Optimism of the 1990s vs. the problem of “los con techo”

After the end of the dictatorship in 1990, a process that has been called ‘the transition to democracy’ started; the transition, that was led for 20 years by a centre-left coalition, was characterised by politics of consensus and political equilibrium, in which a smooth process of transformation towards more socially responsive public policies took place, but keeping untouched the core of the neoliberal reforms introduced by Pinochet and the Chicago Boys.

The focus during the 1990s in most social policies (health, education, housing) was to increase the coverage of services and to decrease deficits. In the case of housing, as has been said, it was through a successful finance system structured by the provision of subsidies (a voucher system) and the management and construction of housing by the private sector, and between 1990 and 2000 an average of 90,000 families obtained a subsidy annually (Salcedo, 2010). This model proved to be effective in cutting housing deficit, and by 1993 “a Chilean-type model, or at least elements of the Chilean model, had become acknowledged best practice” (Gilbert, 2002:310).

Through the Programa de Vivienda Básica (Basic Housing Programme) and other instruments (MINVU, 2004), the Chilean state was able to decrease the housing deficit from more than 30% in 1990, to less than 10% in 2009. If by 1990 the deficit had reached one million units (Salcedo, 2010), by the end of 2009, government estimates indicated that the stock of inadequate housing “was over 400,000 houses, out of which over 80% were overcrowded and the remaining of very poor quality”, and the number of

“people living in illegal settlements has sharply decreased and today represents a small proportion of the population (less than 1%)” (Caldera Sánchez, 2012:6). According to Ariztía and Tironi, by 2010 there were 1,282 informal settlements in the country, including some micro-settlements with less than 20 households each (in Jirón, 2010b).

This achievement was accompanied by an equal rate of decline in poverty, due to this and other socioeconomic policies. The positive numbers and quantitative success during the golden era of the 1990s, however, contrast with the quality of the city produced, as Santiago is considered one of the most segregated capitals of the OECD (OECD,

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2012a), and this can be explained in part by the constant process of exclusion of the poor from urban land that the private-led housing policy has created. These consequences started to be discussed after the 1990s: the result of the capital housing subsidy model was the construction of extensive areas of housing for the poor, socially and functionally homogenous, on cheap land in order to increase private profits, with the houses being regarded by the private sector as a profitable commodity, and the citizens as

state-subsidised customers: “To provide housing for those in need and maintain the number of subsidised units built each year, the government financed small and sometimes poor quality housing” (Vargas, in Caldera Sánchez, 2012:22). The fact that this was a successful economic policy for financing housing but not necessarily a successful social policy has been acknowledged by many authors. A key contribution to this discussion was the reflections of Alfredo Rodríguez and Ana Sugranyes (2004, 2005) regarding the emergence of what they called the problem of ‘los con techo’ (‘those with a roof’), referring to poor families with access to formal housing, in contrast with the historical constraints regarding those without access to formal shelter:

This policy of housing production has not been discussed from the perspective of the quality of its products and, even less, regarding the social and urban problems that this massive housing production has caused (Rodríguez and Sugranyes, 2004:15).

A general debate about what has been called the ‘the dark side of a successful housing policy’ (Ducci, 2000) emerged. Some authors have studied in particular the extreme process of segregation that this set of policies has reinforced (Sabatini et al., 2001;

Salcedo, 2010), as housing policy is recognised as having the ability to build houses, but not cities (Castillo Couve, 2004). Of particular relevance are the phenomenon of ghettoisation of areas of the city as a product of the social homogeneity enhanced by housing policies (Sabatini and Brain, 2008), and the idea that a new urban poverty (Tironi, 2003) has emerged as a consequence of it. The consequences for the daily life of the inhabitants of these new peripheries, some authors maintain, have spread to the entire city and affected the social and cultural development of Santiago as a whole (Greene and Soler, 2004). Thus, as had happened with modernist projects all over Latin America in previous decades, the 1990s formalisation of housing in Chile helped to “render the poor

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invisible because the formal quality of the housing concealed the residents’ deprived social conditions and poverty” (Hernández, 2011:68).

On top of these urban problems, the quality and size of housing units were critical as well. As a study of the MINVU shows, the period in which more units were built in Social Condos (between 1984-1996) was also the period in which the housing units had on average the smallest size, as shown in Figure 4.8.

Figure 4.8 | Chile (1936-2013): Number of housing units built in Social Condos vs. average surface area of houses

Source: MINVU (2014a:365)

Overall, a general question about the extent to which home ownership has contributed to decreasing social problems emerges:

On one hand, through a massive program of investment in subsidized housing, more than a million Chileans have moved out from slums and shantytowns and become property owners. On the other, youth violence, drug trafficking, and other social maladies are increasing in many neighborhoods. It appears that home ownership has not been enough to overcome marginality and disintegration.

Moreover, in some cases, moving to subsidized housing projects contributes to increased social problems, especially those related to violence and disintegration (Salcedo, 2010:90).

Although massive housing production was conducted through policies inherited from the dictatorship, during the past two and a half democratic decades housing institutions have changed to some extent, addressing some of the criticisms described. However, as in

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other sectors such as education, health and pensions, changes after the dictatorship have been processes of ‘improvement’ or ‘corrections’ to the system, but not deep ‘reform’, understood as a process of re-asking what the role of the state should be in these sectors (Atria, 2012). This has also been the case for housing (Cociña, 2012), where such

improvements included a progressive increase in the size and quality of housing solutions delivered, as well as changes in financial mechanisms and organisation.

As described by Juan Pablo Gramsch (2014), former Director of the Housing Division of the MINVU, in an interview for this research, the changes during the first years of the 21^st century were mainly triggered as a response to policy failures, but also as an answer to the demand for the higher standards that the country started to require. These changes focused mainly on improving the technical standards of construction, through legal changes and the introduction of more effective control on construction. Two changes that Gramsch highlights as key during these years were firstly the increase in housing size (from 36sqm to 38, then 40, until today when the minimum is 42sqm for houses and 55sqm for flats), and secondly the introduction of requirements in terms of community involvement, and the resulting decrease of project sizes from neighbourhoods of 1,000 or 2,000 units, to projects of around 80 to 300 units.

In 2002, the ‘Dynamic social housing without debt’ (Vivienda Social dinámica sin deuda) programme was implemented, whereby the poorest groups receive a house without a loan, addressing one of the main socio-political conflicts at that time with ‘housing debtors’. In the same year, the ‘Competitive funds for solidarity housing projects’

programme (Programa fondo concursable para proyectos habitacionales solidarios) was introduced, promoting the organisation of groups of people to develop alternative projects to what the traditional sector offered (Cociña and Boano, 2013). The number and amount of public subsidies increased, although the provision of housing was still in private hands: by 2010, 1.1% of GDP public spending was focused on housing support, much higher than in most OECD countries (Caldera Sánchez, 2012).

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