Maringá, Jundiaí lead ranking of Brazil’s best cities to live in – Macroplan survey

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Not even the 2020 economic crisis caused by the pandemic was able to slow the construction of one of the largest real estate projects in Maringá, a 430,000 inhabitants city in the interior of Paraná.

The positive results achieved in municipal administration have placed Maringá in the lead of the Municipal Challenge Management Index ranking, by Macroplan consulting, which assesses the 100 largest Brazilian cities.

While much of the country was feeling the impact of unemployment, hundreds of laborers continued to work relentlessly to build a new development in the municipality, Eurogarden, near the central region. Construction, in full swing, is a portrait of the city.

The site is planned to feature solar energy supply, water reuse and waste recycling. The revitalization of more than 20 thousand square meters of green area has already begun. The project is developed by a local entrepreneur, Jefferson Nogaroli, founder of Companhia Sulamericana de Distribuição, a supermarket chain with a R$3 billion turnover in 2020 that employs some 3,000 workers in the Maringá region.

Since June, while much of the country suffered from the suspension of economic activity, the municipality has been recording consecutive monthly hikes in job openings. The city entered 2021 with almost 900 new jobs. The average salary, of about R$3,000, also remained stable. “People here value the quality of life and there is a good offer of jobs,” says Nogaroli.

The Macroplan survey includes cities with almost 83 million inhabitants, equivalent to 40% of the Brazilian population, and 53.3% of formal jobs. This is the fifth Macroplan survey, which takes into account 15 indicators on education, health, safety and basic sanitation.

This is not the first time that the city is ranked first: Maringá has already been the champion for two consecutive editions, in 2017 and 2018. In the last decade, Maringá has improved its position in terms of sanitation and sustainability, an area in which it jumped from 7th to 3rd place between 2009 and 2019. Over the past five years, approximately R$50 million has been allocated to improve the water and sewage system, which today serves 100% of the population.

“Proactive municipalities in terms of developing public sustainability policies, which are increasingly valued by companies and citizens, will be well ahead of others in the short and medium term,” said Heiko Hosomi Spitzeck, director of the Dom Cabral Foundation’s Sustainability Center.

“The pandemic has spurred certain developments such as the home office and more and more people are looking for cities with a good quality of life in which to live”.

Maringá, founded in 1947, is one of the few planned cities in the country. With an Atlantic Forest reserve within its urban area, Maringá boasts an index of 26 square meters of green area per inhabitant, one of the highest in Brazil.

And this is not all. Some 94% of the population is served by solid waste collection services and access to basic sanitation is universal. “The sustainability issue has been gaining ground and has become an important factor for investments,” says Adriana Fortes, senior economist at Macroplan and coordinator of the study on quality of life and municipal management.

With its accounts in the black, Maringá manages to set aside 20% of the budget for investments in these priority areas. The results are clear. This year, a children’s hospital is to be inaugurated in the vicinity of Eurogarden. Currently, there are approximately 3 ICU beds for 10,000 inhabitants, almost 50% more than the national average. “The improvement in health indicators has left the city in a more comfortable position in the pandemic,” says Mayor Ulysses Maia (PSD), reelected in 2020. The challenges, however, are many.

Like many medium-sized cities, Maringá has been suffering the impacts of the pandemic: 113,000 have already been infected and 384 have died. Currently, approximately 60% of beds in the public healthcare system are occupied by Covid-19 patients, a rate lower than in cities like Belo Horizonte (74%) and São Paulo (69%).

Just like Maringá, Jundiaí, in the interior of São Paulo, has also made progress in sanitation and solid waste collection, securing second place in the Macroplan ranking. With a child mortality rate of 7.3 for every 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the country, the city stands out for its progress in garbage collection and sanitation, which reaches all of its 420,000 inhabitants. This is no small feat. Some 100 million Brazilians live in areas where sewage collection is unavailable and 35% have no running water.

After doing its homework, the city began to focus more on the environment. A recent effort to clean up the Jundiaí River, which cuts through the city, brought back the catfish and birds such as herons. Late last year, the city launched a public notice for an urban planning project on a stretch of river that runs through the city center.

The goal is to convert the site into a gastronomic and leisure center, as cities like Munich in Germany and Buenos Aires in Argentina have already done. These are important aspects of municipal management that typically draw the attention of qualified professionals, with the means to spend and invest.

The pandemic has hastened the flow of migration from the capital to the interior of São Paulo, with the possibility of remote work and more and more people in search of quality of life. However, the trend is not new. Over the past ten years, cities of between 100,000 and one million inhabitants have grown 50% faster than large centers, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). A survey by the Zap+ real estate website shows that 59% of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte residents would like to move to a smaller town. In Rio de Janeiro, 67% of people share the same desire.

Remote work in the countryside

The home office trend has been prompting companies to create remote job openings. This year, companies such as CI&T digital solutions and Agibank, a digital bank, opened over 500 jobs in the flexible work model. Heineken has already announced that it will place its 1,300 corporate employees on permanent remote work: it doesn’t matter where they live, provided they deliver a job well done.

This is a worldwide trend. In the United States, office occupancy has already dropped by 20%. “Today, the quality of life is as important as a good salary and good health care,” says Luiz Fernando Machado (PSDB), re-elected mayor of Jundiaí.

With an average salary of R$3,400, compared to R$2,260 for the country’s average, Jundiaí has attracted companies and qualified professionals in search of better jobs and quality of life. Strongly based on industry and services, the city has become the headquarters of companies such as Swedish Sandvik Coromant, manufacturer of tools for civil aviation and other industrial segments.

Ascenty, one of the largest datacenters in Latin America, decided to open two plants in Jundiaí in the past six years, which together total 16 thousand square meters. “The quality of telecommunication services, efficient transport logistics and good development rates were important factors for the decision,” says Roberto Rio Branco, marketing and institutional relations vice-president at Ascenty.

The engagement of these companies in the local economy helped preserve the level of employment during last year’s crisis. Jundiaí closed 2020 with a positive balance of 87 vacancies in industry, although it lost 900 jobs during the year overall, in the average of all economic sectors. Employment generation is expected to rebound this year. “The industry should grow again faster, followed by the other segments”, assesses Machado.

Source: Exame