(English) May 3rd, 2013
Why the government is spending millions on demolishing and rebuilding vast tracts of social housing built less than 15 years ago.
by Sam Edwards
Bajos de Mena — a housing project built on the periphery of Santiago between 1994-2004 — is currently the focus of a recently announced multimillion dollar government project to regenerate deprived areas.
Despite having a population of more than 120,000, Bajos de Mena lacks a police or fire station, schools, good transportation links or even a supermarket. Housing vulnerable families from across the region, it has also become a hotbed of deprivation, social problems and crime.
To understand how a project, which cost millions to build less than 20 years ago, once again requires such a huge investment, it is necessary to examine Chile’s unique social housing policy.
Depending on the criteria employed, Chile’s experiment in farming out construction of social housing to private contractors is either remarkably efficient or a recipe for socio-economic segregation and ghettoization.
The paradox of this neoliberal social housing experiment can be summarized by two very different facts.
The first is the dramatic quantitative reduction in the numbers of families with housing problems. In 1990, 30 percent of families lacked adequate housing — living in shanty towns or in conditions extreme overcrowding. That figure has now fallen to 9 percent, according to widely cited statistics.
The second fact, however, is that many of the social housing projects built during this period of accelerated construction are universally acknowledged as isolated outposts lacking basic facilities, prone to fires and often high in crime and social problems.
What, then, can be made of these two juxtaposed facts? With plans to spend millions on demolishing and rebuilding large quantities of housing, should the traditional privatized policy be seen as a failure, or was it simply a necessary first-step for a developing country trying to solve a huge problem?
Understanding the unique Chilean case, its successes and its failures, requires the history of a classic problem: how should the state house its most vulnerable citizens?
Housing: An ‘inalienable right’ or a ‘good to be earned through effort and saving?’
Analyzing the Chilean system, architect Camila Cociña attributes today’s problems to a fundamental misconception of housing.
In a series of articles entitled “Demolishing a housing policy that consolidates inequality,” Cociña cites changes in how housing has been understood across 50 years and several political environments.
“For [Pres. Eduardo] Frei Montalva (1964-1970), under whose presidency the Ministry of Social Housing (Minvu) was created, housing was understood as ‘a good of upmost importance of which all families should have access to regardless of their socio-economic level’,” reads Cociña´s article.
In contrast, the subsequent social government described the provision of housing as a duty that fell upon the state.
“Under Salvador Allende (1970-1973), this was conceptualized as a ‘an inalienable right of the people, [for which] the state has the responsibility to provide … not as an object of profit, but to respond to the necessities and social conditions of people,’” writes Cociña. “Since the Pinochet dictatorship housing has been understood as ‘a good that should be acquired by families through effort and saving.´ This view continues today.”
While the Pinochet-era conception is no longer openly advocated, the post-dictatorship policy maintains a clear neoliberal logic.
Today’s model: one more neoliberal experiment
The words have become synonymous with Chile: “neoliberal experiment,” but like so many other key policy areas social housing remains a contentious issue with opinion often dividing along party lines.
Housing policy in Chile is based on a voucher housing subsidy system. This means the state’s role is limited to providing a payment to qualifying citizens with which they can purchase housing provided by private sector constructors, known as Sponsorship Agencies (EGIS).
Speaking to The Santiago Times, Cociña outlined the unique nature of the Chilean housing policy and, in her view, the way it perpetuates the Pinochet-era definition of housing.
“In this model, the private sector is in charge of designing, distributing and building houses, while the state subsidizes the demand through vouchers and citizens are basically ‘consumers.’”
Criticism of the Chilean model takes many perspectives but there is consensus that the policy of the last 20 years has, in some cases at least, led to poor-quality housing or isolated communities.
Housing Minister Rodrigo Pérez described the policy of the last two decades as relatively successful, pointing to significant quantitative success of reducing the housing deficit, but he was also quick to recognize significant shortcomings.
“Many of the houses built were very small and often on the periphery of the city, in some cases they were also of very poor quality,” Pérez told The Santiago Times. “The country was very different, for a long time quantity was prioritized over quality.”
Disagreement exists between those who see this as a problem to be fixed through better regulation and those that call for a fundamental rethink of the entire system.
Is ‘efficiency’ the answer?
A central tenet of the current model is, of course, the market.
The Minvu coordinator of social housing reconstruction, Pablo Ivelic, noted the role of the market and the profit-drive in this model in Cociña’s article.
“Minvu works by subsidizing demand, in effect what we do is allow the market to function … and the market functions in pursuit of profit for the companies,” he said.
Advocates of the system point to the efficiency the market and private entities have brought to the construction of social housing.
A much-cited example of this is the government’s impressive reconstruction of more than 95 percent of houses damaged in 2010’s massive earthquake, says Perez.
But what some see as efficiency, others blame for poor quality construction.
“The imperative to maintain low costs to accommodate the companies’ ‘legitimate pursuit of profit’ has given rise to the principle of saving in the purchase of land, due to the significant cost this represents in the construction of property,” reads Cociña’s article. “This, coupled with the logic of a large-scale economy necessitates construction of housing in massive volumes and on large sites to maximize profits and has led to the construction of large swathes of homogenous housing away from the services and opportunities on cheap, poorly located land.”
Gustavo Díaz, an economist at conservative think tank Instituto Libertad, says that the pursuit of profit is necessary for this model, but is unequivocal regarding the dangers an over reliance on the market can bring in terms of poor location and quality.
“These problems arise from a lack of central planning in terms of the location and construction of housing projects,” said Díaz. “Instead this has been left to the market. [Aside from poor location and quality,] another issue is that the allocation process disregarded the previous location of families, removing them from their place of origin and ignoring the relationships affected. This is aggravated by the geographical isolation of the housing which impedes community.”
Díaz agrees these problems and the lack of key facilities and distance from business is a serious threaten the populations living in the subdivisions. However, while there may be consensus on the problems, the solutions are a matter of dispute.
Tweaking the current system: regulation
Responding to the criticism of poor-quality construction and other problems associated with the current model, many have cited a lack of regulation.
Ericka Farías, legislative assessor at conservative think tank Fundación Jaime Guzmán, claims that the governing right-leaning Alianza coalition has taken important steps in addressing the difficulties of regulating the subsidy system.
“This administration has tackled regulation across the current system, detecting various abuses of the system such as people obtaining subsidies under false details, or certain construction companies that did not complete their work to a sufficient standard,” said Farías.
Perez expressed similar sentiments citing how the implementation of stricter demands on the EGIS has reduced their number, eliminating unscrupulous companies and improving the system.
“There were some that didn’t even have offices and were functioning in very irregular ways,” said Perez.
This analysis, then, argues that the system’s deficiencies can be remedied through adjustments, regulations and the improved distribution of subsidies, pointing to the systems achievements as proof of its validity.
There is, though, an elephant in the room: segregation.
Social segregation and its bitter route, fear of the ‘other’
The 2012 OECD economic report on Chile highlighted the dramatic levels of income inequality between municipalities. Social segregation in the capital is marked with the very affluent north-east cone surpassing the rest of the city greatly in terms of income, green spaces and many of measures of quality of life, Perez said.
The housing minister highlighted current plans to provide subsidies for vulnerable families to live in mixed areas amongst the middle classes, but these types of policies have been notably absent for a long time in Chile.
This, says Cociña, is fundamental if the current problems are to be tackled. Ghettoization is rife, but there is strong resistance to tackling this from both the public and constructors who fear mixed housing projects would be undesirable to many.
Perez agreed there is great resistance to integrating social housing, but highlighted the role affluent municipalities play in excluding integration.
“We also have to consider that a lot of municipalities, in their regulation, prohibit the presence of social housing. Not explicitly, that would be illegal, but the construction regulations of the places mean that with these restrictions it’s impossible to construct social housing,” said Perez. “Why do they do it? In part, it is because residents of social housing don’t pay municipal taxes.”
For many, though, segregation is much deeper than a simple byproduct of the system — it is symptomatic of Chile’s neoliberal political climate that has led to segregation and inequality in education and health, among other areas.
Analyzing the market logic in his recent book, congressional candidate Giorgio Jackson suggests that simple profit-driven policies are inadequate because they only consider the construction of lots and subsequent earnings, disregarding the provision of facilities, transport links and other necessities. The result is places like Bajos de Menas that lack all basic facilities.
“This is how the system is. It isn’t that it has failed, the system worked because the poorest families live together,” reads the book. “In the conception of the system this isn’t an accident. It is not about solving a problem because [ghettoization] was never conceived as a problem, it is just how the model works.”
Source: Santiago Times
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