Brazil: abandoned buildings will be used for affordable housing in the ‘Minha Casa Minha Vida’ program

Besides tax reform, the issue of the housing deficit mobilized the discussions between mayors and the Minister of Cities, Jader Filho, during a meeting with the National Front of Mayors on Tuesday, 14.

The goal is to use abandoned buildings as popular housing in the Minha Casa Minha Vida (My Home My Life) program.

The minister said that the financing program for housing in central areas of the city would be a line of the program and will attend projects of social movements, city halls, and municipalities after analyzing the feasibility of incorporation into the project.

The popular housing program caters to those with monthly family incomes of up to R$8,000 in urban areas and gross family incomes of up to R$96,000 in rural areas.

The idea is to subsidize up to 95% of the price of properties for families with incomes of up to R$2,600, who will also have 50% of the program’s units reserved for them.

In the case of urban buildings, the idea is to renovate and modernize those considered abandoned in the centers of large cities and make social housing available in places with nearby schools and public transportation.

The process of revitalizing the buildings is what the Minister of the Cities called the Retrofit program, which is a technique that seeks to adapt old buildings to current needs by modernizing the residences with functional restorations that guarantee more adequate, safe, and comfortable structures for the residents, without depriving them of their original historical and architectural elements.

“We are finishing the formatting of the Retrofit program on the issue of abandoned buildings. It is one of several new programs that Minha Casa Minha Vida will have and that you will have access to so that we can face together”, declared Jader Filho.

He also affirmed that in the first 100 days of the government, the expectation is to restart almost 10,000 buildings out of a total of 186 thousand that would be paralyzed.

Of this number, 80,000 would be abandoned works, and most with up to 98% of the execution complete.

According to the Ministry of Cities, 40,785 housing units of Minha Casa Minha Vida have already been delivered in 2023, and the goal until April 11 is to deliver another 4,234 housing units.

In this year’s budget, the government provides R$9.5 billion for the program.

Up to 2 million housing units should be delivered by 2026.

With information from Jovem Pan