The beginning of the end of the Chilean housing model: Lessons to be learned from over 20 years of experience (original) (raw)
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Housing and Urban Regeneration of Deprived
TU Delft Open, 2019
By way of introduction, this chapter explains the main differences and convergences in housing provision paradigms in European and Chilean cities. From housing as part of Welfare State models, both societies have seen the replacement of the right to housing by the financialization of housing. The chapter highlights a red thread in this book, namely the presence of “cultures of the collective” in the provision of housing, which responds to different traditions and contexts in cities in the global north and in the global south. However, despite these differences, both relate to the essential question on how urban dwellers decide on how they want to live.
American Journal of Comparative Law, 2019
This paper addresses the recent international trend in development theory and practice towards an “enabling markets” approach in housing policy. This approach delegates to housing markets the responsibility of providing affordable housing and therefore limits the role of government to stimulating the private sector through targeted subsidies. I ask whether an enabling markets policy constitutes an adequate regulatory strategy for the provision of sustainable housing solutions for the urban poor. I explore this question through an in-depth case study of Chile’s housing policy regime, which was a pioneer in the implementation of an enabling markets strategy; for over four decades successive governments have been able to provide access to housing for most low-income residents, in the context of a regulatory framework that favors private real estate development. However, this success story is marred by an important failure. Through its market-based regime, Chile has routinely clustered low-income families on cheap land, usually located at the periphery of the country’s urban centers, and often in areas with poor public and private services. The main argument I present in the paper is that Chile’s commitment towards an enabling markets regulatory regime has helped to reinforce the pattern of urban exclusion, and has prevented the government from experimenting with alternative policy strategies that may be more effective in promoting inclusionary housing. The main limitation of the enabling markets strategy is that it assumes that the delivery of targeted subsidies will generate an adequate supply of affordable housing for the low-income sector. The Chilean experience shows that this assumption is false, because subsidies are rarely sufficient to enable beneficiaries to compete for well-located housing, while private companies have strong incentives to agglomerate low-income housing in the least desirable urban areas. I argue that, in order to promote urban inclusion, governments need to experiment with an alternative policy strategy that I call a “planning housing markets” approach, which involves using land use governance mechanisms to ensure that low-income housing is fairly distributed within cities.
One of the major Latin American city planning challenges is to provide affordable housing for low-income families in infrastructured areas that offer jobs and services, promoting diversity and equity, translated in a good social and racial mix and social cohesion. This mission becomes increasingly difficult in a neoliberal context in which the task of providing land and housing for low-income families is transfered to the market, whose logic is based on the largest real estate profitability. This paper will bring two Latin American experiences in urban planning that relate to both the profitability logic imposed by the market and the idea of providing the right to the city. The first analysed experience is centred in a special land reserve in municipalities zoning for social housing promotion, through the creation of Special Social Housing Zones (ZEIS). Since the 1980s, uses this land reserve instrument in central areas, and more recently, it has been combined with other instruments that pressure landowners to put their properties on the market, only when and if their properties are considered underutilized, unused or vacant by the municipal master plan. Another observed urban experience, which has been largely implemented in international contexts, is known as inclusionary housing policies and it has been recently debated in São Paulo (Brazil) and Bogota (Colombia). They lie in the design of social housing policies through the use of a planning system to create affordable housing and social inclusion, by capturing resources generated in the marketplace. Inclusionary housing policies, in these Latin American cases, can be a legal framework that provides incentives to private developers to incorporate affordable housing as part of market-driven developments, and within the same development. Whereas Latin America does not have a tradition of regulating urban restructuring processes – different from the United States or some European countries –, this paper reflects whether these experiences resulted in the guarantee of public interests – e.g. infrastructured land, assistance to families, social class mixing and social cohesion etc. – in order to produce more just cities; or whether public interest has been neglected. The hypothesis developed in the paper is that, although those inclusionary housing policies did have some social achievements –that were in some cases observed and underlined in order to guide policies –, generically speaking, they were appropriated by the market logic, transferring the centre of these politics from the task of safeguarding the right to the city, to ensure the profitability imposed by the real state market.
Housing and welfare in the wider Latin American context: The Chilean experience.
The Routledge Handbook of Housing and Welfare, 2023
The current state of housing in the region Chile's current housing crisis must be understood in the context of 40 years of market-oriented housing and urban policies. Particularly in the past decade, these long-term processes have coincided with increased migration in Latin America, a political crisis in Chilean institutions and economic constraints arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. This has placed an additional burden on the existing housing stock, worsening the shortage. Both long and short-term processes, however, are not merely a matter of a housing shortage or the failure of housing policy to address growing demand. Rather, they reflect the exhaustion of a neoliberal-oriented model of housing production, provision and distribution. In this chapter, we examine the current crisis and the limitations of the Chilean housing model, looking at the rationales of government underpinning both the welfare state regime and the housing system. We attempt to show that welfare regimes and housing policies do not respond to uniform political and economic orientations but to rationales of government between which there is tension. Conflicting rationales of government provide entry points for analysing the entanglement of the housing system, political actors' disputes about the status of housing as a dimension of welfare, the roles of the state, the market and civil society in its provision and the quality and coverage of the benefits delivered. The symptoms of the current crisis in Chile arise partly from the neoliberal restructuring of the economy during the military dictatorship (1973-1989). Since the mid-1970s, the urban and housing sectors have been reformed according to neoliberal principles, moving from a state-led provision of housing to a market-led policy. Under this model, a "social housing" 1 programme was implemented, based on demand-side subsidies delivered selectively to eligible applicants for the acquisition of new housing units built by private providers (Kusnetzoff, 1987; Richards, 1995; Rojas, 2001; Gilbert, 2002). This model of housing production and the social housing programme were maintained after the transition to democracy and their market-oriented foundations have remained unaltered (