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ARGENTINA: Cooperative of Unemployed Workers Designs and Builds Housing Complex

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 14 2005 (IPS) - Unemployed workers organised in a cooperative in Argentina designed their own housing project, obtained a government loan to build it, and now have jobs and a construction company that is competing in the marketplace, while they look forward to owning their own homes.

The 11 buildings of the Patricios Park Housing Complex are going up on an 18,000-square-metre lot on the south side of the Argentine capital. The new complex includes 326 large, sunny, two and three-bedroom apartments, 10 shops, a child care centre and a park.

The Housing Institute of the city of Buenos Aires granted the cooperative a loan of 16 million pesos (5.5 million dollars) as part of its “housing self-management programme”.

“A total of 467 housing units are now being built under the self-management system, 326 of which form part of this project,” engineer Ernesto Selzer, the director of the Housing Institute, told IPS, adding that the loan “is not a gift,” and that the plot of land and bricks will be mortgaged until the debt is paid off in full.

The projects that apply for credit through the programme must be economically and technically viable, and must meet requisites and deadlines and pass strict controls carried out by various government agencies.

“Luckily, (the beneficiaries) are living up to the requisites very well,” said Selzer, who also underlined that the Housing Institute “is not a bank”, and that its aim is to guarantee access to housing by the most disadvantaged sectors of society.

Forty-four percent of Argentina’s 37 million people are now living in poverty, down from over 50 percent at the peak of the country’s 2002 dire economic crisis.

The loan was extended to the cooperative of unemployed workers, and several architects who provided advice free of charge to help the members of the cooperative draw up and present the plan are now working on the project.

Once the housing complex has been built, the total amount invested will be divided by the number of housing units, and each family will be responsible for paying off their share of the debt.

The construction site is a beehive of activity. Women guard a small door that serves as the entrance used by the workers, and the large gates open up for trucks full of building materials.

IPS arrives at noon, when some of the workers are getting a bite to eat in the lunchroom, while others use their break to pick up their pay checks.

“I ordered the nails 15 days ago, I can’t work like this,” an angry foreman complains to Carmen Cirano, who doesn’t slow down for a second, whether in her office or walking around the construction site.

Cirano is the head of the Territorial Liberation Movement (MTL) and the secretary of the Emetele Housing, Credit and Consumption Cooperative, Ltd.

In her office on the work site, she spends hours haggling over prices with the cooperative’s suppliers.

On the walls around her are images of legendary Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the hero of Argentina’s war of independence José de San Martín, Uruguay’s national hero José Artigas, Venezuelan-born independence leader Simón Bolívar, Chile’s late socialist president Salvador Allende (who was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973) and Gladys Marín, the long-time leader of Chile’s Communist Party, who recently passed away.

“We women were the motors behind this project because men tend to get depressed when they are left without a job, but since we can’t carry 50-kilo bags of cement, we do whatever we can to support the construction effort, and whatever work we can’t do, our husbands and partners do, even if they’re not active members of the MTL,” Cirano told IPS.

The activist has long been involved in efforts to resist evictions of poor families in the Argentine capital.

Based on that experience, she said the stipends that the city government grants low-income evicted families to pay for cheap pensions add up to a huge budget that could be put to more effective use.

“We began creating community homes,” she said. “We rented out a house, and each evicted family lived temporarily in one or two rooms. That way we saved the state 60 percent of what it was spending on cheap hotels, and we began to realise that there were many people capable of carrying out a self-managed housing programme.”

In Cirano’s view, MTL’s experience differs from that of Brazil’s powerful Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and Uruguay’s housing cooperatives. The MTL believes the cooperative should disappear once the project is completed, and that each new homeowner should be personally responsible for paying back the state.

“The main challenge here is not the actual construction work itself, but recuperating dignity, and creating a ‘new culture’. That is why the housing units are not assigned a priori. We are discussing the criteria for deciding who will be eligible for each housing unit,” she explained.

Some 250 men and women work in the cooperative. The women are in charge of security, cleaning and cooking. Marisol Hczenik, a 32-year-old widowed mother of two, works in the kitchen. Her husband was murdered in her neighbourhood, Villa 21, a slum located in a central area of Buenos Aires.

Eradicating slum neighbourhoods – specifically “Having achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers” – is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2000.

UN-HABITAT (the U.N. Human Settlements Programme) estimates that in 2001 there were 924 million slum dwellers in the world.

But housing is not the ultimate goal of the project, in Cirano’s view. “We want to show the state that we can build a socially-oriented construction company that operates at a cost that is 40 percent lower than that of the companies contracted by the public sector,” she said.

The cooperative is thus training many of its members, some of whom “didn’t even know how to hold a shovel” when they started, and who are now skilled construction workers, she said. Courses are also being given to train electricians, carpenters and plumbers, who are needed on the construction site.

To be competitive, the company must meet deadlines and present costs lower than its competitors. “We buy everything we can from other self-managed companies, like footwear and clothing for the workers, or printing materials,” said Cirano.

Nevertheless, the cooperative is unlikely to purchase the floor tiles from Zanón, an Argentine factory that was taken over and reopened by its workers after the owners fell into bankruptcy. “Zanón’s competitors offer better prices, and I have to look out for our budget,” she said somewhat apologetically.

At the end of the interview, a foreman wearing a yellow hard hat approaches. His name is José Alfredo Caputo, and he is a former construction worker who was unemployed for a year during the crisis. He has been working in the cooperative since last year, but was a member of the MTL long before that.

He now earns just over 800 pesos a month (around 280 dollars), five times more than the 150-peso stipend that he used to receive from the government as an unemployed head of household, which he gave up when he found work in the cooperative.

“This is a very interesting experience, because it could serve as a model for an economy that is more just and is based on solidarity, while giving rise to a different way of building,” said Caputo, pointing out that when he used the word “building” he was not just talking about the construction project itself.

“This is a social laboratory, and many people are watching us,” he added.

Caputo said many activists from leftist groups in which the unemployed are organised believe in the slogan “the worse, the better”: the deeper the socioeconomic crisis and the worse the poverty, the closer the conditions for moving towards a radical transformation of society.

But he disagrees. “We reject that concept. We believe people need to feel that they are better off, and that we can move ahead by throwing out what doesn’t work and taking what does. And there are many people on the left who also think this way. The problem is merely a lack of unity,” said the foreman before saying good-bye and heading back to his work.