the other hand, local governments, not engaged in the mass production of social housing programs, may refuse to take over the management of neighborhoods after they are built for lack of resources. To solve these setbacks, as many experts, Paquette is more favorable to the government supporting the social production of habitat, i.e., the local residents should build and improve their homes with technical support; which will also promote social cohesion.
Where to begin? The neighborhood as a solution
The list of required improvements is long, but one of the main challenges for Gallego and Paquette is urban rehabilitation, that is, the remodeling of existing houses, before focusing on the construction of new ones. “Housing policy focuses on the second objective and little on the first because it does not generate more savings and does not benefit developers,” explains the French urban planner. And she concludes: “I would like the return to the ‘new normal’ to generate a paradigm shift in the matter. Unless governments again choose to rely on the massive production of housing to reactivate the economy… The risk is very real.”
Gallego acknowledges the existing risk of “inefficient and expansive” suburbanization, but is more hopeful: “The recent pandemic has allowed us to reflect deeply on the challenges presented by the current model of urban and housing development and on the opportunities that can be opened up in response to changes in population behavior.” From his perspective, the pandemic has revealed new possibilities for re-evaluating more equitable and adapted planning and land use systems.
The specialist proposes to establish a pattern of multiple centralities, having the neighborhood as a human and economic unit. This model can “improve the management of land markets and, therefore, the accessibility of housing and the levels of socio-spatial segregation faced by the region,” he says. It is also committed to intelligent densification, which, unlike overcrowding, maximizes the use of the area while responding to the geophysical, climatic and cultural aspects appropriate for the area.
Issues on housing deficit estimates
The housing deficit estimate allows balancing the goals of social housing production policies. The UN-Habitat prepared a study on this matter that demonstrated its high complexity. The IDB estimates the deficit at about 38 million units, of which 17 million are new houses that should be built and the remaing 21 million are those that should be improved. The annual needs created by the development of new houses, which are two million per year, should be added to this. “But all the houses included in the housing deficit are not really houses to be built [many must be improved] and here lies the problem,” says Catherine Paquette.
The numbers vary widely depending on the sources. There is no single assessment procedure and each country has its own methodology. In addition, the estimate of the quantitative deficit (houses needed today) depends on what is considered a family. Overall, the nuclear family is taken as a reference, that is, parents and children.
However, many families are made up of more members who support each other within the homes, a way of life very common in the region and essential for the most humble families. But these additional people are also included in the deficit assessment when often this will not mean they cannot buy a house. The problem here is not the lack of housing, but poverty. “The deficit issue, apparently very technical and objective, is nothing like that. It is political and highly subjective. Estimating is a greater challenge,” concludes Paquette.
Source: El Pais