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As delegates to the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2003, the authors examined alternatives to the neoliberal approach to urban development, to escape the negative results that are too often ignored by the media and even academia. Broad-scale, national-level alternatives to neoliberalism have been rare, but alternatives at the municipal level are more common. The authors draw from lessons in Brazil and from their home countries of Mexico, South Africa and the United States. Their lectures and seminars at the World Social Forum, and related programs at the University of São Paulo and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, have been supported in part by the Lincoln Institute.
Residents of enormous districts in some of the world’s largest cities suffer with miserable housing, difficult access to work, inadequate water supplies and sewerage, poor public services and exposure to violence. In many cases, conditions grew worse during the “lost decades” of the 1980s and 1990s, due to recession and cutbacks in planning and public investment. Those with faith in trickle-down improvements waited in vain for private markets to increase household incomes. Instead, in many countries the poorest three-quarters of the population suffered absolute losses.
Forced to respond to these kinds of problems, city governments contemplate new approaches to such questions as local versus national authority, productive efficiency versus neighborhood-based redistribution of services, and conflicts between plans and markets. At the municipal level the complications become painfully clear. Popular advocates of redistributive reforms struggle to survive in a hostile environment, often against strong private business interests, a privileged middle class, and conservative provincial and central governments. The problems in cities are immediate and concrete, requiring negotiation, concessions, compliance with an often-biased legal framework, and high degree of professional competence and leadership. Municipal planners and activists cannot overturn the whole system, but for success they must look to exploit cracks and find institutional openings. In spite of the manifest failures of the neoliberal regimes, reformers will find no simple return to an earlier age.
This brief discussion highlights complex issues, perhaps raising questions more than answering them. How does one deal with land issues underlying most urban problems: ownership, regulation, taxation and value? How much scope is available to municipal governments to pursue economic development or to redistribute basic needs, including household income and access to land? How much difference does it make at the municipal level whether or not the national regime is moving in progressive, redistributive directions? Complicating these issues, globalization may be intensifying, challenging cities with low-cost competition, increased transnational corporate reach, and ever-broader powers concentrated in multilateral institutions.
Land Values and Markets
The benefits of urbanization require public and private access to land, yet urban land values reflect differing degrees of access to a city’s benefits. Low bidders are excluded from more desirable land in most land markets, whether formal or irregular. The poor are pushed to the city margins or crammed into the deteriorated inner core. Weakly regulated land markets do not even guarantee economically efficient use of urban land, let alone ensure land use patterns vital to environmental survival. Local governments intervene with land use controls and taxation, or facilitate access to cheap urbanized land, in the best of cases pursuing equity, fiscal efficiency and environmental viability. Performance on all these counts is highly variable.
In Mexico, at least 60 percent of the urban population lives in areas developed by the illegal occupation of land that subsequently receives services and supports self-built (or rather, self-financed) housing. Thanks to historically ingrained traditions about the people’s right to land, informal settlements have been supported by infrastructure and service provision, regularization programs, and even credits for home improvements. Otherwise, the urban housing situation in Mexico would be much worse. During the 1980s, public institutions accrued significant land reserves, which were applied successfully in low-cost sites and services, core housing and mutual aid projects as alternatives to irregular development. But Mexico eliminated land banking, under World Bank influence, hampering the scope of planning to ensure equitable and sustainable urban development.
In recent years, mass-produced formal housing in cities has increased. In line with World Bank advice, the subsidized finance system for the salaried working classes and middle-income sectors has been restructured, enabling commercial developers to operate on a very large scale, acquiring vast tracts of cheap greenfield sites (and some inner-city sites), and then designing, constructing and marketing industrialized housing. The initial advantages are the provision of services and the seemingly spacious suburban atmosphere. The disadvantages are inaccessibility, lack of urban amenities, reduced space standards, and lack of space for future growth. The gigantic scale of this type of development may deplete irregular settlements of middle-income residents, thus increasing social segregation.
In Brazil, municipal governments have begun to experiment with ways to regulate land use, such as property tax increases linked with progressive taxation, including broad-scale exemptions for as many as half the property owners, and popular participation in decision making for regulatory changes (planning and zoning) and for investments in urban infrastructure. Many changes were first implemented by Workers Party (PT) mayors, operating in opposition to the federal and state governments, with the aid of fiscal and regulatory changes introduced in the 1988 Constitution. Now, with the PT government holding national power under President Luis Inacio (Lula) da Silva, left or center-left municipal governments may find themselves able to experiment more. Nevertheless, the obstacles are very great. Even in the relatively rich city of Porto Alegre a third of the population lives in irregular settlements.
The South African experience since democracy was won in 1994 shows that tremendous difficulties confront those who would use public agencies to assist the poor to gain access to land. The government did succeed in subsidizing over a million families previously living in shacks and shared rooms, but almost all new houses were located at the extreme peripheries of the cities. A key progressive gain is that many large metropolitan areas are now consolidated in single municipal governments. But economic growth concerns and fiscal crises have limited the ability of the new jurisdictions to redistribute resources in favor of the poor. Planners intended to raise ample funds through taxation of high-value central land, to pay for subsidies for developments in poorer districts, but values did not follow predictions, and receipts were grossly inadequate. Land markets continue, by and large, to exclude the disadvantaged, and they haven’t yielded sufficient tax revenue. A continuing lack of coordination in the formulation of policy has seen programs in land, housing, services, public works and employment working against each other in some cases.
In the United States, nearly all land and housing development is “regular,” market-driven and dominated by private banking, real estate and development firms, and better-off households. The results are starkly unequal, pitting suburbs against much poorer central cities. Efforts to right the imbalance have generally been frustrated, because land markets do not deliver great efficiencies or fairness. The process is highly regulated, so that inequalities are generated not only by (land) markets themselves, but also by political groups such as “growth coalitions” and by fierce regulatory manipulation on behalf of privileged middle-class and wealthy districts.
The regulation of land markets through planning, land banking and taxation constitutes a broad arena for municipal intervention in land policy. Local governments have extensive potential authority, and they typically have constitutional prerogatives for planning and taxation (although in practice they are still constrained by powerful national forces). They may act to support economic growth or to redistribute it, even in a conservative provincial or national climate. Local planning does constrain land markets, but often without redistributive effects, since city governments must contend with strong financial interests, patterns of privilege, and entrenched power. Professional competency and consistency are required to exploit the full potential of property registration and taxation systems, and financial decentralization limits the possibility of cross subsidies and redistributive measures.
Progressive Local Government
In spite of claims about the conservative nature of powerful constraints on the redistributive capacity of local governments, evidence from the four countries cited here suggests that municipalities may indeed find ways to redistribute public goods and services on behalf of their less well-off residents. Municipalities also may serve as laboratories for social experimentation and as sources of progressive ideological change.
In Mexico, the role of municipal and state governments in achieving more equitable cities is undisputed and constitutionally sanctioned, yet fraught with obstacles. In the 1990s, the first electoral defeats of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (the PRI, which dominated the political arena from the 1920s) were at municipal and then state levels. Throughout the country there are genuine examples of successful innovative and socially redistributive programs run by municipal governments, such as participatory budgeting and planning, and community recycling. Mexico City’s Federal District is now governed by the left-of-center Democratic Revolution Party, which also controls most of the poorer and more populous jurisdictions of the metropolitan area. In 2001, this government introduced a social investment program targeting the poorer districts, providing monthly cash payments of US $70 in 2002 to people over seventy years, interest-free loans for home improvements in irregular settlements, and traditional public services and social assistance. Criticized from the left and right as populist and electioneering, this program is now emulated on a smaller scale by the center-right federal government and in local electoral platforms by the PRI. Despite initial positive evaluations, however, questions remain about costs for universal coverage and viability in poorer municipalities, and about reinforcing clientilism.
Brazilian experience with redistribution by municipal government has been documented in many notable cases, from giant cities such as São Paulo, to large cities such as Porto Alegre, Santo Andre and Belem, to the hundreds of smaller municipalities that have elected left-of-center administrations over the past 15 years. The case most often discussed is participatory budgeting, the innovation that has involved more than 10 percent of Porto Alegre’s residents in decisions to allocate more than one billion dollars of public expenditures on infrastructure and services. Other innovations include improvements in transit services and expansion of bus lanes to challenge the hegemony of the automobile, which serves a privileged minority. Some progress has been made in housing, but local government capacity is limited.
South African municipal government has emerged only in the last two years from its long history of apartheid division and the turmoil of reform since 1994. But, new trends demonstrate innovation at the municipal scale. Although many aspects of municipal government have been “corporatized” in Johannesburg, the city is beginning to make substantial progress on the regeneration of decayed inner city areas, using a wholly owned company (the Johannesburg Development Agency) as the instrument of change. Agencies of this kind seem to be able to solve some of the problems of intricate relationships between different spheres of government—local, provincial (or state) and national—and to attract greater private interest in supporting municipal initiative.
New approaches to planning in South Africa are also starting to show signs of success. These participatory approaches bring public utility agencies and big-budget government departments, as well as citizens, into framing municipal action over the short- to medium-term. Such developments indicate that working on the linkages between different agencies is crucial for increasing effectiveness and reducing frustration during the early democratic period. Some municipalities are beginning to find ways of sharing experiences and shaping new forms of cooperation. An example is the new national Cities Network, which brings together nine of the largest municipalities in the country as a means of stimulating innovation and expanding impact.
Social and political innovation has also been documented at the municipal level in cities of various sizes throughout the U.S., often in situations that require resisting politically conservative national trends. Very large cities such as Cleveland and Chicago developed city plans aimed explicitly at redistribution to provide assistance to needy households and deprived neighborhoods. Chicago also developed solid programs to support smaller and more local business enterprises, versus the usual beneficiaries among large firms and downtown interests. Smaller cities such as Burlington, Vermont, and Santa Monica, California, developed aggressive programs in housing and rent control aimed at helping needy constituents. As in the heralded examples of participatory budgeting in Brazil, these progressive municipal programs typically have strict limitations, because they can do little to improve the labor market and thus can offer only small improvements to household cash incomes.
Municipal efforts on land use and housing in the U.S. are often constrained by local control or “home rule,” which isolates the more numerous, wealthier suburbs that literally surround poorer central cities. The wealth and significant taxing power of these separate jurisdictions combines with a U.S. peculiarity—local financing of public schools—to burden city residents with powerful disadvantages. Since about 90 percent of U.S. children attend public schools, local control of schools is a hot-button issue in U.S. politics. Scholars construe de jure public suburban control as de facto privatization: by purchasing homes in suburbs, households are purchasing control of local schools, thereby excluding others, such as new immigrants and ethnic groups, especially African Americans.
One hears echoes of such U.S. suburban privatization and division in the rigidly separated districts and gated communities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and other Brazilian cities; in the huge separations of privileged central districts and the unserviced periphery in Mexico City; and in the surviving apartheid spatial structure of Johannesburg. We find that municipal governments do act against these inequities, at least in part because of an ideological commitment and because the resulting problems threaten their capacity to govern. Some localities may turn their limited victories into building blocks for larger progressive structures at the national scale, as evidenced in Brazil.
National-level Urban Reform
Urban affairs is a hot issue in Brazil, and various laws, administrative practices, budgets and regulations have been brewing since the new Constitution of 1988 promised an improved status for cities. After more than a decade of extensive public debate, new legislation was enacted in the 2001 City Statute, a federal law on urban policy. The new left-of-center government led by President da Silva is betting on a new national ministry to integrate different activities and to find more effective approaches to persistent urban problems. This Ministry of Cities (Ministerio das Cidades) was established in early 2003 to improve housing, transit and neighborhood services for poor majorities, preserve and renovate historic centers, promote economic development, and drastically increase participation. National leaders aim to emphasize the concerns of mayors, city councils and the neediest citizens in the federal agenda. Other countries are generally a long way from such an urban policy, and the Brazilian experiment will be closely watched.
Mexico is a clear example of how constitutional rights to such things as decent housing, health and education may be considered important, but are not valued enough to guarantee their fulfillment; nor are all those good intentions laid out in the highly complex planning legislation. Even municipal-friendly constitutional amendments of the 1980s have not fully undermined the high degree of centralization of all public policy, including social spending and virtually all environmental regulation. As a result, the urban and social agendas of different levels of government are often competing rather than complementary, and are always insufficient to meet demand.
South Africa has tried to develop a new national policy in the urban field, starting with a national Urban Development Strategy after the 1994 democratic elections. But relatively little has been accomplished since the strategy has tended to remain a paper commitment to good outcomes rather than a concrete program or a real obligation on different departments and levels of government to work together toward common goals. Part of the problem has been competition between different agencies over who should set the agenda. Diverse centers of power, from the president’s office to the finance ministry, the local government department of the national government, some of the provincial governments, and the national municipal association, are vying for position in shaping urban policy.
The lack of coherent urban policy in South Africa also must be placed in the context of the central agenda of government, which stresses not only economic growth but also the continuing empowerment of the previously disadvantaged black majority. There is by no means consensus over the roles of the cities in accomplishing either of these objectives. A single ministry addressing urban issues would seem like a dream to many observers, but other ways of achieving similar objectives by reorganizing relationships between parts of government suggest that progress can be made.
In the United States, the federal agenda for urban policy has been weak since the late 1970s, and general fiscal constraints have combined with suburban voters’ indifference to cities. These problems have been greatly exacerbated by the consequences of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, by demands of the U.S. war economy, and by the conservative nature of redistribution pursued by the Bush Administration.
This range of international experience suggests that profound national changes and legislation can have immense local effects. A national government can provide fiscal, regulatory and administrative support for a whole series of municipal improvements, many of which would be eagerly implemented by local governments. National governments (and even international agreements, as in the earlier European common market) can inhibit or even prohibit such things as municipal tax-cutting competition in pursuit of relocated private investment, thus eliminating a lose-lose situation for public budgets. But, even in the best of cases, such opportunities are limited, politically difficult and technically complicated.
Conclusions
In the context of the globalizing economy, city politicians and officials face remarkably similar uncertainties in Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and the United States. As economies have become more open, some industrial sectors have been hammered, while others have been able to take up new opportunities (such as motor vehicle exporting in South Africa) and new niches have emerged. The current geopolitical context poses challenges for city administrations; how they think about their role in this period of imported instability is significant. There is a tension between those who think that the role of city government is to frame competition with other cities, and those who see more cooperative roles.
Cities themselves need to develop capacity to formulate and implement plans. They cannot simply rely on the panoply of outside professionals and agencies that have increasingly defined urban agendas. Some of the needed sharing can fruitfully take place in an academic environment, especially where long-term research helps to inform choices. It is particularly important to widen opportunities for sharing between the city officials and scholars of the global South and the North, to the mutual benefit of both.
Priscilla Connolly teaches urban sociology and planning at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Azcapotzalco, Mexico. William W. Goldsmith directs the Program on Urban and Regional Studies at Cornell University. Alan Mabin is associate professor in the Graduate School of Development Management at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Rampant informality, so emblematic of large cities in developing countries, poses many challenges for property taxation systems. For instance, tenure rights in informal settlements are often obscure or even unknown; buildings are constructed gradually over time, self-construction is common, and the whole unit may never be finished; property value depends on vague or intangible factors such as the security provided by community organizations; the occupant or even the legal owner may be too poor to pay taxes; administrative costs of tax collection are higher than in the formal areas, whereas assessed values are often much lower; and there is hardly any public investment in infrastructure and services.
These critical features of informal housing seem to violate many of the premises on which the administration of a property tax system is grounded: identification of taxable property and corresponding taxpayers; description of the property’s physical characteristics; determination of property values on a reasonable market basis and according to predictable measures; the taxpayer’s presumed ability to pay; collection costs that are relatively low compared to the revenue collected; and an expectation that tax revenues would benefit the area from which the tax was collected.
This comparison depicts the essence of the conventional wisdom on informal occupations and the reasons why they are generally disregarded for taxation purposes, but misconceptions and prejudices are evident. This article examines some of these biases and their consequences for property tax collection in informal areas. The Latin American situation is used to illustrate this debate, but this study is still exploratory due to limited data. The arguments discussed indicate promising directions for further analyses, rather than conclusive findings in most cases.
Informal Occupations
In land occupation and housing, informality is a multidimensional phenomenon involving thorny issues related to land tenure; noncompliance with urban norms and regulations, such as minimum lot size, allowance for public spaces, and street layouts; inadequate provision of public services and equipment; and occupation of improper areas, such as environmentally protected or ecologically risky areas and contaminated brownfield sites.
Slums originated by land invasions are the first image of informality that comes to mind, but other social and physical forms of informality range from pirate subdivisions, usually characterized by market sales of land having no clear title, to situations where even legally qualified owners with titled land do not conform to existing urban norms and regulations.
According to the United Nations–Habitat (2003), about 928 million people (32 percent of the world’s urban population or 43 percent of the population of developing countries) currently live in slums with precarious urban infrastructure and inadequate public services. If current trends and policies continue, the report estimates that slum populations will increase by 37 million per year to reach a total of 1.5 billion people in 2020. Although Latin America accounts for 9 percent of the world’s population, it comprises about 14 percent of those who live in slums.
Why is Informality a Problem?
Informality disorganizes the functioning of urban land markets, since illegal, irregular, and clandestine operators are able to reap higher profits by avoiding some costs, such as taxes, the cost of protecting the land from invasions, or the cost of providing basic urban infrastructure and services. Contrary to expectations, land prices per square meter in informal settlements are often higher than those in formal areas, when discounting investments related to the provision of water, electricity, drainage, sewerage, and other services.
Moreover, informality is expensive for society. The costs of curative policies to upgrade irregular settlements are higher than the cost of new land development, and indirect social costs include the presence of criminal activity and natural disasters caused by development in environmentally sensitive areas. The evidence also suggests that informality is both a cause and an effect of urban poverty. The geographic distribution of poverty tends to overlap with the spatial pattern of informal arrangements, although the magnitude and persistence of informality cannot be entirely explained by poverty. A survey conducted by the Instituto Pereira Passos (2002) based on the Brazilian Census of 2000 found that about 64 percent of the population classified as poor actually lived outside the slum areas.
Myths of Informality
There are many prevailing myths about how informal settlements are either established or operated, including the perception that occupants in informal areas are neither willing nor able to pay property taxes. In fact, not only are occupiers usually willing to pay the tax as a way to legitimate their land tenure, but they are often quite able to pay it. New occupants, in fact, have already paid the property tax in the form of higher land prices, yet the payment went to either the subdivider or original landowner instead of the government.
Moreover, payment of the property tax by occupants of informal areas is likely to legitimate their right to demand public services and other urban improvements from government authorities. Many informal occupants also realize that private provision of basic services through informal means, such as buying water from a truck, is likely to be more costly and risky than payment of the property tax.
Other myths or assumptions about informality include beliefs that occupants of informal settlements are necessarily poor; informal settlements are occupied only by unemployed and informal workers; formal property title is necessary to obtain access to credit; informal settlements are homogeneous entities clearly distinguished from formal settlements; and occupation of informal settlements is made through nonmarket transactions.
Property Tax Collection
In an attempt to relate property tax collection per inhabitant to the presence of informality, we used data based on a survey of municipalities conducted in 1999 by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE 2001). Table 1 presents data that measured two criteria: the occurrence of slums (i.e., informal settlements caused by invasions) and the existence of all types of irregular land development. Slums occur in 27.6 percent of all municipalities in Brazil, while irregular land development (including slums) occurs in almost 44 percent of them. The maximum value of property tax collected is higher in larger municipalities and those with slums and other irregular developments, and the revenues also tend to be higher on average than in those municipalities without such development.
However, Table 2 illustrates the difficulty of monitoring property ownership and tax collection records by comparing the presence of cadastres in municipalities with records on slums and informal settlements. Local cadastres cover information on slums in 52.5 percent of the municipalities in which they are found, but only 39 percent of those cities have complete records on informality. By comparison, 50.5 percent of municipalities with irregular land developments have this information included in their cadastres, and 51 percent of the cases with records have complete information. Thus, one cannot reject the hypothesis that the larger, richer, and more developed municipalities are also the ones with better records on informal occupations.
Using the IBGE database, a model for multiple regression analysis was developed to test the relationship between informality and the property tax collected per inhabitant. The relationship was controlled with other attributes available in the database, including the average income per inhabitant, the size of the population, and a group of variables associated with the role of the local administration in promoting urban development. Based on this model, which explains approximately 72 percent of the variation in the property tax collected per inhabitant, the following factors have proven to be influential in determining the amount of property tax collected.
In addition to the level of income, the findings clearly indicate the importance of an effective administration of the property tax. In other words, even in the presence of informality municipalities achieve better results in comparative terms if they maintain updated cadastres and maps, include informal properties in the cadastre, and have a broad framework of urban legislation. In summary, when focusing strictly on the property tax performance, the major cause of concern is not the presence of informality itself, but the way public officials deal with it for property tax purposes.
The Property Tax as a Tool to Reverse Informality
A more vigorous property tax is likely to affect informality directly. For instance, the portion of the property tax levied on land value constitutes a strong antidote to force the existing stock of serviced land to the market. The property tax may also be important as a tool to influence the decision-making process for which areas should receive urban services. Indeed, communities without a property tax system are particularly vulnerable when it comes to seeking public attention.
The property tax can also be an educational mechanism for helping citizens realize their rights and duties, including the need to contribute to public expenses. The government’s commitment to allocate tax revenues fairly and equitably provides greater legitimacy to the tax. Furthermore, a property tax may be one mechanism to reduce land prices through the capitalization effect (Bahl and Linn 1992). Usually local government recognition of occupancy has no direct, legal effect on guaranteeing property titles at the public registry, but informal occupiers may perceive it as a kind of a green card to access the legal world.
Rabello de Castro (2000) has argued that there are solid legal grounds to use cadastres for property tax purposes to legitimize tenure rights, and that the courts would have no difficulty in admitting such records as trustworthy evidence. Finally, there is an advantage for the property tax to cover informal property because its application requires specific knowledge of the area, which has immensurable value to the city management.
Policy Recommendations
Informality poses particular challenges to property tax administration, including the need to design feasible and politically acceptable procedures. Following are some policy recommendations for consideration.
Even though most informal property is excluded from the property rolls, the above requirements should be applied to informal properties if a higher level of efficiency in property tax collection is to be achieved. The argument about high collection costs to exclude low-valued properties (or low-income families for that matter) from the tax-rolls should be reckoned against the benefits of promoting broader fiscal citizenship.
A Longer View
The collection of property taxes in informal areas may be not only possible under certain circumstances, but also attractive for pursuing a more effective urban policy that is capable of mitigating informality and its negative effects for society in general and for individual occupants of these settlements in particular.
Despite the difficulty of providing empirical evidence on its theoretical impacts on the land market, the part of the property tax levied on the land value is likely to produce effects that are critical to mitigate the distortions and dysfunctions in land markets with a high degree of informality. These effects include stimulating land development; deterring land speculation; reducing land prices; increasing the supply of urbanized land; encouraging more compact cities; promoting more efficient provision of urban infrastructure and services; and encouraging a more rational pattern of development. Indirect benefits may include the relevance of the information generated to identify property, the use of paid property taxes as a paralegal means to legitimize tenure rights, and last but not least the opportunity for accessing citizenship and becoming integrated into society.
In summary, when focusing on the property tax performance, the major cause of concern is not so much informality itself, but the way public officials treat informality and how they administer a property tax system. In this context, the introduction of the property tax into an environment with rampant informality requires special caution. The challenges to operating the property tax in informal areas include the need to understand the informal market, curb intervening land ownership claims from previous or absent owners, improve administrative capability, and legitimize public actions that result in social benefits to the poor. In addition, public officials need to overcome prejudice and misconceptions regarding informality and introduce efficient property tax initiatives that may actually reduce informality.
About the Authors
Martim O. Smolka is senior fellow and director of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Claudia M. De Cesare is a property tax advisor to the Secretariat of Finance in the municipality of Porto Alegre, Brazil. She is on the advisory board of the International Property Tax Institute (IPTI) and is a faculty member of the Lincoln Institute.
References
Abramo, Pedro. 2003. A teoria econômica da favela: quatro notas sobre a localização residencial dos pobres e o mercado imobiliário informal, in A cidade da informalidade: o desafio das cidades latino-americanas, Pedro Abramo (Org.). Rio de Janeiro: Librería Sette Letras, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Bahl, R.W., and Johannes F. Linn. 1992. Urban Public Finance in Developing Countries. Washington DC: Oxford University Press.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). 2001. Perfil dos municípios brasileiros: Pesquisa de informações básicas municipais, 1999. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE.
Instituto Pereira Passos. 2002. Evolução da população de favelas no Rio de Janeiro: Uma reflexão sobre os dados mais recentes. Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. http://www.rio.rj.gov.br.
Rabello de Castro, S. 2000. Habitação: Direito e governança – Duas sugestões para ação governamental. Fundação João Ribeiro. Cadernos de Textos 2: 321–338.
UN–HABITAT. 2003. The challenge of slums: Global report on human settlements. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Human Settlements Programme.
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Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 7 del CD-ROM Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.
El Lincoln Institute ha venido colaborando con el Programa de Becas Loeb de la Escuela de Posgrado en Diseño de la Universidad de Harvard desde 1998. El Programa de Becas Loeb fue establecido en 1970 gracias a la generosidad del ex alumno de Harvard John L. Loeb. Cada año se invita a diez profesionales de diseño y planeamiento con cierta experiencia a realizar estudios independientes y desarrollar conceptos nuevos y conexiones para avanzar sus trabajos de revitalización de los entornos naturales y construidos. En mayo, la clase de becarios de 2005 realizó un viaje de estudios a Brasil para intercambiar información con sus contrapartes profesionales de las ciudades de São Paulo y Rio de Janeiro. Este artículo se concentra en lo que aprendimos sobre los programas para mejorar la calidad de vida en las favelas de estas dos ciudades.
Desde la frondosa selva tropical del Amazonas hasta los rascacielos futuristas con helipuertos integrados de São Paulo, Brasil es un estudio en contrastes. El país es rico en territorio, con una superficie ligeramente mayor que los 48 estados continentales de los Estados Unidos; es el país más grande de América del Sur y el quinto más grande del mundo.
En la actualidad, el 80 por ciento de los 186 millones de residentes de Brasil vive en las zonas urbanas. La ciudad de São Paulo, con una población de 10 millones de habitantes, es la más grande de Brasil y una de las más densamente pobladas; más de 16 millones de personas viven en su área metropolitana. La ciudad de Rio de Janeiro es la segunda más grande del país, con 6 millones de habitantes y una población metropolitana de 10 millones.
La distribución de ingresos en Brasil se encuentra entre las más desiguales del mundo. El 10 por ciento de la población con ingresos más altos se queda con el 50 por ciento del ingreso nacional, mientras que el 34 por ciento de la población vive por debajo del nivel de pobreza. Si bien los esfuerzos antiinflacionarios han ayudado a estabilizar la economía en los últimos años, el país sigue llevando a cuestas una considerable deuda externa. Al tener que lidiar con los desafíos de la extrema pobreza, el tráfico de estupefacientes, el crimen, la distribución desigual de la tierra y una oferta inadecuada de viviendas, el gobierno cuenta con fondos limitados para los programas sociales y con frecuencia los ha utilizado en forma ineficiente.
La vida en las favelas
Se estima que el 20 por ciento de los brasileños vive actualmente en favelas, o asentamientos informales de viviendas de bajos ingresos. Las favelas se iniciaron en Rio de Janeiro a comienzos del siglo veinte, cuando miles de soldados que pelearon en una guerra civil recibieron escasa asistencia del gobierno y fueron forzados a vivir en estructuras improvisadas. Se asentaban frecuentemente en lugares sin servicios públicos donde las edificaciones eran precarias, como en colinas empinadas o zonas pantanosas. Estas favelas fueron creciendo y se construyeron muchas otras en zonas igualmente inseguras. En 1966, 1996 y 2001, lluvias torrenciales crearon aluviones fatales en muchas comunidades.
Las favelas comenzaron a crecer rápidamente, tanto en número como tamaño, en la década de 1970, cuando los trabajadores rurales comenzaron a acudir en masa a las ciudades, atraídos por mejores oportunidades de empleo. En Rio, muchas de las favelas tradicionales se encuentran en las zonas céntricas, cerca de los barrios ricos y las áreas turísticas. En contraste, la mayoría de las favelas de São Paulo se encuentran en la periferia del núcleo urbano, debido a su geografía local, razones históricas y otros factores.
Alfredo Sirkis, director de gestión de planeamiento y ex concejal de Rio, explicó que la escala de estos asentamientos informales y el auge de delitos violentos son los dos desafíos más importantes a resolver para poder mejorar la vida en las favelas. Al hablar de la preponderancia de los narcotraficantes, dijo: “Cuentan con armas de guerra y cada día se hacen más valientes. La policía puede neutralizar la situación, pero apenas se erradica a las pandillas se van creando otras. La policía estatal y la guardia municipal patrullan estos barrios, pero la fuerza policial está infestada con corrupción”.
La mayoría de las casas en las favelas son construidas por sus propios residentes con materiales de chatarra, y no cuentan con sistemas de agua o alcantarillado apropiados. Un estudio realizado por el Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas Aplicadas (IPEA) de Brasil estimó que el 28,5 por ciento de la población urbana no tiene acceso a servicios públicos de agua, alcantarillado y recolección de residuos (Franke 2005). Algunas favelas grandes tienen más de 60.000 habitantes y son tan densas que es extremadamente difícil tender caminos o sistemas de servicios públicos.
Se han hecho varios intentos de introducir mejoras en las favelas a lo largo de los años. En la década de 1960, siguiendo el ejemplo de los programas de renovación urbana en los Estados Unidos, algunas favelas fueron demolidas, desplazándose sus familias a complejos edilicios grandes y frecuentemente distantes que contaban con infraestructura y servicios. Sin embargo, de la misma manera que en los Estados Unidos, este método frecuentemente fracasó, destruyendo comunidades y alejando a los residentes de sus empleos locales, brindándoles a cambio muy pocas opciones de transporte. Además, no se atacaron los problemas sociales subyacentes, como la falta de empleo, el tráfico de estupefacientes y el crimen. Durante las décadas de 1970 y 1980 se produjo un período de negligencia benigna que resultó en la rápida expansión de las favelas y el deterioro de su calidad de vida. La película ampliamente premiada Ciudad de Dios muestra la vida casi sin esperanzas de la juventud de las favelas en un proyecto grande de viviendas de la era de 1960, que se había deteriorado y caído presa del crimen en la década de 1980.
Los proyectos más recientes de mejora de las favelas aprendieron la lección de esos esfuerzos del pasado. Los becarios de Loeb visitaron dos de esos proyectos que se concentran en mejorar las condiciones de las favelas en su ubicación actual, reparando la infraestructura edilicia y creando programas sociales para brindar capacitación para el empleo, servicios de guardería, educación y prevención del crimen.
São Paulo: Diadema
Diadema fue fundada en 1959 para albergar a los trabajadores de la creciente industria automotriz y hoy en día es una ciudad autónoma dentro del área metropolitana de São Paulo. Una nueva afluencia de trabajadores rurales en busca de empleo se mudó al área en la década de 1980, y para ese entonces aproximadamente un tercio de la población vivía en favelas. Una gran parte de la ciudad enfrentaba serios problemas estructurales, dada la naturaleza descontrolada del crecimiento pasado, pero el gobierno respondió a las necesidades de infraestructura construyendo caminos y proporcionando alumbrado, agua y sistemas de alcantarillado. Hubo algunos programas de demolición y reubicación de residentes, pero, en general, se reconoció que una política de integración de las favelas en la ciudad tendría mayor éxito a largo plazo.
Sin embargo, la crisis económica de la década de 1990 precipitó una nueva ola de desempleo y crimen. Entre 1995 y 1998, la población de Diadema creció el 3,4 por ciento, pero la cantidad de homicidios se incrementó en un 49 por ciento, a veces con un promedio de un asesinato por día. El alcalde José de Filippi Jr., que ahora se encuentra en su tercer período de gobierno de cuatro años, lanzó una campaña de 10 fases para combatir el delito, que comenzó por recolectar estadísticas concretas. El personal de la alcaldía hizo un mapa de los lugares donde preponderaban los delitos graves e identificó los horarios de mayor actividad. Después de establecer que el 60 por ciento de los homicidios ocurría en o alrededor de los bares entre las 11 de la noche y las 6 de la mañana, en 2001 la ciudad emitió una ley obligando a todos los establecimientos que vendían alcohol que cierren en ese horario. Ello marcó el comienzo de una reducción pronunciada en los delitos graves.
Otro blanco de los esfuerzos del alcalde para reducir el crimen fue la juventud de Diadema, que se benefició de varios programas creativos. El Proyecto de Aprendices Juveniles está dirigido a jóvenes vulnerables que residen en áreas identificadas como de alto riesgo y exclusión social donde prevalece el tráfico de estupefacientes. Este proyecto ofrece oportunidades educativas, deportivas y culturales, colocación de trabajo y un ingreso mensual para aquellos que están calificados. Estas medidas tienen como objetivo brindar a los jóvenes otras opciones para usar su tiempo en vez de cometer delitos, como también nuevos empleos y redes sociales.
Para reducir la cantidad de armas en las favelas a fin de impedir el crimen, la ciudad se concentró una vez más en la gente joven. La Campaña de Desarme de Armas de Fuego ofreció a los niños un libro de historietas a cambio de cada arma de juguete y se recolectaron de esa manera 27,000 armas de juguete en el curso de tres años. En la segunda fase de la campaña, que consistió en recolectar armas de los adultos, muchos niños continuaron con su activismo y presionaron a sus padres y vecinos para que entregaran sus armas. El programa fue más exitoso de lo esperado, logrando recolectar 1,600 armas en los primeros seis meses.
Además de los programas para combatir el delito, el alcalde procuró mejorar el entorno físico y social de las favelas. Los ciudadanos recibieron capacitación y materiales gratuitamente, y se les alentó a realizar mejoras estructurales y también cosméticas en sus casas. En muchas zonas se formaron grupos comunitarios que realizaron mejoras efectivas en los barrios. La ciudad respondió con un programa por medio del cual los residentes de las favelas ubicadas en tierras públicas podían obtener un “derecho de uso” del suelo por 99 años sin cargo. Aquellos que permanecen en su vivienda durante por lo menos cinco años pueden tomar los primeros pasos para convertirse en “inquilinos” legales del suelo, y más adelante podrán incluso vender la estructura.
Nuestra visita a Diadema incluyó un viaje a un barrio favela donde los ciudadanos habían mejorado sus casas y creado capacitación laboral y otras oportunidades más allá de lo que podía brindar el programa gubernamental. Nos congregamos en el centro comunitario, que era al mismo tiempo una capilla y un aula, para escuchar a los residentes expresar su deseo de llevar a la comunidad a “un nivel más alto”. Participaron en el programa “Es bello” de la ciudad, que fue creado en 1983 con financiamiento conjunto de la municipalidad y el grupo comunitario. Después de haber construido la infraestructura básica, querían que el semblante de su comunidad fuera conmensurable con el orgullo que sentían por el esfuerzo que habían realizado.
La becaria de Loeb Mary Eysenbach observó: “Me sorprendió cómo un barrio autoorganizado se parecía a un barrio regulado por el gobierno, tanto en forma como organización. Sea cual fuera la solución para las favelas, es fundamental retener y aun promover la creatividad y el espíritu emprendedor de los residentes”.
Rio de Janeiro: Morro Providência
La municipalidad de Rio de Janeiro creó el proyecto Favela-Bairro en 1993, cuando aproximadamente la quinta parte de la población vivía en favelas. En sus primeras dos fases, el proyecto comenzó a integrar a 620.000 ciudadanos en 168 comunidades informales al resto de la ciudad. Estos asentamientos incluyen 143 favelas establecidas y 25 subdivisiones irregulares más nuevas. Se ha planeado por lo menos una fase más, con la intención de alcanzar a hasta 2 millones de personas. Este proyecto está financiado principalmente por la municipalidad y el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID 2003).
Los objetivos principales del proyecto Favela-Bairro son realizar mejoras estructurales en las casas, ampliar los caminos de acceso, y mejorar y formalizar la infraestructura urbana, incluyendo caminos pavimentados, suministro de agua potable y alcantarillas sanitarias. Estas mejoras físicas integrarán las favelas en el entramado urbano por medio de espacios públicos y otras amenidades. Programas sociales brindarán asistencia a niños y adolescentes (guarderías y establecimientos artísticos y deportivos) y crearán oportunidades de generación de ingresos (capacitación profesional y educación para adultos y jóvenes).
Una parte pequeña pero vital del proyecto ayuda a los residentes de las favelas a obtener una dirección postal con calle y número, permitiéndoles recibir correspondencia y establecer una relación de cliente con proveedores de servicios. El proyecto también proporciona certificados de “derecho de uso” a residentes una vez que sus casas se conecten al sistema de agua y alcantarillado, se incorporen al mapa de la ciudad y se les asigne una dirección. Este “alquiler” del suelo, en general, es por 100 años y permite al dueño transferir sus viviendas a un familiar inmediato; el suelo sigue siendo propiedad de la ciudad. Se espera que el programa, además de brindar servicios, proporcione al propietario de la vivienda más seguridad y un mayor sentido de propiedad y responsabilidad.
Visitamos el Morro Providência, uno de los modelos del proyecto Favela-Bairro con aproximadamente 5,000 residentes. Como señal sombría de que la seguridad sigue siendo un problema aun en un barrio mejorado, fuimos escoltados por agentes armados. Nuestro guía nos explicó que la nueva escalera que estábamos subiendo era una parte importante del proyecto, porque no sólo brinda acceso sino que también es un medio para transportar agua y líneas de alcantarillado a las partes superiores de la favela. También mencionó que se ofrecen programas educativos a los residentes para demostrar el uso de la nueva infraestructura y servicios, pero puede pasar tiempo antes de poder integrar estos nuevos sistemas en su modo de vida.
Quedamos impresionados por las ideas creativas utilizadas para confrontar los problemas cotidianos. Por ejemplo, el número limitado de caminos para vehículos y la falta de acceso dificultan la recolección de basura y residuos. Una solución ha sido un programa de intercambio innovador: los residentes reciben leche a cambio de una bolsa de basura, creando así una población más sana, mejor recolección de residuos y barrios más limpios.
Observamos un proyecto de restauración histórica de una capilla y la incrustación de una línea dorada en el cemento para guiar a los visitantes en una recorrida a pie por los hitos importantes del proyecto de revitalización. Nuestra visita también incluyó una presentación del proyecto Favela-Bairro en la nueva guardería que albergará a 220 niños de las familias más necesitadas. Como pudimos comprobar en la totalidad de nuestra visita a Brasil, tanto el personal municipal como los líderes vecinales participaron en forma colaborativa en las presentaciones y discusiones.
La becaria Robin Chase comentó: “Todo el concepto de Favela-Bairro de potenciar las inversiones personales y darse cuenta de que una vivienda cerca del centro es mejor que un proyecto de viviendas en el medio de la nada me impresionó como práctico y eficiente. La calidad de vida ha mejorado ampliamente, con electricidad, agua y plomería. La resolución del tema de la seguridad parece ser un problema muy difícil que tiene que ser atacado en todo el país”.
Conclusión
Observamos signos de cambios positivos en las favelas que visitamos y quedamos impresionados por la dedicación de sus ciudadanos y funcionarios para integrar estas comunidades al resto de la ciudad, pero existen todavía grandes desafíos, en particular la necesidad de recursos financieros sustanciales para realizar cambios mayores. Un amplio estudio de los residentes de favelas en Rio confirma nuestra experiencia: “Si bien se han producido mejoras notables en el consumo de servicios urbanos colectivos, artículos del hogar y años de educación en las últimas tres décadas, hay mayor desempleo y desigualdad” (Perlman 2003). El delito, la corrupción policial y el prejuicio contra los residentes de las favelas siguen siendo barreras para el progreso.
“En ciertos niveles locales, nacionales e internacionales, los líderes se han dado cuenta de que las estrategias de desplazamiento, marginalización y segregación del pasado no van a funcionar”, notó James Stockard, conservador del Programa de Becas Loeb. “La gente tiene una fuerte conexión con el suelo donde se ha asentado. Hay que aprovechar este compromiso y energía para convertir estos barrios informales en comunidades más saludables, seguras y económicamente viables”.
Heather Boyer fue becaria de Loeb en la Escuela de Postgrado de Diseño de la Universidad de Harvard en 2004–2005 y ahora es una editora independiente en la ciudad de Nueva York.
Referencias
Franke, Renata. 2005. El veintiocho por ciento de la población urbana de Brasil no tiene agua corriente ni alcantarillado. Brazzil Magazine, 2 de junio, www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/2641/49/
Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID). 2003. Favela-Bairro: Diez años de integración a la ciudad. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo.
Perlman, Janice E. 2003. “Los pobres crónicos de Rio de Janeiro: ¿Qué ha cambiado en los últimos 30 años”? Trabajo no publicado presentado en la Conferencia sobre la pobreza crónica, Manchester, Inglaterra.
Loeb Fellows, 2004–2005
Heather Boyer, former editor, Island Press, Boulder, Colorado
Robin Chase, founder and CEO, Meadow Networks, Cambridge, Massachusetts; founder and former CEO, Zipcar, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Maurice Cox, professor of architecture, University of Virginia; former Mayor, Charlottesville, Virginia
Mary Eysenbach, former director, The City Parks Forum, a program of the American Planning Association, Chicago, Illinois
Klaus Mayer, partner, Mayer Sattler-Smith, a multidisciplinary design firm in Anchorage, Alaska
Cara McCarty, curator of decorative arts and design, St. Louis Art Museum
Mario Navarro, former housing policy director, Chilean Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Santiago
Dan Pitera, director, Detroit Collaborative Design Center, University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture
Carlos Romero, community organizer and community development advocate, San Francisco, California
Susan Zielinski, cofounder and director, Moving the Economy, Toronto
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The current state of global urban development is unsettling and plagued with man-made and natural disasters. In many developing countries, the government does not have the fiscal and institutional capacity to build affordable housing and basic infrastructure for the growing urban population, resulting in a proliferation of informal settlements and slums. At the same time, natural disasters in some of these distressed regions have destroyed homes, roads, water and sewage systems, and other public facilities, exacerbating the already limited basic services available to the urban poor.
In response to these problems, many international aid agencies such as UN-HABITAT and the World Bank, as well as governments, scholars, and practitioners, are looking for new ideas or repackaging existing ways to rebuild cities. This article discusses a long-established land management tool that has attracted recent attention—land readjustment (LR)—and describes how selected elements of this tool are being adopted to assist post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in Chile.
The LR approach emphasizes the integration of the urban economy, city planning, law, and governance with land management to form a comprehensive urban development or upgrading strategy. It requires an interdisciplinary team of experts with different perspectives to work on a concrete land development project. Although many scholars such as Doebele (1982) and Hong and Needham (2007) have emphasized the importance of this integrated approach, some practitioners perceive it as merely a tool to facilitate land transactions. This narrow view has limited opportunities in some developing countries to resolve urban upgrading and development problems in a more comprehensive way.
The recent resurgence of interest in LR is due to the recognition of the importance of coordinating economic, legal, political, and social institutions in the design and implementation of urban (re)development plans. Practitioners are also contemplating the possibility of extending LR from management of peri-urbanization and post-disaster reconstruction to slum upgrading, for example in some rapidly urbanizing African cities. The application of this LR approach to countries where the technique has never been used is still at an experimental stage. Potential pilot projects are being designed, but have not been fully implemented, so further research is needed to test the validity of assertions about this approach.
Challenges of Urbanization
In 2010, about 50.7 percent of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) lived in urban areas (World Bank 2011). The percentage is expected to increase to 70 percent by 2050, mostly in the periphery of secondary cities in developing countries. According to UN-HABITAT (2011), one-third of the urban population in developing countries (1.2 billion people) lives in slums and, despite substandard living conditions, these populations are increasing, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of slum dwellers increased by six million annually (Cities Alliance 2011).
Unfortunately, infrastructure and basic service development in most African countries have not increased at the same rate. Cities where sanitation, roads, water, and other services were already underdeveloped have limited fiscal resources and struggle with accommodating the unprecedented increase in population. Two major problems that hinder urban upgrading are holdouts in land assembly and lack of public funds to finance infrastructure—issues to which we will return.
Natural disasters also have taken a toll on urban populations. According to a United Nations estimate, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, and volcano eruptions caused economic damage totaling $109 billion in 2010, three times more than in 2009 (Reuters 2011). Cities in developing countries with poor infrastructure and fiscal health are particularly vulnerable and are facing increasing price tags for both post-disaster reconstruction and adaptation to future calamities. Again, solving the problems associated with land assembly and infrastructure financing are crucial.
Conventional solutions for dealing with land assembly problems, such as compulsory purchase (eminent domain) and market transactions, are onerous. With increasing global demands for democratic governance and the realization of human rights to adequate housing, secure tenure, and protection from forced eviction, the traditional approach of relying on coercive measures that take land from owners or occupants for urban expansion and redevelopment is encountering strong legal opposition and public protests (table 1).
Using the market to facilitate voluntary land transfers is also problematic. Holdouts by individual landowners could thwart the redevelopment project and increase compensation costs for land acquisition. In some African countries where market mechanisms are not yet fully developed, unequal access to information has led to land grabs and speculation by local elites. As a result, the urban poor were either forced out or bought out from their neighborhoods and were relocated to remote areas where access to employment, public transportation, and basic services are limited.
To make matters worse, the fiscal outlook for cities in developing countries is bleak, and the opportunities to speed up the construction or repair of housing and basic infrastructure are limited. The 2008 subprime mortgage market meltdown in the United States has had adverse repercussions for municipal finances around the world. The decline in demand for imports in industrialized nations and the tightening of liquidity in the financial markets has slowed global economic growth. As exports to developed countries decrease, income-tax and value-added-tax collections in less developed nations also drop. The reduction in tax revenues exacerbates the already tight local budgets and further undermines the ability of municipalities to repair disaster-damaged infrastructure or build new facilities to accommodate rapid population growth.
Land Readjustment as an Alternative
LR has been practiced in many countries to achieve policy goals ranging from farmland consolidation to inner-city revitalization (Doebele 1982; Hong and Needham 2007). Its basic principle is to organize landowners to act collectively—in cooperation with a municipality and/or private developer—to pool their land in order to accomplish a redevelopment project.
LR is often used to re-parcel land when existing parcel boundaries are in conflict with the current land use plan. One important outcome is that a portion of the readjusted land can be retained by the development agency for construction of necessary infrastructure and basic services. If LR is not used, this land would have to be acquired by the local government, which could entail a huge upfront cost.
In return for the owners’ or occupants’ land contribution to the project, each participant receives, upon completion of the program, a new parcel proportionate in size or value to the original one. The size of the parcel may be smaller, but the value is greater due to land improvements and infrastructure created by the project. In this way, LR generates desirable urban development patterns, increases land values, allocates these increments to the involved parties, and limits displacement.
What is important about the recent interest in LR is its renewed emphasis as a mechanism for building legal and social institutions to govern urban development. The major goal is to combine job creation, land use planning, urban densification, public-private partnerships, and value capture for public infrastructure financing in one comprehensive policy package.
Potential Advantages and Disadvantages
Different elements of this unified goal can be emphasized depending on the context. For instance, in the design of a LR project for urban upgrading in an African city where residents do not have legal property rights, policy makers can legitimatize the occupants’ claims to land and allow them to exercise their right to participate in the project. After land is pooled, readjusted, and serviced, the residents will be invited back to the neighborhood to rebuild their homes or receive an apartment unit with legal title. This is a win-win approach because it allows squatters to improve their living conditions and tenure security, and it increases development densities to enable the city to obtain much-needed land for urban expansion.
LR can also help implement citywide land use regulation incrementally. To ensure that individual LR projects add up to a coherent whole, they must be conducted as part of a comprehensive urban planning process. In situations where local governments lack the capacity to execute a large-scale master plan, related LR projects can be implemented in an orderly sequence and at a manageable scale to put into action a coordinated, long-term development strategy.
In addition, LR can engender democratic governance. The core principle of LR is to build consensus and cooperation among the parties involved in land development. These parties include formal landowners, informal landholders, renters, NGOs, national government agencies, city officials, and private developers. The process entails grassroots mobilization by giving the urban poor real bargaining power to approve LR proposals. Agreement from the supermajority of landowners and renters is required before LR can proceed, thus ensuring that the government (or a private organizing agency) will pay special attention to the needs of the underprivileged groups and avoid confrontation caused by the threat of forced eviction at the very beginning of the project.
Finally, LR can facilitate land value capture for financing local infrastructure and social services. In readjusting the land boundaries, land space is created by increasing development densities. This land space can then be sold in the market to raise funds to defray a portion of the infrastructure costs. This technique creates a clear connection between the development benefits received by landholders and the price that they need to pay to make the program financially viable.
Despite these potential advantages of LR over conventional land assembly methods, it is hardly quick or uncomplicated. LR is particularly difficult to implement in developing countries where public participation is not integrated into urban planning or where there is limited capacity to maintain ownership records and resolve competing land claims. When property owners do not recognize their obligation to pay for basic infrastructure and services, requests to give up a portion of their land to cover the project costs will be strongly resisted.
Another concern is that LR reduces plot sizes, causing problems in many informal settlements where people often rely on extra space to earn rental income or conduct agricultural and business activities. In some cases, urban legislation is often too rigid for facilitating LR. Furthermore, different stakeholders may value real assets in diverse ways, making consensus building difficult. Some see possible improvements in living conditions, neighborhood amenities, social networks, and cohesiveness of community as the predominant factors. Others may make their decision based solely on monetary gains.
The integrated LR approach is designed to target all of these issues by focusing on institutional design and development. It emphasizes learning from past LR experiences to illustrate the importance of local context and enhancing this tool to accommodate a wide range of variables and situations. In addition, future adoption of the technique will search for a good fit rather than a single best practice. Most fundamentally, the design of LR projects must be based on multiple perspectives ranging from political economy and anthropological approaches to legal investigation.
Designing Land Readjustment in Chile
On February 27, 2010, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed a large part of Central Chile. Three regions—O’Higgins, Maule, and Bio-Bio—comprising 5 major cities and 45 small towns were seriously damaged; more than 80,000 homes were destroyed, and about 108,000 units were severely damaged (figure 1).
In response to this unprecedented disaster, the Chilean government expanded its National Reconstruction Plan to include new mandates and more flexible policies to speed up its post-earthquake reconstruction efforts. This plan offers four types of assistance in the form of vouchers to affected families: (1) US$24,144 for rebuilding a new home on existing land; (2) US$19,083 for buying a new home in another neighborhood; (3) US$3,761 for repairing houses that were partially destroyed; and (4) a special bonus of US$4,200 if the destroyed house is located in a heritage zone (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development 2011).
Despite this financial assistance from the government, affected property owners are facing two major problems. First, because the reconstruction program gives priority to low-income households, the money provided by the state to middle-income families is insufficient for them to rebuild homes of the same size and quality or in the same neighborhood. Property owners without insurance coverage who want to build a similar house must sell their land and move to another neighborhood where the land price is lower. Those who live in tsunami-damaged areas now considered unsafe for redevelopment must resettle further inland, yet that may limit their access to jobs and public services.
Second, selling their land to finance reconstruction may not be a viable option for all affected residents. Some landowners refuse to sell to private developers who offer a low price because the property is so badly damaged. Others who are unable to sell their land may not have sufficient financial resources to rebuild. This persistence of unlivable houses and vacant lots covered with debris further dampens the private incentive to reinvest in the neighborhood.
To assist the post-earthquake reconstruction effort, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the ProUrbana Program in the Public Policy Center at the Catholic University of Chile (the team) put forward a joint proposal to the Chilean government to experiment with LR.
The Pilot Project: Las Heras, Talca
The team decided to conduct its first pilot in the Las Heras neighborhood in Talca for four reasons.
First, Las Heras was ripe for redevelopment even before the earthquake. It is a middle-class neighborhood with large old houses and a beautiful main square. Good social networks exist among its residents, organized by the church and local NGOs, although its development had stagnated for many years due to economic restructuring of the Chilean economy. The central government was offering Las Heras assistance in developing affordable housing through the national voucher program, and these housing subsidies later became an important potential funding source for the proposed LR project.
Second, the Public Policy Center has another program called Puentes (Bridges) that conducts collaborative research projects with local municipalities, including a preexisting work agreement with Talca, which facilitated prompt support and cooperation from city officials.
Third, Talca has a master plan that allowed the team to design a series of related LR projects to be implemented step-by-step, so it could fulfill the city’s long-term development plan. Preliminary land ownership and demographic information, land use data, and property damage assessments in different neighborhoods are also available.
Fourth, the local government and private developers in Talca were interested in increasing urban densities. Densification provided the much-needed profit incentive for the private sector to redevelop damaged sites, and it could help the local government achieve its objective of increasing and upgrading the housing supply.
Buy-In from All Involved Parties
Following the integrated LR approach, the team recognized the importance of gaining support from the central government. It organized a seminar in Santiago in May 2010 to present the concept of LR and exchange views with top officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD). After several rounds of follow-up discussions, the director of the National Program of Housing Reconstruction agreed to purchase reserved land generated from the proposed LR project, thus providing a guarantee for one of the funding sources, and agreed to go to Talca with the team to encourage property owners to participate.
To obtain critical local government involvement, the team travelled to Talca in September 2010 to present the LR ideas to city officials. The team also met with selected property landowners to determine if they might be interested in contributing all or part of their land as capital to finance the reconstruction of their homes and neighborhood. In another visit, some team members also met with school and community leaders, emphasizing the need for broad community support for the project’s success.
The team next began to gather detailed data about the area by conducting a survey of residents in eight blocks comprising 217 lots near the main plaza of Las Heras (figure 2). Team members completed 135 questionnaires over the telephone and then interviewed selected residents. The survey results indicated that 77 percent of the respondents trusted their neighbors, and the majority of them (65 percent) wanted to stay in the neighborhood and were willing to work with their neighbors to rebuild the community. Only 12 percent of respondents planned to sell their property and relocate to another area. This information revealed that organizing property owners for LR was feasible.
Project Design
Because the majority of residents in Las Heras are unfamiliar with the concept of LR, the strategy started with a small pilot project to demonstrate the applicability of this method. The team chose a block near the plaza and proposed three scenarios for combining 8 to 12 sites for LR. The number of lots included in the proposed project would depend on the levels of difficulty involved in negotiating with affected property owners. To facilitate the participation process, the team prepared visual images of what the neighborhood environment might look like after the project (figure 3).
The team also conducted detailed financial and legal feasibility studies for the project. A tentative plan for financing the pilot included a careful calculation of the amount of land that each owner would need to contribute based on the availability of government subsidies, estimated building costs, compensation for temporary relocation, and a projected land price at the completion date of the project. The financial study also revealed that constructing housing units at an estimated future price of US$46,000 per unit would allow the project to be self-financing and provide the developer with a 10 percent profit margin—under the assumption that MHUD would purchase the reserved land to build affordable housing for low- and low-to-middle-income households after LR. It was also estimated that 24 percent of the housing units within the block would be affordable for low-income households. This would help the MHUD attain its policy goal of social integration through the provision of subsidized housing.
The Real Estate Co-ownership Law in Chile requires all participating owners of the LR project to sign a legal document specifying their rights and liabilities. For example, any sale of land held by the designated organizing agency would require the consensus of all participating owners. A legal contract signed by the agency and each participating owner would specify explicitly the number of housing units that the owner would receive at the end of the project and the date of the delivery. The contract would also guarantee compliance by requiring the agency to pay compensation to owners in case of failure to transfer properties in a timely manner and of acceptable quality. The agency also needs to submit the proposed plan to the city. The Municipal Works Department would review the project, approve the building plan, and authorize the transfer of land. The approved plan would then be recorded by the registrar.
Although the research conducted by the team shows that LR is feasible in Las Heras, progress in convincing landowners to participate has been slow due to five key challenges.
First, most property owners are unfamiliar with LR, and there is no existing example in Chile to show how the idea could work. The lack of precedents makes community organizing difficult.
Second, city officials have not provided sufficient support in organizing community meetings or interacting with property owners directly about the proposed project.
Third, many affected property owners who received assistance from their extended families or friends have already relocated to other areas. These owners are in no hurry to rebuild their homes and are delaying the transfer of their land until they receive a higher offer from a private developer or the government. In Chile, there is no LR law that can force these owners to transfer their real assets.
Fourth, not all buildings in the neighborhood were destroyed by the earthquake, and the owners of the unaffected homes are not willing to give up their existing plots for a neighborhood-wide redevelopment.
Fifth, although the survey shows that many owners are willing to work on rebuilding with their neighbors, solving local problems through collective action is not a social norm in Chile. Some property owners have a strong sense of entitlement to receive public resettlement assistance, which contradicts the idea of community self-help.
Interim Assessment
Although the LR approach in Las Heras is still a work-in-progress and it is too soon to predict if the team will be able to overcome local challenges, the project has already generated several observable impacts on Chile’s post-earthquake reconstruction policy (Public Policy Center 2011).
First, LR gives property owners in Las Heras an additional option for reconstructing their homes. Before the proposal, they had to either sell their properties to a private developer and move to another area or take the government’s subsidies and rebuild a house of smaller size and lower quality. LR provides residents with the opportunity to remain in the neighborhood and to attain the highest possible living standard by using their land as capital for home reconstruction.
Second, LR opens a new channel for the central government to work with local communities on reconstruction projects. The main reasons that the LR proposal for Las Heras could go forward are MHUD’s willingness to buy land, provide assistance in encouraging landowners to participate in LR, and give participating landowners the first priority to receive government housing vouchers to finance reconstruction.
Third, the introduction of LR has influenced the government’s overall post-earthquake reconstruction strategy. Through this holistic approach, public officials are designing a comprehensive reconstruction plan to rebuild the entire neighborhood coherently, rather than giving subsidies to individual homeowners to rebuild their houses separately. The MHUD has also invited the team to assist its reconstruction effort in the earthquake-damaged city of Constitución, indicating that the government has taken LR seriously as a viable option for other projects.
Fourth, all discussions among the central and local governments, landowners, NGOs, developers, scholars, and urban designers about LR have engendered an environment of mutual learning and understanding, which in turn is reshaping the governance structure for post-earthquake reconstruction. The involved parties have begun to realize that neither a top-down nor a bottom-up approach is sufficient to generate satisfactory solutions. Cooperation among all interested parties is paramount. The LR experiment has fostered a social discourse that helps all segments of society learn how to solve their problems collectively.
Conclusion
Like all policy experiments, the current proposals to test the integrated LR approach for urban upgrading and post-disaster reconstruction in countries where the idea is new will face uncertainties and challenges. Yet, given the mixed outcomes of conventional land assembly methods in many (re)development situations, LR could offer another option for policy makers, practitioners, and other interested parties to consider.
About the Authors
Yu-Hung Hong is a senior fellow of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a visiting assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Isabel Brain, a sociologist, coordinates the ProUrbana Program (Program of Urban and Land Policy) at the Public Policy Center, Catholic University of Chile in Santiago.
References
Cities Alliance. 2011. World statistics day: A look at urbanisation. Washington, DC. http://www.citiesalliance.org/ca/node/2195
Doebele, William A. 1982. Land readjustment: A different approach to financing urbanization. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Hong, Yu-Hung, and Barrie Needham. 2007. Analyzing land readjustment: Economics, law, and collective action. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Government of Chile. 2011. Reconstruction Plan (English version). Santiago, Chile: Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
Public Policy Center. 2011. Land readjustment project, second report. Santiago: Catholic University of Chile. May.
Reuters. 2011. Cost of natural disasters $109 billion in 2010. January 24. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/24/us-disasters-un-idUSTRE70N26K2…
UN-HABITAT. 2011. State of the world’s cities 2010/2011–Cities for all: Bridging the urban divide. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Human Settlements Program.
World Bank. 2011. Data: Urban population. Washington, DC. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the other members of the LR project team for their contributions to this article: Armando Carbonell, Department of Planning and Urban Form, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Pia Mora, ProUrbana, Public Policy Center, Catholic University of Chile; Julio Poblete, DUPLA/Urban Design and Planning; Alejandra Rasse, Catholic University of Maule; Francisco Sabatini, Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies, Catholic University of Chile; and Martim Smolka, Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
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Como consecuencia del colapso en el mercado inmobiliario y la Gran Recesión –que provocaron un aumento sustancial de ejecuciones hipotecarias residenciales y a menudo abruptas caídas de los precios de las viviendas, lo cual probablemente dio lugar a ejecuciones hipotecarias adicionales– muchos observadores especularon sobre si los gobiernos locales iban a sufrir consecuentemente pérdidas significativas en la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad. Si bien las pruebas anecdóticas sugieren que las ejecuciones hipotecarias, en especial en los lugares donde estaban espacialmente concentradas, redujeron los precios de las viviendas y los ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad, las investigaciones existentes no proporcionan ninguna prueba empírica que justifique esta conclusión (recuadro 1). Con datos de ejecuciones hipotecarias de la empresa RealtyTrac, que proporciona información sobre las ejecuciones hipotecarias anualespor código postal para el período de 2006 a 2011 (período que tanto precede como sucede a la Gran Recesión), este informe es el primero en examinar el impacto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre los valores y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad por parte de los gobiernos locales. Después de presentar información sobre la correlación entre ejecuciones hipotecarias y los precios de viviendas en todo el país, nos concentramos en Georgia, para explorar cómo las ejecuciones hipotecarias afectaron a los valores de la propiedad y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad en los distritos escolares a lo largo del estado. Nuestro análisis empírico indica que, en efecto, las ejecuciones hipotecarias probablemente redujeron los valores de la propiedad y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad. Si bien aún preliminares, estas conclusiones sugieren que las ejecuciones hipotecarias han tenido una serie de efectos sobre los sistemas fiscales de los gobiernos locales.
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Recuadro 1: Investigaciones existentes sobre el impacto de factores económicos en la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad
Si bien existen investigaciones que examinan los diversos impactos de factores económicos sobre la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad, dichos estudios usan datos que reflejan sólo una recesión previa (por ejemplo, la recesión de 2001) o cubren solamente el inicio de la crisis inmobiliaria de la Gran Recesión. Doerner e Ihlanfeldt (2010), por ejemplo, han estudiado directamente los efectos de los precios de las casas sobre los ingresos de los gobiernos locales usando datos del panel de precios detallados de las viviendas en Florida durante la década del año 2000. Concluyen que los cambios en el precio real de las viviendas unifamiliares de Florida tuvieron un efecto asimétrico sobre los ingresos gubernamentales. Los aumentos de precio no aumentan la recaudación real per cápita, pero los descensos de precio tienden a reducirla. Doerner e Ihlanfeldt también concluyen que las respuestas asimétricas se deben en gran parte a los límites impuestos sobre los aumentos y el monto del gravamen, las demoras positivas o negativas entre los cambios en los precios de mercado y la valuación tributaria, y la reducción de las tasas tributarias en respuesta a un aumento de los precios de las viviendas. Alm, Buschman y Sjoquist (2011) documentan las tendencias generales en la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad en los Estados Unidos entre 1998 y 2009 inclusive, cuando los gobiernos locales, en promedio, pudieron evitar en gran medida los impactos significativos y negativos sobre el presupuesto sufridos por el gobierno federal y los gobiernos estatales, por lo menos hasta 2009, si bien se produjeron variaciones regionales sustanciales en dichos efectos. Alm, Buschman y Sjoquist (2009) también examinan la relación entre los gastos en educación y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad para el período entre 1990 y 2006. En un estudio relacionado, Alm y Sjoquist (2009) examinan el impacto de otros factores económicos sobre las finanzas de los distritos escolares de Georgia, como las respuestas estatales a las condiciones de los distritos escolares locales. Finalmente, Jaconetty (2011) examinó temas legales relacionados con las ejecuciones hipotecarias, y la Fundación MacArthur ha financiado un proyecto sobre ejecuciones hipotecarias en el condado de Cook, Illinois.
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Vínculos potenciales entre los precios de las viviendas, las ejecuciones hipotecarias y los valores inmobiliarios
Los gobiernos locales en los Estados Unidos dependen de varias fuentes de ingresos propios, tales como impuestos locales sobre los ingresos, sobre la propiedad y generales sobre las ventas, e impuestos específicos sobre el consumo, aranceles y cargos sobre el usuario. De éstos, la fuente de ingresos dominante es, con mucho, el impuesto sobre la propiedad. En 2011, los impuestos locales sobre la propiedad generaron aproximadamente tres cuartos de los ingresos tributarios totales de los gobiernos locales y casi la mitad de los ingresos locales totales propios (incluyendo aranceles y cargos).
Algunos impuestos locales, como los impuestos sobre el ingreso y las ventas, tienen bases tributarias que varían de acuerdo a los niveles de actividad económica, y la Gran Recesión deprimió seriamente los ingresos derivados de dichos impuestos. La base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad es el valor de tasación, que no cambia automáticamente en respuesta a las condiciones económicas; a falta de un cambio formal y deliberado en la tasación, una reducción en el valor de mercado no se traduce necesariamente en una reducción del valor de tasación. Los límites de tasación, las demoras en las revaluaciones y la posibilidad de efectuar cambios deliberados en el tributo unitario o la tasa del impuesto sobre la propiedad se combinan para que las fluctuaciones económicas que influyen en los valores de las viviendas no afecten a la base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad o los ingresos debido a este impuesto de manera inmediata u obvia. Con el tiempo, sin embargo, los valores de tasación tienden a reflejar los valores de mercado, y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad puede verse afectada.
Un mercado inmobiliario debilitado –con valores de la vivienda más bajos y mayor cantidad de ejecuciones hipotecarias– puede reducir los ingresos tributarios de los gobiernos locales procedentes de distintas fuentes (Anderson, 2010; Boyd, 2010; Lutz, Molloy y Shan, 2010), como los impuestos a la transferencia inmobiliaria, los impuestos sobre las ventas de materiales de construcción de viviendas, y los impuestos sobre la renta de los trabajadores de las industrias de la construcción de viviendas y de mobiliario para el hogar. Los ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad suponen una proporción importante de la recaudación tributaria local, sin embargo, los cambios en la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad frecuentemente son mayores que los cambios debidos a dichos otros impuestos relacionados con las viviendas.
Actividad de ejecución hipotecaria en todo el país durante y después de la Gran Recesión
La figura 1 (pág. 26) presenta la cantidad total de ejecuciones hipotecarias a nivel de código postal de 5 dígitos como porcentaje de la cantidad de viviendas ocupadas por sus dueños en 2010. Esta figura demuestra la clara concentración geográfica de las ejecuciones hipotecarias. Arizona, California y Florida fueron afectadas especialmente por el colapso de la burbuja inmobiliaria. No obstante, otras áreas también experimentaron una actividad significativa de ejecuciones hipotecarias.
La Agencia Federal de Financiamiento de Viviendas (FHFA) produce un índice de precios de viviendas para cada área estadística metropolitana (MSA). Cotejamos los datos de ejecuciones hipotecarias de RealtyTrac con el índice de precios de viviendas de la FHFA en 352 áreas estadísticas metropolitanas. La figura 2 (pág. 26) presenta un simple diagrama de dispersión que relaciona las ejecuciones hipotecarias totales entre 2006 y 2011 como porcentaje de la cantidad de unidades de vivienda ocupadas por sus dueños en 2010, con el cambio del índice de precios de las viviendas en el período de 2007 a 2012 en las 352 áreas metropolitanas. El simple coeficiente de correlación entre las ejecuciones hipotecarias por unidades de viviendas ocupadas por sus dueños y el cambio del índice de precios de viviendas es de -0,556; si consideramos solamente aquellas MSA con ejecuciones hipotecarias no nulas a lo largo del período, el coeficiente de correlación es de -0,739. Este simple análisis sugiere que las ejecuciones hipotecarias tienen una correlación negativa significativa con los valores de la vivienda. El próximo paso es explorar el efecto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre la base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad y sobre la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad propiamente dicho. En la próxima sección examinaremos este tema para el estado de Georgia.
Análisis más detallado: Ejecuciones hipotecarias, valores de la propiedad e ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad en Georgia
Al examinar el efecto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre los valores de la propiedad y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad en un solo estado, eliminamos la necesidad de controlar las muchas maneras en que los factores institucionales pueden diferir entre estados. Georgia es un lugar adecuado para concentrarse porque de alguna manera es un estado “promedio”. Por ejemplo, los gobiernos locales de Georgia dependen del impuesto sobre la propiedad sólo un poco menos que el promedio nacional; en 2008, los ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad como porcentaje de los impuestos totales de los gobiernos locales fue del 65,1 por ciento en Georgia, en comparación con el 72,3 por ciento en los Estados Unidos en general. (Bourdeaux y Jun 2011).
Medimos la actividad de ejecución hipotecaria con datos de RealtyTrac, agregando las observaciones por código postal en los condados correspondientes. El Departamento de Ingresos de Georgia suministró la base tributaria anual del impuesto sobre la propiedad (que en Georgia se denomina “resumen neto”) y las tasas del impuesto sobre la propiedad. Los ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad y los ingresos locales totales de los distritos escolares fueron suministrados por el Departamento de Educación de Georgia. La base tributaria corresponde al 1 de enero del año respectivo. La tasa del impuesto sobre la propiedad se determina en la primavera, las facturas del impuesto se pagan en el otoño, y su recaudación se reporta en el siguiente año fiscal. Los distritos escolares tienen un año fiscal que va del 1 de julio al 30 de junio, de manera que la base tributaria y las tasas unitarias de 2009, por ejemplo, aparecerían en los ingresos del año fiscal 2010. También usamos varios datos demográficos y económicos (ingresos, empleo y población) medidos a nivel de condado para ayudar a explicar los cambios en la base tributaria. Debido a que estas variables se reportan a nivel de condado, para el análisis siguiente agregamos las variables de base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad y su recaudación en los distritos escolares urbanos a los sistemas escolares de condado correspondientes a dichas ciudades para obtener los totales para los 159 condados. Para condados que incluyen todo o parte de un sistema escolar urbano, la tasa tributaria es el promedio de las tasas tributarias escolares del condado y la ciudad, ponderadas por sus bases tributarias respectivas.
En Georgia, las tasaciones de las propiedades con fines tributarios son responsabilidad exclusiva de los gobiernos de condado, pero el estado evalúa todas las bases tributarias del impuesto sobre la propiedad anualmente, comparando ventas reales de parcelas mejoradas durante el año con los valores de tasación, y determina si el nivel de tasación es apropiado con relación al valor justo de mercado, que se fija legalmente en el 40 por ciento. Los “estudios de razón de ventas” resultantes reportan una cifra de base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad ajustada al 100 por cien para cada distrito escolar del estado, junto con una razón calculada. Podemos usar estas bases tributarias ajustadas del impuesto sobre la propiedad, cubriendo los períodos de 2000 a 2011 inclusive, para medir el valor de mercado de la propiedad residencial.
Georgia tiene muy pocas limitaciones institucionales al impuesto sobre la propiedad. Las juntas de distritos escolares pueden fijar generalmente sus tasas del impuesto sobre la propiedad sin aprobación de los votantes, la cual solamente es necesaria si la tasa del impuesto sobre la propiedad en un distrito escolar de condado excede de 20 milésimas del valor de tasación. En la actualidad, solamente cinco sistemas escolares han alcanzado este límite. Además, no hay un límite general en el valor de tasación, si bien un condado ha congelado las tasaciones sobre bienes de familia. En 2009, el estado de Georgia impuso una congelación temporal sobre las tasaciones en todo el estado, que potencialmente afectaba a los ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad sólo en el año académico/año fiscal 2010; sin embargo, al disminuir las bases netas y ajustadas del impuesto sobre la propiedad per cápita en la mayoría de los condados de 2009 a 2011 inclusive, es poco probable que esta congelación haya recortado las tasaciones.
Ejecuciones hipotecarias
La tabla 1 muestra la media y mediana de ejecuciones hipotecarias en todo el estado por código postal entre 2006 y 2011 inclusive. La cantidad total de ejecuciones hipotecarias casi se duplicó de 2006 a 2010, disminuyendo en 2011. La media de ejecuciones hipotecarias es mucho mayor que la mediana, lo cual es señal de que la distribución es extremadamente asimétrica.
La tabla 2 muestra la distribución de los códigos postales de Georgia por la cantidad de años que el código postal tuvo alguna ejecución hipotecaria. Más del 65 por ciento de los códigos postales tuvieron ejecuciones hipotecarias en cada uno de los seis años, mientras que sólo el 7 por ciento no tuvo ninguna ejecución hipotecaria en ninguno de los seis años. Esta distribución sugiere que sólo una porción muy pequeña del estado quedó inmune a la crisis de ejecuciones hipotecarias.
La figura 3 (pág. 27) muestra la distribución de ejecuciones hipotecarias en el estado durante el período de 2006 a 2011 inclusive. Como los códigos postales difieren en tamaño y densidad de viviendas, también se muestra un mapa de las ejecuciones hipotecarias por unidades de vivienda ocupadas por sus dueños en 2010 en la figura 4 (pág. 28). Nótese que los códigos postales marcados en blanco no tienen ninguna ejecución hipotecaria o no se tienen datos de ejecuciones hipotecarias. Como era de esperar, los condados urbanos y suburbanos (particularmente en el área metropolitana de Atlanta) sufrieron la mayor cantidad de ejecuciones hipotecarias. No obstante, hay también una gran cantidad de ejecuciones hipotecarias en muchos de los códigos postales menos urbanos.
La figura 5 muestra la distribución anual de ejecuciones hipotecarias por cada cien unidades de vivienda en cada uno de los 159 condados de Georgia. Nótese que la barra del recuadro representa el valor medio, el recuadro captura las observaciones en el segundo y tercer cuartil, los “bigotes” representan 1,5 veces la diferencia entre los porcentiles veinticinco y setenta y cinco, y los puntos son los valores extremos. La mediana de ejecuciones hipotecarias por condado aumentó de 0,17 por 100 unidades de vivienda en 2006 a 1,18 por 100 unidades en 2010, un aumento en la mediana de más de seis veces. Hay una alta correlación positiva entre la actividad de ejecuciones hipotecarias en 2006 y 2011 en todos los condados. Esta correlación es de 0,78 cuando se mide en relación a las unidades de vivienda y 0,74 cuando se mide per cápita, lo que indica que los condados con actividad de ejecución hipotecaria mayor (menor) que el promedio antes de la crisis inmobiliaria siguiron estando por arriba (abajo) del promedio en su pico.
Valores de la propiedad,/b>
En cuanto a los cambios en los valores de la propiedad, las figuras 6 y 7 muestran la distribución de cambios anuales, respectivamente, en la base tributaria neta del impuesto sobre la propiedad per cápita y en la base tributaria 100 por ciento ajustada del impuesto sobre la propiedad per cápita en los 159 condados entre 2001 y 2011 inclusive. Los estudios sugieren que las ejecuciones hipotecarias pueden tener un efecto de contagio sobre los valores de mercado de otras propiedades en la jurisdicción (Frame, 2010). Intentamos estimar el efecto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre los valores de mercado en función de la base tributaria 100 por ciento ajustada del impuesto sobre la propiedad.
Nuestros resultados son preliminares, porque el análisis solamente incluye datos de Georgia. Aun así, sugieren significativos efectos negativos de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre los valores de la propiedad, controlando por los cambios porcentuales de año a año en ingresos, empleo y población. Las estimaciones de coeficientes de la variable ‘ejecuciones hipotecarias’ sugieren que un aumento marginal de una ejecución hipotecaria por cada 100 viviendas (o aproximadamente el aumento en la mediana de ejecuciones hipotecarias de 2006 a 2011) está asociado con aproximadamente una disminución del 3 por ciento en la base tributaria 100 por ciento ajustada del impuesto sobre la propiedad en cada uno de los dos años subsiguientes. De igual manera, un aumento de una ejecución hipotecaria por cada 1.000 habitantes está asociado con casi el 1 por ciento de disminución en la base tributaria 100 por ciento ajustada del impuesto sobre la propiedad después de un año, y una disminución porcentual ligeramente menor en el año subsiguiente.
Ingresos del impuesto sobre la propiedad
También exploramos el efecto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad. La figura 8 representa la distribución de cambios nominales por condado de los ingresos totales de mantenimiento y operaciones del impuesto sobre la propiedad desde 2001, que muestra una variación considerable de un sistema escolar a otro en los cambios anuales de recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad. Aun en los últimos tres años de disminución de los valores de la propiedad, por lo menos la mitad de los condados tuvo un crecimiento nominal positivo anual en la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad. Para comprender el efecto de la actividad de ejecución hipotecaria sobre los ingresos del gobierno local por impuestos sobre la propiedad, estimamos las regresiones que relacionan las ejecuciones hipotecarias con los gravámenes del impuesto sobre la propiedad y la recaudación de dicho impuesto.
Encontramos que un aumento en las ejecuciones hipotecarias está asociado a una reducción en el monto del gravamen, después de controlar por los cambios en la base tributaria del impuesto sobre la propiedad como también en las fluctuaciones de ingresos, empleo y población. Un aumento de una ejecución hipotecaria por cada 100 unidades de vivienda se asocia con alrededor del 1,5 por ciento de disminución subsiguiente en el gravamen, manteniendo constante el resto de las variables. También encontramos que las ejecuciones hipotecarias tienen un impacto negativo sobre la recaudación, manteniendo constante el resto de las variables. Como en nuestras estimaciones anteriores, estos resultados son para Georgia solamente, pero identifican una relación negativa significativa entre las ejecuciones hipotecarias y los gravámenes y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad por parte de los gobiernos locales. Puede ser que una mayor actividad de ejecución hipotecaria haga vacilar a las autoridades locales sobre la posibilidad de aumentar las tasas tributarias para compensar el efecto de las ejecuciones hipotecarias sobre la base tributaria.
Conclusiones
¿Las ejecuciones hipotecarias causadas por la Gran Recesión afectaron a los valores de la propiedad y la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad por parte de los gobiernos locales? Nuestros resultados sugieren que las ejecuciones hipotecarias han tenido un impacto negativo significativo sobre los valores de la propiedad y, por esta vía, un efecto similar sobre la recaudación del impuesto sobre la propiedad, por lo menos en el estado de Georgia. Nuestros resultados también sugieren la presencia de efectos adicionales sobre los gravámenes y la recaudación de dicho impuesto, después de controlar por los cambios en la base tributaria. Hacen falta más investigaciones para saber si estos resultados se extienden a otros estados.
Sobre los autores
James Alm es profesor y director del Departamento de Economía de Tulane University.
Robert D. Buschman es asociado de investigación senior en el Centro de Investigaciones Fiscales de la Escuela Andrew Young de Estudios Políticos de la Universidad Estatal de Georgia.
David L. Sjoquist es profesor y titular de la cátedra Dan E. Sweat en Política Educativa y Comunitaria en la Escuela Andrew Young de Estudios Políticos.
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Alm, James y David L. Sjoquist. 2009. The Response of Local School Systems in Georgia to Fiscal and Economic Conditions. Journal of Education Finance 35(1): 60–84.
Alm, James, Robert D. Buschman, y David L. Sjoquist. 2009. Economic Conditions and State and Local Education Revenue. Public Budgeting & Finance 29(3): 28–51.
Alm, James, Robert D. Buschman, y David L. Sjoquist. 2011. Rethinking Local Government Reliance on the Property Tax. Regional Science and Urban Economics 41(4): 320–331.
Anderson, John E. 2010. Shocks to the Property Tax Base and Implications for Local Public Finance. Paper presented at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Conference, “Effects of the Housing Crisis on State and Local Governments,” Washington, D.C. (Mayo).
Bourdeaux, Carolyn y Sungman Jun. 2011. Comparing Georgia’s Revenue Portfolio to Regional and National Peers. Report No. 222. Atlanta, GA: Fiscal Research Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
Boyd, Donald J. 2010. Recession, Recovery, and State and Local Finances. Paper presented at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Conference, “Effects of the Housing Crisis on State and Local Governments,” Washington, D.C. (Mayo).
Doerner, William M. y Keith R. Ihlanfeldt. 2010. House Prices and Local Government Revenues. Paper presented at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Conference, “Effects of the Housing Crisis on State and Local Governments,” Washington, D.C. (Mayo).
Frame, W. Scott. 2010. Estimating the Effect of Mortgage Foreclosures on Nearby Property Values: A Critical Review of the Literature. Economic Review 95(3): 1–9.
Jaconetty, Thomas A. 2011. How Do Foreclosures Affect Real Property Tax Valuation? And What Can We Do About It? Working paper presented at National Conference of State Tax Judges, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA (Septiembre).
Lutz, Byron, Raven Molloy, y Hui Shan. 2010. The Housing Crisis and State and Local Government Tax Revenue: Five Channels. Paper presented at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Conference, “Effects of the Housing Crisis on State and Local Governments,” Washington, DC (Mayo).
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As interest in urban living grows, the cost of residential real estate in many hot markets is skyrocketing. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS 2015), in 2014 rental vacancy rates hit their lowest point in two decades; rents rose in 91 out of 93 metropolitan areas studied; and the consumer price index for contract rents climbed at double the rate of inflation—and 10 percent or more at the top end, in Denver, San Jose, Honolulu, and San Francisco. Despite some interruption from the mortgage crisis, asking prices for homes for sale have continued to rise as well, often beyond the reach of potential home buyers (Olick 2014); in Washington, DC, the median home value nearly tripled from 2000 to 2013 (Oh et al. 2015). As housing activists look for effective tools to prevent displacement of lower-income families from gentrifying neighborhoods and create inclusive communities, many are turning to community land trusts (box 1) as a way to help build the nation’s stock of permanently affordable housing.
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Box 1: The CLT Model
Under the CLT model, a community-controlled organization retains ownership of a plot of land and sells or rents the housing on that land to lower-income households. In exchange for below-market prices, purchasers agree to resale restrictions that keep the homes affordable to subsequent buyers while also allowing owners to build some equity. The CLT also prepares home buyers to purchase property, supports them through financial challenges, and manages resales and rental units.
CLTs thus bring sustainable home ownership within the reach of more families, supporting residents who want to commit to their neighborhoods for the long term. In gentrifying areas, they provide an effective way for lower-income families to retain a stake in the neighborhood because they take a single initial subsidy (which could come from a variety of sources, often public programs such as the HOME Investment Partnerships Program or Community Development Block Grants) and attach it to the building, keeping the units affordable over time without new influxes of public money. In weak housing markets, they are beneficial as well (Shelterforce 2012), providing the financial stewardship that ensures fewer foreclosures, better upkeep, and stable occupancy. In 2009, at the height of the foreclosure crisis, Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) loans were 8.2 times more likely to be in the foreclosure process than CLT loans, despite the fact that CLT loans were uniformly made to low-income households (Thaden, Rosenberg 2010), and MBA loans included all income brackets. Of the very few CLT homes that did complete foreclosure, none were lost from the CLT’s portfolio.
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Much like community development corporations (CDCs), many CLTs grew from grassroots neighborhood organizations. Traditional community organizing (distinct from broader “resident outreach”) creates a base of residents who are empowered to determine for themselves what they need and mobilize to get it; as a united front, these individuals are better able to counter-balance corporate or governmental opponents and other forms of institutional power. Strategic collaboration and strength in numbers are essential to the successful formation of a CLT. But the skills required to organize politically around local concerns are very different from the skills required to manage real estate. While both sets of skills are required to implement and sustain a CLT, growing these core competencies under the same roof might hamper the neighborhood-based organization’s ability to pursue or achieve its core founding mission.
How have community organizations that created CLTs navigated the challenge of building two seemingly incompatible skill sets? We examined the experience of five established CLTs in locations across the country to see how they addressed this challenge and how their focus evolved as a result. From Boston to Los Angeles, community organizers faced a range of conditions, from high-vacancy neighborhoods with almost no housing market to booming areas where displacement was the top concern. Yet all five organizations had remarkably similar reasons for starting a community land trust: each CLT director spoke of wanting community control of land to prevent residents from either losing a home or being unable to afford one. Even those CLTs that began in weak housing markets were located near downtowns, university districts, or other popular areas, and recognized the potential for displacement as conditions in the neighborhoods improved. All agreed that a clear community vision is essential to the success of a CLT, but some groups take direct responsibility for creating and implementing that vision, while others are devoted to housing work on behalf of a parent organization charged with shepherding the larger vision. Approaches to organizing and housing development varied as well, but all agreed that these two activities can be a difficult mix.
Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston, MA
The oldest organization in our study, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), formed in a cold market in the 1980s to fight illegal dumping on broad swaths of vacant land left behind by a wave of arson. The city was proposing a master plan for the area without seeking input from residents, and community members responded by organizing DSNI to assert the community’s right to direct decisions about land use within its boundaries. They won that right and through DSNI decided that a CLT was the best tool to help the organization implement the community’s vision. “A lot of times, groups want to jump into creating a CLT thinking it will magically solve a neighborhood’s problems,” says Harry Smith, director of DSNI’s CLT, Dudley Neighbors Inc. (DNI). “But first we say: ‘Have you written down a vision of development in your community, and can you say how a CLT fits into that?’”
Founded in 1984, DNI is an independent organization, but it maintains close ties to its parent organization. The two groups share staff, and DSNI appoints a majority of the CLT’s board. The CLT is responsible only for providing affordable housing and community control of land, freeing DSNI to make organizing and community planning its main priority. Neither DSNI nor DNI carry out development directly, but instead partner with local affordable housing developers.
Because of its long history and established relationships, DSNI engages in less confrontational organizing than it did in its earliest days. But it doesn’t shy away from it if necessary. In fact, Smith reports that maintaining a CLT can be a unique political strength. When DSNI organizes around the fate of a particular parcel of land, “Having a land trust gives us an extra level of impact,” he says.
Sawmill Community Land Trust, Albuquerque, NM
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sawmill CLT was born in 1996 when, after a decade of community organizing, low-income residents banded together to fight a nearby factory that polluted their air and threatened their health. They wanted to assert control over future use of the space. After leaders attended a conference to learn more about CLTs, they held a series of community meetings on the topic. Though some residents aired concerns about the lack of land ownership in the CLT model, a community elder reminded them that they didn’t truly have ownership of their property in any case, either because they were renting or were ill-equipped to control what happened on their land. Former executive director Wade Patterson says, “The fact that the work was specifically geared toward controlling housing costs assuaged concerns about gentrification and displacement. The fact that we got a house instead of another factory was something we couldn’t argue with.”
Sawmill CLT was created as a standalone organization dedicated to housing development, stewardship, and property management. It’s one of the largest CLTs in the country, with 34 acres, which includes rental, ownership, and senior housing. Recently, it won an RFP issued by the city of Albuquerque to revitalize an old motel in a new neighborhood in the city, and the CLT is figuring out how to enter the community respectfully from outside.
Albuquerque’s Sawmill-area neighborhood associations, including the Sawmill Advisory Council, which launched the CLT, focus on “community building” through cultural events, says Patterson. The CLT supports neighborhood organizing by offering meeting space in one of its buildings and other support. Patterson says, “Our goal isn’t to lead but to be behind them.”
San Francisco Community Land Trust, San Francisco, CA
SFCLT was launched in 2003, at a time when the city was already one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, and low-income residents were concerned about soaring rents and illegal evictions for condo conversions. Housing organizers were seeking a model that could prevent evictions and give lower-income residents more control over their living situations.
The CLT is a standalone entity, but it maintains a close relationship with the housing organizers who founded it. When its partner groups organize to prevent evictions or condo conversions in an at-risk building (generally small apartment buildings), SFCLT steps in as a preservation purchaser and converts them to co-ops on CLT-owned land. SFCLT has in-house real estate expertise, but does not develop new buildings, and it contracts out any needed rehabilitation. It handles the financial aspects of the acquisition and the conversion, the stewardship of the land, and the training and support that helped residents form a co-op board and carry out co-op governance. “Housing groups refer everyone to us; we’re the only housing organization that can help stabilize a multi-unit apartment building by buying it,” says director Tracy Parent. SFCLT organizes its member base to support the broader issues that its coalition partners push for, but it doesn’t “initiate organizing” on issues, according to Parent.
T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Los Angeles, CA
When T.R.U.S.T. South LA was formed in 2005, its target neighborhoods were filled with vacant lots and deteriorated housing, while surrounding areas were under increasing development pressures. While the founders—Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, Strategic Actions of a Just Economy, and Abode Communities—originally envisioned the CLT as primarily a housing tool, it has taken on a broader role in implementing a community vision. “Originally, we formed as a land acquisition group. Then our members wanted to organize,” says executive director Sandra McNeill. The CLT has, for example, organized against a slumlord who was trying to evict residents from a building he had strategically let deteriorate in order to cash in on expiring section 8 affordability restrictions. It has also organized to raise funding for transportation and green space improvements in its neighborhood and participated in coalitions to support broader citywide policies such as increased funding for affordable housing.
The group now describes itself as “a community-based initiative to stabilize the neighborhoods south of downtown Los Angeles.” T.R.U.S.T. South LA is a standalone organization that considers itself part of the development team on housing projects, partnering with others to purchase, finance, and construct or rehabilitate housing.
Although T.R.U.S.T. South LA does a lot of organizing, nearly all of its policy work is conducted in collaboration with other groups, including its founding partners. “Affordable housing developers generally aren’t risk takers,” says McNeill. “They may be involved in political work to ensure that funding streams are in place for affordable housing, but that’s as far as most of them go.”
Community Justice Land Trust, Philadelphia, PA
Community Justice Land Trust in Philadelphia formed in Northeast Philadelphia in 2010 amid combined cold and hot market challenges. Although the neighborhood suffered from a large number of vacant and abandoned properties, it was surrounded on all sides by booming markets, and those rising prices and development pressures seemed likely to spread. The Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP), along with a coalition of local civic organizations, held dozens of public meetings to help the community members understand what forming a CLT would mean and to explore their concerns about resale restrictions. Attendees voted in favor.
Community Justice CLT is set up as a program of WCRP, which has its own in-house development and organizing expertise, including an entire department devoted to organizing.
But as WCRP’s executive director Nora Lichtash warns, “Sometimes you lose relationships when you’re organizing. . . . Sometimes people don’t like to be pushed to do the right thing.” Indeed, WCRP apparently pressured its local council person enough on certain issues that she declined to give the CLT vacant land it had hoped to secure for its first development. In the end, however, the council person helped the group establish a citywide land bank (Feldstein 2013–14), which furthers some of the same goals as the land trust.
Despite potential tensions like these, Lichtash believes that organizing and CLT functions should stay closely related. “It’s important to remember that organizing and building affordable housing fit together,” she says. “Your funders think you should be doing one or the other, but it’s not good for CLTs to be separated from organizing. You’re building your capacity for present and future work. When you organize, you’re respected because you have people power.”
To Develop or Not to Develop: A Big Decision
Affordable housing development is a complicated and expensive business that no community organization should take lightly if it is thinking about starting a CLT. As DNI’s Smith says, “If you do development work, it will take time away from organizing, which is cumulative. It takes time and a lot of sacrifice to form a truly representative, neighborhood-based organization. If you cut corners, you risk jeopardizing a lot of the power you’ve built up over the years.”
The Boston experience, for example, begins with a cautionary tale. DSNI stepped in when the original developer for the CLT’s first project backed out of the deal. It was “traumatic” for staff and board, says Smith. “It took so much time. It distracted DSNI from its core functions.”
The idea of controlling development resources and accessing developer fees can be seductive to grassroots groups, says WCRP’s Lichtash. But they should proceed with extreme care. “Becoming a developer can muddy the waters,” she says. “You have to focus on every detail in million-dollar deals. It takes you away from educational work.”
“Real estate work is very hard, speculative,” Lichtash continues. “You think you’re getting one thing and instead you get another. I tell people to partner for a long time first. It’s hard to keep both tenants and funding sources happy.”
Patterson of Sawmill agrees and adds that it’s particularly difficult “to meet all the deadlines and reporting requirements on funding [for development]. I’m always shocked by the amount of administrative overhead that’s required.” He also advises that if you can’t make the numbers work, “it’s important to know you can pull out of a project if needed.”
T.R.U.S.T. South LA’s McNeill says, “Development definitely has its own language. It’s complex stuff. Nonprofits that do it have large budgets and tend to have sizable staffs. I respect the skill it takes to pull off these deals. It’s a very different skillset from what we do.”
Another consideration is that affordable housing development is not an easy industry to break into these days. In the current funding environment, many of the subsidies that CLTs have traditionally used to develop and steward their units are being slashed, and mortgages for potential CLT home buyers are harder to find. McNeill says, “We’ve gone through enormous shifts in the housing industry. The reality is that there isn’t an opening now for new organizations to get into the development business. It’s definitely not the time.”
Even the ongoing stewardship of a CLT requires a different kind of relationship with residents than an organizer would have. “Developer fees and rent collection could impact the relationship with residents and the power dynamic,” says Smith of DNI. “You’re responsible to leaseholders and non-leaseholders in your community, so there are tensions,” according to Lichtash of WCRP. And as SFCLT’s Parent comments, “Organizers often paint issues as clear moral choices,” but when you are involved as a property manager, “there are nuances.”
Eyes on the Prize
Once a community group has determined that a CLT is an appropriate tool for keeping housing affordable to local residents, the next questions should be: How will the roles be divided up? Who is taking the lead on implementing the broader vision? Is there an organization already in place that’s committed and able to take that on, or does one need to be created? Are there groups serving the community that already have development expertise and access to funding that could partner with a CLT or even fold one into their work? How can the new CLT partner with and support the community’s organizing work rather than distract from it?
Many newer CLTs are following the lead of groups like DSNI and T.R.U.S.T. South LA by setting up a separate organization to manage the stewardship and land ownership functions, and then drawing on the capacity of existing affordable housing developers through partnerships. While every locality is different, this approach seems like a wise place for groups to start, especially if they want to preserve their energy for the important work they started with: fighting for vibrant, equitable communities.
Miriam Axel-Lute is the editor of Shelterforce, a magazine devoted to the field of community development. She has written extensively on both organizing and community land trusts.
Dana Hawkins-Simons is an award-winning journalist who has published groundbreaking investigations in U.S. News & World Report. She is also the former director of the Opportunity Housing Initiative at the National Housing Institute.
References
Beckwith, Dave, with Cristina Lopez. 1997. “Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots.” http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers97/beckwith.htm
Feldstein, Jill. 2013/14. “Winning a Land Bank We Can Trust.” Shelterforce. Fall/Winter 2013/14. www.shelterforce.org/article/3910/winning_a_land_bank_we_can_trust2/
Horwitz, Staci. 2011. “It’s All About Choice.” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/article/2313/its_all_about_choice/
Joint Center for Housing Studies. 2015. State of the Nation’s Housing 2015. Harvard University. www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/state_nations_housing
Oh, Seunghoon, Josh Silver, Annelise Osterberg, and Jaclyn Tules. 2015. Does Nonprofit Housing Development Preserve Neighborhood Diversity? An Investigation into the Interaction Between Affordable Housing Development and Neighborhood Change. Manna, Inc. www.mannadc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Final_Neighborhood_Impact_Analysis_7_1.pdf
Olick, Diana. 2014. “Housing Still Too Expensive Despite Positive Signs.” CNBC.com, July 10. www.cnbc.com/2014/07/10/housing-still-too-expensive-despite-positive-signs.html
Shelterforce. 2012. “What’s the Point of Shared-Equity Homeownership in Weak Market Areas?” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/images/uploads/theanswer171-2.pdf
Schutz, Aaron and Marie G. Sandy. 2011. “What Isn’t Community Organizing.” In Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing, London: Palgrave McMillan. pp. 31–44.
Thaden, Emily and Greg Rosenberg. 2010. “Outperforming the Market: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates in Community Land Trusts.” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1846_1154_LLA10102%20Foreclosure%20Rates.pdf
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Few low-income urban settlements in Venezuela are located on land owned by their occupants. As a result, the occupants cannot register the structures they have built and are entitled to only a substitute title (“título supletorio”) granting them limited rights. A legal interpretation handed down by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s has been upheld by repeated court decisions: transactions involving structures on land not owned by the builder cannot be registered without the landowner’s express consent (Pérez Perdomo and Nikken 1979, 38). This is a general legal principle, applicable not only to urban shacks but to all structures.
It could be said, however, that the inhabitants of houses built in the country’s squatter settlements enjoy possession of the land they occupy, though strictly speaking it is what former Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera and others have called a “precarious possession.” These settlements have considerable stability in some cases, less stability in others, and in certain cases there is no stability at all; occupants are evicted and their structures are demolished.
Peaceful occupations of land, and occasionally more aggressive invasions, are by no means a new development in Venezuela; such settlements have been prevalent since the 19th century. As a result, Venezuelan cities are characterized by their physical and social diversity:
Changing Conditions
Many observers wonder, when considering the legal status of the squatter settlements, why it has become “normal,” and to a substantial extent accepted, for Venezuelans to build houses or take up residence on lands assumed to be owned by others. Reactions to this complex situation can vary. It is striking that, in many instances, neither the presumed landowners nor the occupiers of these lands have taken the extreme responses available to each party-demands for eviction or expropriation by the owners or purchase of the land and legalization of its ownership by the occupiers. The presence of a parallel official law has permitted the establishment of settlements and improvement of housing conditions on “invaded” lands (Ontiveros & Bolívar 2000, 128-139). Furthermore, this pattern has become a chronic condition whose end is not demanded by any of the parties involved.
However, this tacit understanding has broken down in recent years, chiefly due to new requirements by banks, which refuse to lend to anyone who does not have registered ownership of the land. The World Bank’s involvement as a co-financier of urban renewal projects has also changed the status of the urban squatter settlements. The national Housing Policy Act (Article 14) now provides for the legalization of land holdings in the squatter settlements, and a team of specialists, mainly lawyers, is drafting a bill that would help make it possible to end the illegal status of Venezuelan urban squatter settlements. Some lower-income neighborhoods with commercially built housing would also be legalized by this action.
Obstacles to Legalization
In spite of these recent developments, procedures and mechanisms relating to urban squatter settlements have been created and modified over many years. The state’s inability to legalize these entrenched settlements can be attributed to a number of interacting factors.
Unclear Land Ownership
Former President Caldera has argued that the main reason for the continuing illegal status of squatter settlements is a lack of clarity as to who actually owns the invaded lands. He argues that, given this prevailing doubt and uncertainty about land ownership, the most important and urgent need is to provide public utilities and other basic public services to the occupiers. Legalization has not been a top priority in the process of consolidating squatter settlements. Nevertheless, there are other causes for the continuing absence of legalization, causes that are deeper and less visible.
Acceptance of the Status Quo
Since the expansion of urban squatter settlements in the 1940s and 1950s, it has been commonly assumed that eventually they would be controlled and demolished, though that has not occurred; they have simply been banished from city maps. The replacement of self-built settlements with standard housing developments has not gone beyond political rhetoric or electoral promises. Proof of this assertion is that half the residents of Venezuelan cities continue to live in these informal settlements.
A kind of official but informal law has emerged for the squatter settlements. Pérez Perdomo & Nikken explain “… how the State itself has contributed to the creation of a kind of informal legal order to meet the squatter settlements’ legal needs in relation to the ownership of housing” (1979, 2). This is a de facto, but not a de jure, acceptance of squatter settlements.
Does this mean that the residents of these settlements do not want legalization of ownership? We know that is not entirely true because they treat the land they possess as if it were their own. When the owner appears and wants to evict them, they fight back until the eviction order is stopped. As long as mere possession poses no risk of eviction, the residents remain satisfied and make no effective distinction between ownership and possession in their settlements. Furthermore, some are afraid of having to pay taxes and accept other obligations that would come with legalization of their status.
Provision of Services and Infrastructure
Further evidence of this acceptance of squatter settlements is the provision of public utilities, services and infrastructure by state agencies, though in most cases the services are considered “precarious” investments. This official attention to the settlements is convincingly illustrated in the work of Josefina Baldó (1996), although it is well known that such attention is provided only to a minimal degree and only in exchange for votes.
Researchers and policy makers from other countries, especially in Latin America, express surprise at the range of public services provided in Venezuelan urban squatter settlements that do not have legal recognition. Even more surprising is the progressive improvement of housing units as they are transformed from shacks into solid houses and even multistory buildings made of appropriate materials (Bolívar et al. 1994). This pattern is not unique to Venezuela, but it reflects the path chosen by the country’s leadership decades ago: a consistent policy of providing “precarious” public services for settlements whose occupation has been accepted, rather than first settling the issue of ownership. This policy has prevented, or at least slowed down, the legalization of the squatter settlements. In addition, improvements built by the residents are paid for by the government if the land is ever expropriated.
Bureaucratic and Legal Procedures
Venezuela is a country characterized by unequal access to the legal and administrative systems. Bureaucratic procedures consume a great deal of energy and are very costly. Accordingly, until a legal deed to property is required of them, most occupants appear content without it, and may even forget that such an option exists. It should also be noted that technical experts are not always available to determine ownership status and that incorrect diagnoses are not unusual.
Furthermore, legalization initiatives run up against the need to identify the true owners. It is necessary to specify the legal tradition of ownership and resolve questions of legally undivided plots (“tierras indivisas”), which traditionally have been dispersed among multiple owners by inheritance. However, there is a prevailing lack of sensitivity and ignorance of the law among court employees and the professionals retained resolve these cases. The laws are very strict, and hence very difficult to apply. The situation is further complicated by unprepared and sometimes corrupt bureaucrats, who may be prejudiced against and resent the “beneficiaries” of land cases, especially when they are illegal occupants of self-built neighborhoods.
Still another obstacle expressed by government officials has to do with the diverse sizes and shapes of land plots in the squatter settlements (Bolívar et al. 1994, 53-100). Some plots may be only 20 m2 in size, while others may cover thousands of square meters, making legalization extremely complicated. A land survey of each settlement would have to be taken, and in many cases their maps would have to be redrawn, implying a highly detailed and difficult challenge to city or state agencies.
Conclusions
Peaceful struggles by settlement residents to occupy land are seldom publicized, although some fights have resulted in the loss of human lives. Most of these battles are not recorded officially, but for those who work in this field they comprise indispensable documentation for the study of the legalization issue.
Given these obstacles and other factors, the political will to launch a legalization process is also lacking in many Venezuelan cities. The politicians who depend on patronage to remain in office have no interest in “resolving” the problem, since that would “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” To date the occupation of land and subsequent acceptance of possession has been the prevailing pattern, but many observers believe it is imperative to overcome that pattern. To continue relying on the ambiguous position that only possession counts and that ownership is irrelevant is to condemn both the possessors and the owners to a permanent legal vacuum. In time this posture leads to urban chaos and a daily life for the inhabitants characterized by uncertainty, fear and violence.
REFERENCES
Baldó, J. 1996. “Urbanizar los barrios de Caracas.” En: Bolívar, T. y Baldó, J. (comps.), La cuestión de los barrios. Homenaje a Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, Fundación Polar y Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Bolívar, T., Guerrero, M., Rosas, I., Ontiveros, T., y De Freitas, J. 1994. Densificación y vivienda en los barrios caraqueños. Contribución a la determinación de problemas y soluciones. Caracas: Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano/Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda.
Bolívar, T., Ontiveros, T., y De Freitas, J. 2000. Sobre la cuestión de la regularización jurídica de los barrios urbanos. Caracas: SEU/FAU/UCV e Instituto Lincoln (mimeo).
Ontiveros, T., y Bolívar, T. 2000. Vivienda y acceso al suelo urbano. ¿Institucionalización de un derecho oficial paralelo. En: Edesio Fernandes (coordinador), Derecho, espacio urbano y medio ambiente. Madrid: Instituto Internacional de Sociología.
Pérez Perdomo, R., y Nikken, P. 1979. Derecho y propiedad de la vivienda en los barrios de Caracas. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela y Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Teolinda Bolívar Barreto is an architect and professor in the Department of Architecture, Central University of Venezuela, Caracas. The Lincoln Institute is supporting her research and educational programs on this topic. Translator Richard Melman contributed to this article.
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As part of the American Planning Association (APA) 2003 national conference held in Denver in March, the Lincoln Institute assembled a group of planning directors from large and small western cities to discuss a set of topics they had previously identified as being important, including infill housing, maintaining the core vs. sprawling at the edge, paying for infrastructure, and transportation and land use. To explore these issues and exchange case histories, the planners met for a weekend retreat organized by Peter Pollock, Boulder’s planning director, before presenting their findings at an APA session titled “Urban Challenges and Opportunities in the Rocky Mountain West.” This report highlights key discussion points raised during both the retreat and the APA panel.
The West remains one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Not surprisingly, the liveliest discussions among western city planners center on issues of infill housing and the need to protect and maintain the viability of the urban core in the face of continued regional growth. As Chris Knight of Las Vegas noted, “protecting the core is important to the health of the entire region.” Louis Zunguze of Salt Lake City emphasized that “the core area has a real responsibility for the pace of sprawl,” adding that there is a practical need “to keep the area attractive from many perspectives.”
Neighborhood Responses to Infill Development
Part of that challenge has to do with neighborhood resistance to change and increased density. In Billings, Montana, for example (metro population approximately 100,000; county population 140,000), sprawl is becoming a significant issue, according to Ramona Mattix. Yet, despite substantial capital support for downtown revitalization and favorable zoning densities, the city faces considerable resistance from its residents, many of whom are attached to their traditional wide-open spaces.
Bill Healy of Colorado Springs (population 368,000) spoke of his earlier experience as a planner in Salem, Oregon (population 137,000), when he addressed the problem of how to “sell density” in older neighborhoods. As in Billings, the greatest opposition to infill housing in Salem, which involved rezoning established neighborhoods to accommodate multifamily housing, came from existing residents who would grow increasingly vocal if growth was slated to occur in their “back yard.” Healy explained, “The way we sold density [in Salem] was to couple it with better design standards.” People there found density much more acceptable if new development was designed compatibly with existing neighborhoods. A further benefit was that the city obtained new design standards. “Public acceptance of infill is like a sine curve,” Healy explained. “In urban areas there is great acceptance. But as you get out to the first-ring suburbs, there is a real fear of density. Way out where populations are sparce it’s not an issue.” In Colorado Springs, Healy noted, there is little economic incentive for infill. “Half our land area is vacant, so that is a disincentive for infill development. It’s an issue from a planning standpoint.”
Not all western city planners cited neighborhood opposition to infill development as a major obstacle to accommodating growth, however. Ellen Ittleson, for example, discussed Denver’s (population 555,000) recent success in “planning around resistance” in the city’s most recent plan, Blueprint Denver. While preparing the plan, the city looked at growth projections over the next 20 years and devised a way to accommodate the addition of 132,000 predicted new residents and 109,000 new jobs to the city and county. The metro area is expected to receive an additional 760,000 new residents over the same period. “Once we accepted the growth,” remarked Ittleson, “the real task became figuring out where to put it, because where the market or zoning would have put it was not acceptable.”
The Blueprint Denver plan identifies two types of infill areas. “Areas of change” are those parts of the city that would benefit from increased population densities, such as areas of economic need where land use change and transportation initiatives could go hand-in-hand with realizing mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented and transit-oriented development. The only strictly residential area of change is Cherry Creek, which is being transformed from a single-family neighborhood to one with single-family and attached housing. “Areas of stability” are represented primarily by traditional residential neighborhoods, but also include small commercial and even industrial districts where the effort will focus on how to protect the character of these areas rather than adding new households or jobs.
“There has been great consensus on where growth should be and where it should not be,” Ittleson remarked. Yet, there remains considerable controversy “at the edge, that is, how to transition from areas of change to areas of stability,” she continued. Another major obstacle facing the city’s housing initiative is land assembly. “We have the Denver Urban Renewal Authority, but it’s a politically supercharged thing to use. It’s expensive and politically complicated,” she added. Another difficulty is Denver’s “archaic legislation,” which offers far less acceptance of inclusionary zoning than in the East.
Salt Lake City (population 182,000; metro population 1 million) also has demonstrated considerable acceptance of the need for more infill and density downtown. Renowned for its abundant natural amenities, the city has a thriving tourist industry and has become a magnet for growth. As a result, land costs are very high to accommodate the new population, and there are serious discussions between the mayor, the city council and the development community on how to make the city more viable in the face of this challenge. Louis Zunguze remarked that the city is keenly aware that “what happens around us has a lot to do with what we do in the core.”
As part of its efforts to contain the pace of sprawl and attract new development to the downtown, Salt Lake City is putting together a major housing initiative and has studied downtown sites suitable for infill. With the ambitious goal of creating 40,000 new housing units in and around the downtown area, amounting to a three-fold increase in density, a considerable challenge will be to “strike a balance” with more traditional neighborhoods. Strategies include block consolidations for small subdivisions and amending the zoning ordinance to allow for more height in certain appropriate areas, “so more density can be accommodated gradually.”
Salt Lake City has considerable assets working in its favor, notably the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon Church), whose world headquarters is located downtown. “The Church is a significant entity from both a social and financial standpoint,” Zunguze noted. In addition to complementing the city on key housing and economic initiatives, the Church works hard to induce corporations to relocate downtown near the Church’s own headquarters. The Church partners with new development and redevelopment in other ways as well. For example, it has built a new conference center and recently bought the Crossroads Mall located downtown (that is still taxable) and other projects as additions to Church facilities.
Cheyenne (population 53,000; county population 81,000) is the largest community in Wyoming but the smallest city represented on the APA panel and it does not have issues with infill housing. “We’re a landlocked, small community,” notes Mike Abel. “Residential areas are close by, so residential development downtown is not a huge issue right now. We’re more interested in community development issues . . . our infill focus is on commercial redevelopment.”
Regional Planning
According to John Hester, Reno (population 200,000; metro population 550,000) relies heavily on regional planning. The city has a state-mandated regional plan, updated every five years and designed to account for growth and development over a 20-year period. The recently revised plan promotes the objective of directing development to existing areas and infrastructure. It also introduces a new conceptual framework for identifying and prioritizing those districts and transit corridors most suitable for infill and development. On a broad scale the plan presents the idea of Municipal Service Areas designed to capture what has already been built and approved. Urban and suburban land uses are allowed only in these service areas. Then, within these areas, the plan identifies activity centers and auto-dependent transit corridors most suitable for high-intensity land use and development. One specific target for the city, noted Hester, “is to capture 35 percent of all regional metro housing over the next 20 years within the McCarran Ring, a four-mile radius from downtown.”
For David Richert, the cities of Phoenix (population 1.4 million; metro population 3 million) and Reno appear to share similar planning approaches toward managed growth. The Phoenix plan identifies six growth areas as overall targets for development and infill. To alleviate traffic congestion within and among the designated growth areas, the plan also recommends redirecting growth to certain strategic perimeter areas. “They become edge cities within a village system,” he explained. “There are one hundred years worth of growth in the Phoenix plan. We’re putting in infrastructure where we think growth is going to occur.” Richert noted, however, that it was important to keep in mind that “getting the infill requires getting the people who want it, too. . . . Among our goals is to get a fair share of everything that happens in the valley and to set a good example.”
Las Vegas (population 500,000; metro population 1.5 million) has been the nation’s fastest growing region for more than 60 years. But, according to Chris Knight, “the city is still young, with an outward focus and large expanses of vacant land. We tear things down if we don’t like them. If it’s bad, we just blow it up and move elsewhere. Redevelopment is difficult because some of the more prominent redevelopment tools such as eminent domain are taboo.” Downtown Las Vegas is perceived to be in trouble, and its revitalization is at the top of the mayor’s agenda. “One obstacle is that the private owners of downtown properties need to buy in on fixing the problem,” Knight explained. Another problem he noted is that “a number of downtown property owners believe they own the site of ‘the next big casino,’ so land prices are very inflated.”
The mayor of Las Vegas has been a champion of regional planning and recognizes that protecting the core is vital to the health of the region. “The mayor wants to leave the legacy of a new downtown,” Knight added. Part of that legacy would include the introduction of new medical research facilities and 40,000 units of housing to the downtown area. “Big retailers are already coming in,” added Knight, and the city is “looking for tall buildings.” The city is also beginning to investigate transportation-related development to support the existing monorail system, “but our zoning standards may be archaic and will be in the way. We have to figure out how to remove them,” he explains.
Infrastructure and Land Management
Maintaining control of a city’s services and proper fiscal strategies may help in managing growth. Salt Lake City is well endowed with transportation facilities: light rail, bus (local and Greyhound) and train (Amtrak) services, and an airport that is within ten miles of downtown. Moreover, the streets in Salt Lake are so wide that it’s easy to install new rail lines down the center for new transit services. The city also has three large malls within the downtown area, which help keep the city viable. In addition, there is considerable willingness on the part of developers “to look at the barriers in the way of the kind of the development we want downtown (i.e., mixed-use along transit),” Louis Zunguze noted. In Salt Lake, “the city development and finance communities are beginning to come to the table together to discuss what type of housing should be developed and how to finance it. . . .The banks are willing to look at new ways to finance mixed-use developments,” he noted. While work still needs to be done in terms of putting the most viable financing tools together, Zunguze cited land use regulations as the city’s major obstacle to its infill efforts. The city is faced with “contradictions of wanting to do things but the process being very slow. . . . Developers seem to have no problem assembling land, but projects are seriously challenged by the review and permitting processes,” he explained.
Reno has less than half the population of Las Vegas, but as the second largest city in the nation’s fastest growing state, growth management is a high priority. John Hester cited two other factors, in addition to strong regional planning, that have been instrumental in shaping the city’s response to growth. First is the need to work within the limitations imposed by the city’s physical constraints: Reno is landlocked and must also contend with limited water supplies. Second is the city’s concern for fiscal equity and accountability. Taxpayers subsidize growth, and the city, in consultation with outside fiscal consultants, has made concerted efforts to ensure that only those who receive municipal services pay for them, and that taxpayers in one area are not subsidizing the provision of municipal services elsewhere. “A lot of what we try to do is use the fiscal system to make people realize they can’t keep building out,” says Hester. He also noted that the city has a unique tax structure that enables depreciation.
David Richert considers the situation in Phoenix to be very similar to that in Reno only on a bigger scale. “We have our land constraints—the Indian reservations . . . and the state trust lands. Only 13 percent of the State of Arizona is in private hands,” he explained. However, the city itself has no constraints on water. “Phoenix is in the business. It sells water to other communities,” he noted. But controlling the allocation of water “provides a measure of growth control in other areas. In Arizona, you need a 100-year water supply for everything you do.”
Phoenix is also trying to achieve “a balance of transportation,” with efforts to enhance existing transportation rather than building new. Greenspace planning is also becoming increasingly important within the Phoenix region. As an example, Richert cited the recent introduction of special zoning for drainage washes and meanders. The city also passed a bill to collect taxes to pay for park acquisition. “It won’t be enough,” he added, “because once you start buying land you create a market. Land values go up and you can’t buy as much.”
Cheyenne is a city poised for change. As the “northern anchor” of the Colorado Rocky’s Front Range, Cheyenne is only 90 miles from urban Denver. Because of its strategic location on north-south and east-west highways and railroad lines, the city is looking to capitalize on its potential as a major regional transportation hub. “Regionally, we have a lot going for us as a transportation center. Businesses are looking at Cheyenne because of its proximity to other major centers,” Abel explained. Moreover, for businesses Wyoming has a very attractive tax structure, and Cheyenne is also proving popular for commercial development because it is “ready to build.” The city has many greenways, and the strong pedestrian orientation within the community is appealing to new development and infill initiatives. Already, Abel stated, “once-vacant city blocks are beginning to change, and there’s a new parking structure downtown.” Growth is not without obstacles, however. Specifically, water will be the limiting factor in the city’s growth cycle. Like many western cities, noted Abel, “we’re dependent on our water resources and future enhancements. Without sufficient snowpack to balance out the high mountain reservoirs during a drought situation such as we have now, Cheyenne could be out of water in less than three years.”
Despite this sobering prospect, the city remains more than optimistic about its future. Recently, a local property owner offered the city a massive 17,000-acre ranch that appears to have several water sources, and with them significant development capability. The city has taken the option to purchase the ranch for its water rights, but the city would acquire both the land and its water. “With this purchase, we could double the size of Cheyenne overnight,” exclaimed Abel, adding that “it will force the city to look differently at land use in the area for commercial and urban development. It’s an opportunity to develop the next generation of Cheyenne.” David Richert commented, “17,000 acres is huge. . . . You’ll need a lot of expertise from the private sector. But you’re doing a very progressive thing; your government has a chance to control development.”
Armando Carbonell is a senior fellow and cochairman of the Lincoln Institute’s Department of Planning and Development, and Lisa Cloutier is a research assistant in the department.
photo:
Participants in the Lincoln Institute-sponsored retreat for planning directors of western cities: Top row, from left: Mike Abel, Cheyenne; Bill Healy, Colorado Springs; Chris Knight, Las Vegas; John Hester, Reno. Middle row: Louis Zunguze, Salt Lake City; Ramona Mattix, Billings; Ellen Ittleson, Denver. Bottom row, from left: Armando Carbonell, Lincoln Institute; David Richert, Phoenix; Peter Pollock, Boulder. Photo credit: Lisa Cloutier
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The sound of electricity hums deep inside the Tate Modern, the power plant turned art sanctuary on the south bank of London’s River Thames. Despite the 4 million visitors per year now streaming inside since the galleries opened in 2000, the switching plant is still generating 2 megawatts of power for its neighborhood, making the Tate one of the most unusual mixed-use urban redevelopments ever concocted.
But an even more far-reaching hum is reverberating all around the Tate—that of regeneration. Connected to central London by the arching spine of Lord Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge and further magnetized by the whirling mega-folly of the London Eye Ferris wheel nearby, the Tate has catalyzed well over $200 million worth of other redevelopments to the area. Yet, even as it joins other high-end arts institutions in the “Bilbao effect” of high art sparking higher-end gentrification, the Tate is working hard to nurture an economically and ethnically diverse live/work/play urban neighborhood.
“We’ve had impacts,” says Donald Hyslop, head of education for the Tate and coordinator of its community initiatives. “We attract 4 million visitors a year, and 12 million now move between the Tate and the London Eye. The question for us became, ‘How do we spread that wealth?’”
Such models of urban regeneration lured the 2006 Loeb Fellows from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design to London for their annual study trip abroad, cosponsored by the Lincoln Institute. Aided by Jody Tableporter’s connections as the former director of regeneration for London Mayor Ken Livingston, the group gained a first-hand look at the leaps, stumbles, and lessons to be learned from one of the world’s most rapidly redeveloping cities.
“London has proven the relationship between transportation planning and economic growth,” observed Luis Siqueiros, a planner who has worked in Juarez/El Paso, Guadalajara, and other Mexican cities. “They are mixing all kinds of activities together in their buildings. In North America, we talk about these things a lot, but they are showing us how to do it and why.”
The Beginnings of London’s Regeneration
The story of London’s regeneration is long and complicated. It begins in the Thatcher years with a bold refocusing of government aid to cities that created urban redevelopment agencies and enterprise zones to assemble land and better focus new development and transportation infrastructure projects. The most conspicuous early success was Canary Wharf, the sleek, steel-and-glass commercial new town that became the first major project in the Royal Docklands, and in the Thatcher government’s vision for a larger, regional corridor of redevelopment, dubbed the Thames Gateway, stretching all the way to the North Sea.
Despite the misfortunes of Canary Wharf’s original developer, Olympia & York, the larger Docklands redevelopment agency and enterprise zone resulted in the Jubilee Line tube extension and the first phase of the Docklands light rail line. Today, with more than 100,000 workers, Canary Wharf is competing with downtown London to be the center of the financial services sector, decidedly shifting the momentum of the city’s growth to the east.
While Margaret Thatcher’s free-market programs—particularly the release of huge tracts of government-owned land for redevelopment—broke a long freeze on urban redevelopment, subsequent Labor Party policies have guided recent successes. In the 1980s, forecasts of 4 million new households by 2020 led John Major’s government to create the Urban Task Force overseen by architect Richard Rogers. The resulting 2000 Urban White Paper made urban renaissance official national policy.
The reverberations have been widespread, stretching from Leeds to Norwich, but the epicenter is London. Projects like Canary Wharf and the Tate established momentum that gained further steam with the city’s election of its first mayor, Ken Livingston, to set policy for the metropolitan region’s 24 boroughs. Livingston has unleashed a panoply of internationally attention-getting initiatives, from the much-lauded “congestion pricing” of automobiles traveling into the core to a series of bold, new buildings and public spaces by top-rung architects like Rogers and Norman Foster. Now, with the Olympics scheduled for 2012, London has succeeded Barcelona as the “It girl” of European cities, while luring other English cities onto the dance floor.
“Having an architect like Richard Rogers involved in the destiny of cities was a major force,” Tableporter says. “His work with the Urban White Paper spawned a whole batch of English cities that all of a sudden are attuned to design standards and urban principles via master planning.”
But for all the excitement and the dozens of major projects underway, the Loeb Fellows agreed that London’s growth will live or die in the details. As Jair Lynch, a developer from Washington, DC, put it, “The question is, can they give these new places soul.”
Guiding Land Use Principles
While far more modest than some of the huge redevelopments that have been and are being completed, the Tate Modern offered the kind of careful instrumentality that attracted the Loeb Fellows, by both seeding major new development in the long-dormant south bank and spreading the benefits to the existing community.
Under Hyslop’s guidance, the Tate joined a national pilot program to create one of England’s first Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). This initiative developed an employment training program called START, helping to bring more than 40 percent of the museum’s employees from the nearby, and historically downtrodden, South London districts. It started a new community group now boasting 450 members who wanted more open space, meeting places, and a movie theater. Their efforts moved the Tate to open up rooms for public use, develop a community garden, and host a new neighborhood film club.
“The Tate is trying to create a dual function for an arts institution,” noted Lisa Richmond. A long-time arts administrator and activist who has worked on community development projects for the Atlanta Olympics and the Seattle Arts Commission, Richmond says most major U.S. cultural institutions focus solely on audience development. “On the one hand, the Tate has a major global impact, representing the U.K. to the world, but it is also taking responsibility for its immediate community,” she observed. “I don’t know of any U.S. arts institution trying anything like it.”
By combining a major attraction, top-notch architecture, public space, and transportation infrastructure, the Tate became an early standard setter. But, it is rapidly gaining many potential equals, from the centrally located King’s Cross, where a new Channel Tunnel station designed by Norman Foster is triggering a 50-acre redevelopment with 1,800 new homes plus retail and commercial uses, to the outlying Wembly Stadium, the building and master plan designed by Rogers, including a plaza and grand boulevard lined with shops, bars, and restaurants, as well as 4,200 homes.
The primacy of the pedestrian is another common denominator. With Michael Jones, a director at Foster and Partners, the Loeb Fellows toured the newly renovated British Museum. There, the breathtaking glass roof—gently domed in a Fibonacci sequence of diamond-patterned steel structure—covering the 2½-acre Queen Elizabeth II courtyard has garnered all the headlines. But the restoration of the museum’s forecourt—ripped out in the 1960s for a road—has transformed the area into a new magnet for lunching, lounging, and strolling tourists and locals alike.
Nearby, Jones pointed out the similarly transformed Trafalgar Square. This traffic-choked cameo player has set the scene of “busy London” in so many movies. But it is now costarring in Livingston’s remake of the city through a “World Squares for All” campaign that will link Trafalgar with Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square as a major pedestrian corridor.
“For too long London’s public realm has been neglected and ignored,” Livingston said in a 2005 speech, as he unveiled plans to build 100 new public spaces for the Olympics. “Now we have an opportunity to get things right by rebalancing the spaces of the city for people and cars. I believe that the street is the lifeblood of city life.”
The Loeb Fellows also saw some of the method behind Livingston’s Midas touch in the work of Space Syntax, a dynamic new studio pioneering techniques of measuring and shaping traffic—both on wheels and on foot. Growing out of research at University College London by Professor Bill Hillier in the 1970s, and now a four-year-old company with offices in Sydney, Tokyo, Brussels, and South Africa, Space Syntax has developed new software to algorithmically model impacts on congestion and movement. It is based on a simple principle: people’s urge to take the shortest route.
In early studies of the potential impact of the Millennium Bridge, for instance, the city’s planners guessed it would be crossed by 2 million pedestrians annually. Space Syntax’s formulas predicted at least 4.4 million, but already more than 9 million are crossing the bridge each year. Jones added that similar studies eased planners’ minds about the benefits and impacts of removing streets at the British Museum and Tralfalgar Square.
“Space Syntax is using the traffic engineer’s language for the urban designer’s goals,” noted Etty Padmodipoetro, a Boston urban designer who designed several key open spaces for the Big Dig highway project. “In the United States, we could learn a lot from how they have harvested academic research for use in the profession.”
Challenges to Redevelopment Goals
Such innovations, however, only mitigate some of the risks in London’s bold experiments in regeneration. So far, London’s greatest successes have been catalytic projects within the existing city fabric that humanize the public realm while generating new developments that attract new residents and jobs. On the horizon are dozens of larger-scale projects that will determine whether London’s mastery of regeneration is a moment or an era. Some are widely considered to be mirages, like the Battersea Power Station, where an all-star cast of designers—Cecil Balmond, Nicholas Grimshaw, Ron Arad, and Kathryn Gustafson among them—has teamed up for a Tate-like power station to arts remodel as part of a proposed $1.5 billion transformation of 40 acres into hotels, offices, retail spaces, and flats. But other projects, like the soon-to-break-ground Silvertown Quays, teeter precariously in the gusts of London’s transformation.
Land Ownership
As the Loeb Fellows learned from Timothy Brittain-Catlin, a historian and lecturer at the Architectural Association, enormous swaths of London’s land base are owned by a small number of families who first gained control when King Henry VIII abolished church land ownership, handing the land over to his cronies whose descendants, like the Duke of Marlborough, still control it. In short, most of central London’s land is leased rather than sold. Most of these areas are also protected under the city’s strict historic preservation policies. With Livingston’s hopes of building 120,000 new units of housing in the next 10 years, the success of projects like Silvertown Quays—outside the core, on government-owned land less bound by historic codes and neighborhood NIMBYs—is essential.
Partnering with the Government
But “developing in London is not for the faint-hearted,” even in partnership with the government, according to James Alexander of KUD International, the company codeveloping Silvertown Quays. Borrowing a page from its successful playbook in the United States, in which it has partnered with local governments to build aquariums and stadiums, KUD is working with the Docklands Redevelopment Agency to transform the now largely empty 60-acre Quays site. At the center will be the Terry Farrell-designed Biota!, Europe’s largest aquarium, along with 5,000 units of housing, 420,000 square meters of commercial space, and 73,000 square meters of retail and leisure facilities.
Mixed-use development is new to KUD, better known as a horizontal developer that leverages land values with large-scale infrastructure. But KUD’s techniques are new to London: sharing equity with the redevelopment agency and offering a guaranteed delivery price for infrastructure and the aquarium. Even in partnership with the agency, according to Alexander, getting to a final deal has taken four years—tracing deeds, completing archeological surveys, dealing with watchdog groups, and hopping other regulatory hurdles, not to mention negotiating against Livingston’s demand for 50-percent social housing (talked down to 30 percent).
KUD’s Alexander was candid about the firm’s worries. It will be betting $250 million up front on reclaiming the land and building the aquarium with no profit projected for seven years. The affordable housing goals remain aggressive, particularly with no guarantee that government grants, estimated at $20,000 per unit in the development agreement, will come through. Project delivery also will converge with the Olympics, which is guaranteed to trigger construction inflation and capacity issues. And, with many developers following the current boom and the government’s housing goals, Alexander adds, “an equal challenge will be to maintain value over time as the market inevitably drops off.”
Volatile Housing Markets
Indeed, with more than 90 percent of new housing permits in London’s pipeline designated for flats, a recent study, “New London,” by Knight Frank estate agency predicted a softening market for flats, signs of which are already appearing. More critical, the study suggested, is an already failing market for flats in other, less robust English housing markets that have followed the London model.
Citing a range of studies showing the dramatic tilt nationwide to brownfield/flat development over greenfield/single-family houses, historian Peter Hall also expressed concern in a recent paper presented at a Lincoln Institute conference that government and private developers are failing to meet a critical market for workforce housing, particularly single-family houses for young families. Several Loeb Fellows worried about the continued focus on large-scale, Bilbao-style attractors like Biota!. “The Tate’s BID model seemed potentially ground-breaking,” Lisa Richmond reflected, “while the aquarium (at Silvertown Quays) felt like a disaster in the making.”
Ambitious Plans for Olympic Village
On the 23rd floor of Barclay’s building overlooking the sleek Canary Wharf development and the future Olympic Village beyond, Tim Daniels of the London Olympic Delivery Authority offered the Loeb Fellows an overview of what will be London’s most ambitious attempt at regeneration. The Olympic Village dates to the Thatcher government’s launch of the Thames Gateway corridor, but it is finally sprouting under Livingston’s mix of go-go capitalism with a larger social agenda.
Livingston cannily separated the usual single Olympic authority into two separate agencies—one for building facilities, the other for marketing. Consequently, London is keeping one eye on the long game of what Daniels calls the “regeneration dividend.” In the short term, a new velodrome, stadium, tennis center, and the much-anticipated aquatics center by architect Zaha Hadid, along with a major new Euroline transit hub ushering in visitors from all over Europe, will anchor what will be the first village to fully integrate athletes’ housing with sports facilities. The goal, Daniels says, is to have more than 50 percent of the participants within walking distance. But long after the Olympic Games close, those facilities will anchor a mixed-use neighborhood in which the bedrooms originally built for 23,000 athletes and support staff will become 4,300 units of family housing.
Numerous speed bumps lie ahead, however, ranging from the tough deals still being negotiated for land assembly with owners looking to cash in, to finding new homes for “travelers”—gypsies who under British law have the right to squat on unused land. More than 6 kilometers of rivers and canals need to be dredged and remodeled, and 40 bridges either refurbished or built anew. Since the village site is cut off from any existing neighborhood by a major freeway and rail line, at least two major 50-meter “land bridges” are being proposed to make the awkward link to nearby Stratford.
But challenges aside, “it’s a great way to look at the Olympics,” noted Jair Lynch, a developer and former Olympic medalist who now sits on the U.S. Olympic Committee. “The whole thing can be taken over by the marketing people, but by splitting the authority, they can keep a strong focus beyond the event.” He and other Loeb Fellows concluded that the key for the village, along with all of London’s increasingly larger, bolder efforts at regeneration, will be keeping—and, in many cases, creating—a sense of local connection. As Lynch put it, “How do you create a real sense of neighborhood at those scales?”
Closing Observations
At the end of our study tour, most Loeb Fellows felt that Donald Hyslop of the Tate Modern offered the clearest, most hopeful, and most far-reaching aspirations for London’s bold, new brand of large-scale urban neighborhood building. With architects Herzog & de Meuron adding on to their celebrated first phase with an eye-catching, high-rise annex, the Tate will move out the electrical switching station and reclaim the huge, decommissioned fuel tanks beneath the building for a new 400-seat theater, more restaurants and shops, and more spaces for flexible programming.
Hyslop says the goal will be to develop a “life-long learning center” spawning a “16-hour-a-day” corridor along the 15-minute walk between the Tate and the rapidly regenerating Elephant & Castle neighborhood. Rather than being merely a catalyst for development, the Tate hopes to be an active agent in creating a neighborhood—a transformer, if you will, rechanneling financial and social wealth throughout the community.
Randy Gragg is the architecture and urban design critic for The Oregonian in Portland.
Loeb Fellows, 2005–2006
Teresa Brice-Hearnes, Program Director, LISC Phoenix (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), Phoenix, Arizona
Barbara Deutsch, Urban Greening and Green Roof Consultant, Washington, DC
Randy Gragg, Architecture and Urban Design Critic, The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon
Jair Lynch, CEO, Jair Lynch Companies, Washington, DC
Etty Padmodipoetro, Urban Design and Transportation Planning Consultant, Boston, Massachusetts
John Peterson, Architect, Peterson Architects, San Francisco, California
Lisa Richmond, Community Cultural Planning Consultant, Seattle, Washington
Luis Siqueiros, International Planning Consultant, Mexico City, Mexico
Kennedy Smith, Principal, The Community Land Use and Economics Group, LLC, Arlington, Virginia
Jody Tableporter, Chief Executive, Peterborough Urban Regeneration Company, Peterborough, United Kingdom
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Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 7 del CD-ROM Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.
En las ciudades de América Latina, y especialmente en las más grandes, la ubicación de las viviendas es crítica para los grupos más vulnerables. En Buenos Aires, la población de las villas miseria en el área del centro se duplicó en el último período intercenso (1991-2001), si bien la población total declinó aproximadamente el 8 por ciento. En Rio de Janeiro, durante la misma década, los asentamientos informales de mayor crecimiento fueron los que se percibían como mejor ubicados, generalmente cerca de la costa en los barrios de clase media y alta, si bien éstos eran ya los barrios más hacinados y congestionados.
También se observa esta tendencia en Chile, no obstante el problema de los asentamientos informales es mucho menor que en el resto de América Latina. Sólo alrededor de 28.600 familias (el 1 por ciento de la población total de Chile) viven en 533 asentamientos precarios identificados (los cuales son denominados campamentos). Los catastros sucesivos demuestran que al mismo tiempo que los campamentos más antiguos se van reordenando, se continúan creando campamentos nuevos. Más de la mitad de los campamentos existentes fueron establecidos entre 1991 y 2007 (Fundación un Techo para Chile, 2007).
Hay varias explicaciones para esta persistencia de campamentos, aun en Chile, donde la política de vivienda se considera más desarrollada que en otros países, y donde ya queda poca tierra urbana disponible para ser invadida. Algunas familias que viven en campamentos pueden representar un grupo residual en transición entre su llegada a la ciudad y su reubicación en viviendas de interés social u otro tipo de vivienda formal. Otros pueden tener preferencia por tener su propia casa en un campamento en vez de tener que compartir cuartos con otra familia o parientes en una vivienda más formal.
Vivir en un campamento también puede ser comparable a anotarse en una lista de espera para poder acceder a un programa de vivienda de interés social, ya que el programa del gobierno que se concentra en este tipo de familias (Chile Barrio) tiene por finalidad atender a sus necesidades y facilitar su acceso a la vivienda de interés social. Como algunas de las familias que viven en campamentos aún no cumplen con las condiciones necesarias para participar en el programa de viviendas de interés social, siguen allí hasta poder encontrar otras opciones.
Por otro lado, la continua existencia de campamentos no se puede atribuir a altos niveles de pobreza o a una política débil de regularización de asentamientos. Por el contrario, en los últimos 20 años la pobreza en Chile se redujo a la mitad, y ahora se estima que alcanza al 13,7 por ciento de la población (CASEN, 2006). Al mismo tiempo, el gobierno implementó una política de vivienda que entrega bonos a las familias para comprar una casa. Este programa ha sido respaldado por sucesivas administraciones de gobierno y ha beneficiado hasta ahora a dos millones de familias, a un promedio de 100.000 familias por año, o casi el 3 por ciento de los 3,6 millones de hogares urbanos de Chile en 2002.
Independientemente de su éxito en términos de cobertura, los programas de vivienda han generado una concentración de viviendas de interés social en la periferia de Santiago y otras ciudades principales. Históricamente, los proyectos de viviendas de interés social han creado grandes zonas socialmente homogéneas que han producido la segregación de familias de bajos ingresos, con consecuencias negativas. Algunas de estas zonas ahora sufren de serios problemas sociales, como un alto nivel de desempleo y deserción escolar, como también sentimientos generalizados de falta de esperanza y inversión de los valores sociales entre sus residentes (Sabatini, Cáceres y Cerda, 2004).
También hay mayor inestabilidad e inseguridad laboral en la economía chilena en la actualidad que en el pasado, y una transformación radical del sistema político ha desestabilizado las relaciones cotidianas entre las clases populares y los líderes de los partidos políticos. A medida que estas formas tradicionales de cohesión social se van debilitando, ciertos factores, como la ubicación de una casa en la ciudad, se hacen más relevantes, ya que una buena ubicación puede brindar acceso a una mejor “geografía de oportunidades”, o sea a lugares que se perciben como de mayor y mejor acceso a servicios públicos y privados, como escuelas, mercados, parques y redes de transporte, como también acceso a mejores trabajos y proximidad a redes sociales y familiares.
En este contexto, examinaremos algunos de los factores que influyen en el continuo desarrollo y persistencia de los campamentos, a pesar de la disponibilidad de programas gubernamentales masivos de vivienda, como también un sistema legal que protege los derechos de propiedad.
Una encuesta de preferencias de localización de vivienda
Usando datos de la Región Metropolitana de Santiago, diseñamos tres conjuntos de muestras con un total de 1.588 unidades familiares: familias que viven en campamentos (812); familias que viven en viviendas de interés social y que se mudaron de campamentos que fueron erradicados (510); y familias que viven en viviendas de interés social pero que no se mudaron de un campamento (266). Las tres muestras fueron tomadas, respectivamente, de un inventario de moradores de campamentos preparado en 2007; y el registro del programa Chile Barrio, que identifica a familias que vivían en campamentos y que adquirieron viviendas de interés social entre 1999 y 2005; y familias del mismo proyecto de viviendas de interés social que no provenían de un campamento. Las encuestas en los campamentos fueron efectuadas de puerta en puerta en agosto de 2008, y en los barrios de proyectos de vivienda de interés social en diciembre de 2008.
Los resultados de la encuesta muestran que al vivir en campamentos, las familias logran optimizar las preferencias de localización de su vivienda con una mayor probabilidad de éxito, entendiendo dichas preferencias fundamentalmente como la proximidad a una buena geografía de oportunidades. Casi el 70 por ciento de las familias que antes vivían en campamentos y ahora viven en viviendas de interés social se quedaron en el mismo distrito, comparado con el 51,7 por ciento de las familias que viven en viviendas de interés social y que no vinieron de campamentos (ver Cuadro 1). Por lo tanto, sin alterar radicalmente la ubicación de su vivienda, las familias que antes vivían en campamentos pudieron acceder a subsidios de vivienda que les permitieron mejorar su estándar de vida y obtener un título legal.
Ver Cuadro 1 en anexo: Origen de las muestras de hogares en la Región Metropolitana (RM) de Santiago (porcentajes)
Las familias que viven en campamentos también perciben que tienen mayor prioridad que otras familias similares para acceder a viviendas de interés social, y una mayor probabilidad de acceder a viviendas de interés social en su localización preferida. Alrededor del 63 por ciento de las familias que viven actualmente en campamentos reportaron tener ventaja en el acceso a viviendas de interés social en comparación con otras familias. Esta percepción coincide con la realidad, ya que entre 1996 y 2007 la cantidad de campamentos en Chile declinó de 972 (105.888 familias) a 533 (alrededor de 28.600 familias) y el déficit de viviendas asociado con campamentos se redujo en un 75 por ciento.
Para examinar el precio del suelo como factor en la selección de vivienda, utilizamos la tasación fiscal en zonas de características similares (ZCS) y, como referencia, el valor máximo obtenido por cada distrito. En este análisis, el 71,4 por ciento de las familias que se mudaron de un campamento a una vivienda de interés social se transfirieron a una localización mejor o equivalente (ver Cuadro 2).
Ver Cuadro 2 en anexo: Valor actual del suelo comparado con el valor en el distrito de origen
La encuesta también muestra que la mayoría de las familias de campamentos (60,6 por ciento) llegó entre 2000 y 2008, un período de gran expansión en la oferta de viviendas para familias de menores ingresos, indicando una preferencia por vivir en un campamento bien ubicado antes que en una vivienda de interés social en otro lado (ver Cuadro 3).
Ver Cuadro 3 en anexo: Año de llegada de la muestra de familias que viven en campamentos
Los resultados de la encuesta se deben interpretar teniendo en cuenta los siguientes factores contextuales.
Interacciones entre pobreza y los valores del suelo
La mitad de las familias que viven en campamentos (51 por ciento) no son pobres, de acuerdo a la Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica (CASEN). En nuestra muestra, la mayoría de las familias que vivían en campamentos tienen un mayor porcentaje de jefes de familia masculinos, menor tamaño familiar, y un ingreso per cápita casi el doble de la mayoría de las familias de bajos ingresos de la Región Metropolitana. Este resultado contradice la creencia convencional de que las familias más pobres viven en los campamentos. Lo que parece estar ocurriendo es la expresión de una estrategia por parte de familias de menores ingresos para superar su vulnerabilidad y aprovechar al máximo las oportunidades para mejorar su situación, usando para ello la ubicación de su vivienda como un recurso en el proceso de movilidad social.
La incidencia de pobreza en los campamentos varía en función del precio promedio del suelo en el distrito donde se encuentra el barrio. Menos de la mitad de las familias que viven en campamentos ubicados en distritos de valor bajo y alto del suelo son pobres, mientras que aquéllas que viven en distritos de valor medio del suelo tienen niveles de pobreza mucho mayores (ver Cuadro 4). Las familias que viven en distritos de valores bajos y altos del suelo también tienen una mayor proporción de trabajadores en los sectores de servicios privados y domésticos, y menos empleados por cuenta propia.
Ver Cuadro 4 en anexo: Pobreza y empleo en las familias que viven en campamentos, por valor del suelo en el distrito
Los residentes perciben que la localización objetiva de los campamentos es mejor que el de las viviendas de interés social, porque es más probable que los campamentos se encuentren en los distritos de mayor valor del suelo, en comparación con las viviendas de interés social: 27 por ciento, comparado con 7,9 por ciento (ver Cuadro 5). Al mismo tiempo, las familias que viven en campamentos tienen una percepción mucho mejor de su proximidad a los servicios y puestos de empleo, y encuentran que su distrito es socialmente más diverso que el de las familias que viven en viviendas de interés social (ver Cuadro 6).
Ver Cuadro 5 en anexo: Distribución de familias por valor del suelo en sus distritos respectivos (porcentajes)
Ver Cuadro 6 en anexo: Percepciones de localización de la vivienda
Si se usan los valores del suelo como indicador de acceso a servicios, queda claro cuán significativa es la localización para las familias. Los campamentos ubicados en distritos donde los valores del suelo son altos exhiben ventajas significativas sobre aquellos en distritos de precio del suelo bajo, sobre todo con respecto a la ubicación del trabajo del jefe de familia y su cónyuge (ver Cuadro 7).
Ver Cuadro 7 en anexo: Percepciones de localización por valor del suelo en el distrito entre las familias que viven en campamentos (porcentaje)
Preferencias declaradas de localización
Las familias que viven en campamentos valoran su localización. Al preguntar: “Si tuviera la oportunidad de mudarse a otra casa, ¿qué elegiría?”, el 28,8 por ciento declaró que preferiría quedarse en el mismo lugar y el 57,6 por ciento se mudaría a otra ubicación dentro del mismo distrito. La tercera opción, mudarse a otro distrito, fue seleccionada sólo por el 13,6 por ciento de las familias.
Con respecto a sus expectativas para el futuro, la mayoría de las familias que viven en campamentos declaran que esperan vivir en una vivienda de interés social dentro de cinco años. El sesenta y siete por ciento cree que vivirá en una vivienda de interés social dentro del mismo distrito y el 25 por ciento de ese grupo cree que vivirá en una vivienda de interés social construida en el mismo lugar donde se encuentra el campamento donde vive ahora.
El resultado más interesante es que el 51,8 por ciento de las familias que viven en campamentos dicen que prefieren quedarse en el barrio (bajo las mismas condiciones) que mudarse a una vivienda de interés social lejos de su distrito actual, Esta preferencia también es expresada por el 58.7 por ciento de las unidades familiares que declararon estar dispuestas a ahorrar más de los aproximadamente 400 dólares estadounidenses que el estado exige actualmente como pago para participar en el programa; un pago más alto aumentaría aún más la probabilidad de quedarse en la misma localización.
Conclusión
Este estudio ofrece una nueva perspectiva sobre los patrones y preferencias de localización de las familias que viven en asentamientos precarios. Subyacente en la decisión familiar de vivir en un campamento está el interés de aumentar la probabilidad de obtener una vivienda de interés social en un período más corto y en el distrito de su preferencia. No parece haber ningún conflicto entre obtener una mejor localización y obtener un subsidio residencial de una vivienda formal. Por el contrario, el vivir en un campamento constituye una estrategia racional para alcanzar ambos objetivos.
Las familias que han seguido esta estrategia tienen un perfil un tanto distinto a la típica familia pobre de Santiago. La mayoría tiene un jefe de familia masculino y un nivel de ingresos que, si bien es bajo, se encuentra significativamente por encima de la línea de pobreza tal como se define en Chile. La localización del campamento parece cumplir un rol importante en favorecer la proximidad al trabajo tanto para el jefe de familia como para su cónyuge.
Los programas de vivienda de interés social en Chile se han guiado fuertemente por la noción del déficit de viviendas, donde las familias pasan a ser un número de una lista para obtener un subsidio de manera independiente, sin considerar aspectos tales como el mantenimiento de las redes sociales o las preferencias de localización. Esta política, basada en subsidiar la demanda y dar por sentado el valor del suelo, llevó a una segregación a gran escala en la periferia, donde los precios del suelo tienden a ser menores.
Este estudio demuestra que las familias optarán por una mejor localización, frecuentemente en la ciudad central, aunque ello signifique vivir en un campamentos o un lote más pequeño, demostrando los límites de la vivienda de interés social basada en los precios más bajos del suelo en la periferia. El programa Chile Barrio, creado en 1996, ha reemplazado el énfasis en el déficit de viviendas por un enfoque territorial que hace del campamento la unidad de intervención, y este nuevo enfoque parece haber mejorado las opciones de vivienda. La lección de política pública aprendida para programas de vivienda futuros es la necesidad de concentrarse en la calidad de la localización y en la inclusión social.
Referencias
CASEN. 2006. Ministerio de Planificación. www.mideplan.cl
Fundación un Techo para Chile. 2007. Informe catastro de campamentos. www.untechoparachile.cl/cis
Instituto de la Vivienda (INVI). 2001. Diagnóstico de medición de satisfacción de beneficiarios de vivienda básica. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo.
Sabatini, F., G. Cáceres, y J. Cerda. 2001. Segregación residencial en las principales ciudades chilenas: Tendencias de las tres últimas décadas y posibles cursos de acción”. EURE 27 (82) Diciembre.
Sobre los autores
Isabel Brain es socióloga y coordinadora del Programa de Apoyo a las Políticas Urbanas y de Suelo (ProUrbana) de la Universidad Católica de Chile Sus investigaciones se concentran en el desarrollo urbano, viviendas económicas, segregación residencial, mercados de suelos y asentamientos informales.
Pablo Celhay es economista e investigador de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado de Santiago, Chile. Recibió una maestría en políticas públicas de la Universidad de Chicago. En la actualidad está cursando la carrera de maestría en políticas públicas en la Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile.
José Joaquín Prieto es director del Observatorio Social de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado de Santiago, Chile. Sus investigaciones se concentran en políticas sociales y metodología de las investigaciones aplicadas.
Francisco Sabatini es sociólogo y profesor de planeamiento urbano en el Instituto de Estudios Urbanos y Territoriales de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Se especializa en segregación social, conflictos medioambientales y participación ciudadana.
