In-formality in access to housing for Latin American migrants: a case study of an intermediate Chilean city (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Housing Policy, 2019
Antofagasta is an intermediate Chilean city featuring an extractive mining sector which attracts a population of low-income migrants, internal and cross-national, looking for economic opportunities. This leads to a gap between supply and demand for rental housing, subletting and homeownership, resulting in a highly speculative housing market. This paper examines the consequent increase in so-called informal settlements and shows how self-built housing has become an alternative way for the population of internal and foreign migrants to access housing. Drawing upon both quantitative (secondary statistics and a survey with 102 households) and qualitative research (15 in-depth interviews), the paper shows how a private-led, profit-oriented and racist housing market has consolidated in the city. Moreover, by shedding light on the everyday ways in which residents access urban services, the research points to the complex forms of juxtaposition between the formal and the informal in central, peri-central and peripheral sectors of the city. Therefore, the paper questions the formal–informal dualities in access to housing and the necessity to rethink housing and urban policies accordingly.
Antofagasta is an intermediate Chilean city featuring an extractive mining sector which attracts a population of low-income migrants, internal and cross-national, looking for economic opportunities. This leads to a gap between supply and demand for rental housing, subletting and homeownership, resulting in a highly speculative housing market. This paper examines the consequent increase in so-called informal settlements and shows how self-built housing has become an alternative way for the population of internal and foreign migrants to access housing. Drawing upon both quantitative (secondary statistics and a survey with 102 households) and qualitative research (15 in-depth interviews), the paper shows how a private-led, profit-oriented and racist housing market has consolidated in the city. Moreover, by shedding light on the everyday ways in which residents access urban services, the research points to the complex forms of juxtaposition between the formal and the informal in central, peri-central and peripheral sectors of the city. Therefore, the paper questions the formal-informal dualities in access to housing and the necessity to rethink housing and urban policies accordingly.
Urban Studies, 2023
This article analyses the persistence of informal settlements in the city of Santiago, Chile, between 1990 and 2018, a period of democratic governments characterised by falling poverty rates and – paradoxically – state efforts to reduce informality by increasing the provision of housing for low-income groups. Based on a qualitative study that includes document analysis and interviews with poor urban residents and governmental actors, I describe one mechanism of informal housing reproduction: the cyclical repopulation of informal urbanisations, that is, the intertwined processes of relocation of informal residents and the reoccupation of settlement sites by new families. In contrast to dichotomous understandings of informality that explain informal housing as produced by residents’ poverty, the article shows that repopulation cycles respond to a regime of government structured around what I call a ‘politics of poverty’, a framework that labels informal settlements as ‘spatial concentrations of poverty’, therefore creating spatial zones of intervention. While this helps the state to target informal settlements as subjects of poverty policies, residents mobilise the policy’s categories to legitimate informal practices.
Cities, 2020
In recent decades, governments and international organizations have made strong efforts to promote homeownership among low-income households. However, in many countries, informal housing arrangements persist. A strong reason for this is emphasized in the “credibility thesis” which posits that informal settlements play a functional role and serve informal dwellers by supplying other valuable attributes that formal housing may not provide. Based on a comprehensive survey of 1588 households living in 69 irregular settlements and 32 subsidized housing projects in Santiago, Chile, we analyze the functionality of informal settlements by examining two hitherto under-researched indicators for credibility: residents' perceptions on location and neighborhood security. Results show that in the low-income housing sector some individuals may prefer to live in an informal settlement because these places are more functional with respect to some relevant urban attributes to which they give more weight. In effect, households living in informal settlements are less willing to move from their current municipal district, are closer to jobs, and report lower rates of neighborhood vandalism relative to those living in formal subsidized housing projects. This is related to the fact that in Chile many individuals who have had access to affordable housing have moved to segregated urban areas. The results show that even within well-functioning urban areas where there is strong protection to private property rights, urban informality may still provide a better geography of opportunities than formal homeownership.
2 9 the Informal Housing Production Process in Latin America : Connecting the Poor to the City
2015
Catolina Velasco-Campuzano holds a BA. and M .A. in economics form Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) and an MA. in Public Policy from the University ofMichigan . She is presently a doctoral student in Urban, Technological, and Environmental Planning program at the University of Michigan . She has worked for many governmental and nongovernmental organizations, including the 29 THE INFORMAL HOUSING PRODUCTION PROCESS IN LATIN AMERICA: CONNECTING THE POOR TO THE CITY
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 (
THE ROLE OF INFORMAL HOUSING IN MEXICO: APPLICATIONS IN CANADA
This adaptation of a larger research study examines the intersections of the economy, property rights, land use planning, and housing within a tourism destination context. Housing is a human need, and when neither the public nor the private sectors are providing it, people will provide it for themselves in the form of self-help housing. Accommodation within informal settlements is an important segment of the housing market, and in many developing nations, the majority of housing that is available to the poor and working classes. The question then becomes not how to prevent informal housing but how to manage it. A substantial component of the housing stock in the study locale of Mazatlán, Mexico originated as informal settlements, and that most of those have now been serviced and incorporated into the community. The study's GIS analysis revealed that housing parcel sizes for the poor and working classes has remained modest over time. This focus on dense housing development and minimal urban streetscape improvements can be considered as part of housing strategies in other locations as they address their burgeoning informal housing crises. Allowing informal settlement, while not ideal, may bridge the gap until such time as formal provision is mobilized to meet the human need for shelter.
The article analyzes the information on Chilean and Brazilian housing policies and presents field research conducted with social housing residents in Santiago, Chile. This work emphasizes the subjective perspective generated by the process of homeownership. The Chilean experience demonstrates a great complexity in the production of social housing from a business perspective. Since 2009, Brazil's recent political interest in this course of action has raised the debate on the impacts of this model on Brazilian cities. Although studies have given greater emphasis to the architectural, urban, and political criticism of the model, the impacts on the subjectivity aspect of social practices are yet to be studied. Through a combination of methods, such as bibliographic research, documentary research, interviews, and observation, this work demonstrates the impacts of neoliberal housing policies through the approximation between Brazilian and Chilean realities. These policies cause complex subjectivation processes characterized by crossed relationships between the reproduction of a social imposition and the contestation of unique patterns. The work contributes to the discussion of housing in the Latin American context by taking into account housing programs and the consequences of a neoliberal model for the daily lives of their beneficiary families. REVISTA V!RUS V!RUS JOURNAL issn 2175-974x julho. july 2021 editorial editorial entrevista interview ágora agora tapete carpet artigo nomads nomads paper projeto project expediente credits próxima v!rus next v!rus
… Conference Adequate and Affordable Housing for …, 2004
Over the past decades, the Chilean housing policy has made considerable efforts to reduce the housing deficit and has managed to contribute to the construction of over 100,000 units yearly, an impressive figure considering the country's population and in comparison to other Latin-American nations. The model has been thoroughly analysed, researched and discussed over its life span 1 . It was considered revolutionary in its time due to its pioneering way of approaching the housing problem, through demand-side subsidies, at a time when supply-side ones were standard and self-help and upgrading were the most important types of interventions. The application of the housing model is remarkable in its magnitude and continuity, serving as a model for other countries who attempt to import it either fully or partially, recognising its efficiency in Chile and its potential; however, seldom are the flaws critically considered.
Anthropological Theory, 2024
Migrant populations globally are often subjected to explicit forms of housing discrimination based on their race, nationality, migration status, and social class. In Chile, due to the dramatic increase in rent prices and a worsening housing crisis, migrants have turned to autoconstructing their own houses in campamentos (squatter settlements) in recent years. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, we show that the campamentos autoconstructed by immigrants have turned into new spaces of sociality, inclusion, and the emergence of new forms of citizenship. Unlike most of the anthropological literature on autoconstruction processes, we do not focus on how the symbolic and material production of the city frame poor people's involvement in social movements for housing. Rather, we show how, by self-building their houses and neighborhoods, immigrants produce a specific form of political subjectivity based on an ethics of civility and individual accommodation. Furthermore, we highlight the paradoxes that emerge between, on the one hand, their discursive emphasis on individual strategies to achieve legitimate citizenship and urban social inclusion and, on the other hand, their actual participation in collective life in the settlement, as well as a sense of shared norms and common morality. In doing so, we argue that this tension emerges from the need to defend their right to urban social inclusion as inhabitants who see themselves as embodying and enacting stigmatized forms of city-making and urban incorporation.