A "for sale" sign seen outside a house in Centro Habana. As you walk along the streets of the Cuban capital, you see a variety of "for sale" signs on a number of houses. The same is true in cities and towns in Cuba's 168 municipalities. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Oct 16 2023 (IPS)

To emigrate to the United States and fulfill her hopes for a better life, Ana Iraida sold almost all of her belongings, including the apartment that, until her departure, saved her from the uncertainty of living in rented housing in Cuba, a country with an unresolved housing crisis.

“I inherited the apartment in Havana from my maternal grandmother, who passed away in 2015. It was small, but comfortable. I sold it for 6,000 dollars to pay for my documents, paperwork and airfare,” the philologist, who like the rest of the people interviewed preferred not to give her last name, told IPS."It is difficult to sell, because many people want to emigrate, and they are practically 'giving away' the houses. But at the same time hard currency is scarce and a person with thousands of dollars prefers to use them to leave the country." -- Elisa

From Houston, Texas in the U.S., where she now lives, the young woman said that, thanks to loans from friends, “I raised another 4,000 dollars. I got to Nicaragua in December 2022 and from there I continued by land to the U.S. border.”

Ana Iraida said she feels “fortunate” to have had a home that was “furnished and in good condition,” with which she covered her expenses. She said that others “have a more difficult time because they do not have a home of their own.”

In the last two years, emigration from Cuba has skyrocketed amidst the deterioration of the domestic economic situation, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the tightening of the U.S. embargo, partial dollarization of the economy, the fall in the purchasing power of wages and pensions, shortages of essential products and inflation.

Errors and delays in the implementation of reforms to modernize the country and the ineffective monetary system implemented in January 2021 have also played a role.

In this country of 11 million people, in 2022 the exodus led some 250,000 people to the United States alone, the main receiving nation of migrants from this Caribbean island nation, from which it is separated by just 90 miles of sea.

To stem the wave of immigration, on Jan. 5 the U.S. government extended to nationals of Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti a humanitarian temporary residency permit program, known as “parole”, similar to the one implemented in October 2022 for Venezuelans and previously for other nationalities.

As of the end of August, more than 47,000 Cubans had obtained the humanitarian permit, of whom 45,000 had already immigrated, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

A view of Havana from Cerro, one of its 15 municipalities. This city of 2.2 million inhabitants, the biggest in the country, has the largest housing deficit in Cuba, exceeding 800,000 housing units. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

One of the requirements for the temporary residency permit is to have sponsors who are U.S. citizens or hold some other legal status, in addition to having the financial resources to support the beneficiary or beneficiaries.

Swapping or selling parole

Owning your own home can also be an opportunity allowing whole families to move abroad.

“People are swapping houses for parole status. A few weeks ago I facilitated the exchange of a house for five parole permits to the United States. And in another case, with a residence in Miramar (a wealthy neighborhood in western Havana), nine people were the beneficiaries,” said Damian, a historian who privately engages in buying and selling, for which he charges a commission.

Damián explained to IPS that “residents in the United States ask for 10,000 to 12,000 dollars to provide a guarantee for parole status. The number of people they give a guarantee for depends on the value of the house. When the process is completed, the property is sold to a relative or friend of that person in Cuba.”

Walking through the streets in the Cuban capital, the most varied signs reading “for sale” can be seen on crumbling or remodeled buildings. The same is true in other cities and towns of the country’s 168 municipalities.

On online sites and Facebook groups for buying and selling activities, there is a proliferation of advertisements with photos and information about the properties, such as the number of rooms, the presence of a landline telephone line or an electrical installation that allows the connection of 110 and 220 volt equipment.

Some negotiate the price with or without furniture, others negotiate with buyers who pay cash in hand, or who pay in dollars, euros or make the deposit abroad.

“It is difficult to sell, because many people want to emigrate, and they are practically ‘giving away’ the houses. But at the same time hard currency is scarce and a person with thousands of dollars prefers to use them to leave the country,” said Elisa, a lawyer who told IPS she is interested in settling with her husband and son in Spain.

She said she has been trying to sell her apartment in La Vibora, another Havana neighborhood, for a year. “I can’t find a buyer, not even now that I dropped the price to 10,000 dollars, half the initial price, and it’s furnished,” she complained.

In Cuba’s informal real estate market, offers range from 2,000 dollars or less to a million dollars. The lowest of these figures is far from the average monthly salary, equivalent to 16.50 dollars on the black market.

A man pulls a cart loaded with building blocks past a house for sale in the municipality of Centro Habana. In view of the government’s diminished construction capacity and the decline of funds for housing, since 2010 the government authorized the free sale of various materials for construction, repairs, remodeling and expansion. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Hurdles despite the reforms

Now, Cubans can sell their properties even to move away from the country, a situation very different from 15 years ago, when only swaps of houses between two or more owners were possible. Homes could only be sold to the government, and they were confiscated if the people living there emigrated.

Under laws passed in the early years after the 1959 revolution, most citizens became homeowners.

The Urban Reform Law of 1960 turned housing properties over to those who lived in them, prohibited their sale or lease, and abolished private construction and mortgages.

After decades of prohibitions, in October 2011 the 1988 General Housing Law was amended and the doors were opened to free purchase and sale between Cuban citizens and even foreign residents, endorsed before notaries and with the payment of taxes.

The law also eliminated certain formalities and official regulations on swaps.

Prior to the restitution of the right of ownership of residential units, in 2010 the government approved permits allowing people to build, repair or expand their own homes.

In view of the government’s reduced capacity for construction and the decline in housing funds in that same year, the free sale of cement, sand, gravel, cement blocks and corrugated iron bars was also authorized, which until then had been exclusively centrally allocated or sold in convertible pesos (CUC, a now defunct currency equivalent to the dollar).

The authorities promoted the granting of subsidies to vulnerable families, especially those affected by hurricanes, and micro-credits to build, expand or remodel homes.

These measures helped drive a boom in private construction and repairs.

As in other areas marked by the scarcity of materials, red tape and unequal purchasing power, the granting of housing and sale of materials is not exempt from corruption, theft and poor quality work, which has given rise to repeated complaints from the public.

There is still a housing deficit of more than 800,000 homes, while one third of Cuba’s 3.9 million homes are in fair or poor condition.

The largest deficits are concentrated in Havana, a city of 2.2 million inhabitants, as well as in Holguín, Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey, the other three most populated cities.

In 2019, a Housing Policy was launched, aimed at eliminating the housing shortage within a decade, based on the incentive of local production of construction materials and recyclable inputs, in addition to the contribution from the government and the centrally planned economy.

But the policy has run into hurdles as a result of the economic crisis, and multiple factors such as delays in paperwork and procedures, loss of material resources, unfinished subsidies and financial resources tied up in the banks.

The shortage of foreign currency and insufficient investment stand in the way of increasing production and incorporating equipment to boost construction capacity and sustainability.

Official data show that in 2022, more than 195 million dollars were dedicated to business services, real estate and rental activity, including hotel construction, which represented almost 33 percent of investment in the sector.

On the other hand, only 8.5 million dollars were allocated to housing construction, or 1.4 percent of the total, according to the government’s National Statistics and Information Office (ONEI).

Since 2019, 127,345 housing units were completed and 106,332 were remodeled or repaired, said Vivian Rodriguez, general director of Housing of the Ministry of Construction, during the most recent session of the Council of Ministers, on Oct. 1.

The authorities acknowledged that compliance with the year’s plan of 30,000 new units is under threat. Maintaining this pace would mean eliminating the housing deficit in more than 28 years.

A rundown house stands next to a newly remodeled home on a street in the municipality of Playa, Havana. A third of Cuba’s 3.9 million homes are considered to be in fair and poor condition. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

No immediate solution

The lack of housing and the deterioration of existing homes continue without a viable solution in the short or medium term.

On many occasions, people of different generations are forced to live together in small homes, many of which are in a state of disrepair, putting a significant number of families at risk.

Access to housing has also been identified as a factor in the low birth and fertility rates that Cuba has been experiencing for decades.

There is also a problem after tropical cyclones and heavy rains, when centuries-old buildings that have never been remodeled or repaired collapse, or those vulnerable to strong winds are left roofless.

The private practice of professions such as architecture is also not allowed, and although since September 2021 the government has authorized the incorporation of micro, small and medium-sized companies, some of which specialize in the construction and repair of real estate, they still encounter obstacles to their practice.

“There could be many solutions, but in my opinion an essential one is that building materials must be available and at affordable prices; or that houses can be sold to workers so they can pay for them on credit. Otherwise, families will continue to be overcrowded, roofs and walls will collapse on us, or we will grow old without a place of our own,” Orlando, a prep school teacher living in Havana, told IPS.

A view of Caracas from the south side of the narrow valley where it sits, dotted with houses and residential buildings where full occupancy was the norm until a few years ago. As a result of the massive migration of young people and adults, more and more homes are left unoccupied or inhabited only by the elderly and young children. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 4 2023 (IPS)

Gladys swore she would not cry in front of her small children, but she still had to wipe away a couple of tears when she turned her head and looked, perhaps for the last time, at her dream house on Margarita Island in Venezuela, from where she migrated, driven by a lack of income and by fear.

“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours (she works in administration, her husband is a mechanic, and they have two boys), but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate,” she told IPS from Miami, Florida in the U.S.

Due to the economic, social and political crisis, which gave rise to a complex humanitarian emergency, 7.7 million Venezuelans, according to United Nations agencies, have migrated from this country, the vast majority in the last decade, and the flow is not slowing down, especially to other countries in the region."It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours, but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate." -- Gladys

The family of Gladys, who like other people who talked to IPS preferred not to give her last name, tried their luck in Colombia, Panama and Spain, before finally settling in the United States, “and the worry about the house followed us like a shadow, but fortunately we made a deal with an enterprising young man who takes care of it, improves it and pays a modest rent.”

There are thousands like her. Migrants try not to leave their homes empty and abandoned, because they could lose them. For this reason, since most migrants are adults in their most productive age and young people, relatives of other ages remain in the homes, giving Venezuela the appearance of being a country of elderly people and children.

“I have to close up my home,” said Juan Manuel Flores, from San Antonio de Los Altos, a satellite city of Caracas with many middle class houses. “The neighbors will take care of it. It took us more than five years to build it and it cost between 150,000 and 200,000 dollars. Now I can’t get more than 60,000 dollars for it. We are not just going to give it away for that price.”

Flores, a teacher at a school where he earns less than 200 dollars a month, is preparing to travel to Spain, where his wife and adult daughters have gone ahead of him. “I will return to Venezuela when the country and its economy improve, and housing prices will rise again,” he told IPS, although without much conviction.

Solitude eats away at houses and buildings even in sought-after areas of the residential and commercial municipality of Chacao, in eastern Caracas. The real estate and construction market is suffering in Venezuela from the general economic crisis and in particular from the oversupply of housing created by those leaving the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Why not rent out their house? “Because the laws and the authorities always favor the tenant, and if they have children it is impossible to get them out when the lease is up, whether they pay the rent or not, and they end up staying in the house for years,” said Nancy, a pastry chef, also from San Antonio, who left a niece in charge of her apartment when she moved to Brazil last year.

A survey of migrants in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, released in October 2022 by the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants in Venezuela (R4V), led by United Nations agencies, showed that only 23 percent considered the homes they left behind in their country to be safe.

Selling is also not an option in most cases, because the magnitude of the exodus over the last decade has so depressed demand that the most that can be obtained for a property is 15 or 20 percent of the value it had 15 years ago, if you are lucky. So selling a home even if you want to is a long, difficult process that provides meager results.

Those who have no other choice say that they are not selling their home but “giving it away” for whatever they can get, with great regret, mostly to internal migrants from other parts of the country, who “take refuge” in Caracas because outside the capital there are recurrent power outages, and scarcity of water and fuel, in addition to other shortages.

“Real estate deteriorates, ceases to serve those who need it and remains an important asset that produces nothing for the owner, for example a migrant who needs to pay rent as soon as they arrive in another country,” Roberto Orta, president of the Venezuelan Real Estate Chamber, told IPS.

The businessman said “this is an issue that, we have proposed, should be addressed with political will in order to reform the laws that constrain the real estate market, to benefit both landlords and tenants. Up to 250,000 homes could be freed up in five years.”

A view of the working-class neighborhood of 23 de Enero on the west side of Caracas. In low-income barrios, closed, empty houses are almost non-existent, as those who decide to emigrate look for relatives to move in, to avoid the risk of the homes being invaded or robbed. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

A trade is born

In the residential buildings located in Caracas and other cities, closing up an apartment and moving outside the country is not the same as leaving a house abandoned to solitude and neglect, because the neighbors, for their own safety and in order to pay the common expenses, keep watch and take care to prevent strangers from occupying the empty apartments.

But houses, especially middle-class homes, are an attractive and easy target for crime and even for people who want to occupy them by de facto means. That is why a new profession has appeared: the home caretaker.

“I have taken care of three houses in housing developments in the southeast (of Caracas), it’s the way I make ends meet,” said Daniel, who also works as a self-employed gardener. “I would go to one house twice a week, three times a week to another, and every day to another.”

He explains that in the last house “the owners were Portuguese business owners who went away and left three dogs. I would go to a pet food store to pick up the food, feed the dogs, check around the house and that was it.”

Family friends of the owners have now taken charge of the dogs and Daniel no longer receives payment for taking care of them. “I don’t have an account in dollars, I was paid through a restaurant friend of the owners, who does have an offshore account,” he said.

To pay for caretakers from abroad, intermediaries are indispensable, since in Venezuela, whose currency has been made nearly worthless by the economic crisis, there is a de facto dollarization, without agreement from the U.S. authorities, who also use sanctions to block the transactions of government bodies.

Daniel is saving up to join one of the groups forming in Antímano, the working-class neighborhood where he lives in the southwest of the capital, to migrate as well. He said that “I didn’t leave a few weeks ago because I hadn’t sold my motorcycle yet, otherwise right now I would be in the Darien,” the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama that thousands of migrants cross every day.

A more successful caretaker is Arturo, who is in charge of two houses with large living rooms, corridors, yards, a swimming pool and parking area. He is paid a modest fee to care for and maintain the homes, but is authorized to rent them out for social gatherings and parties.

“In both cases the owners are people with good incomes, they left with their children to study abroad and plan to return in a few years if conditions in the country change. They would like to find their homes as they left them,” he said.

When he rents out the property for a day or a night, guests can use the yards, swimming pool and even awnings, tables and chairs. But Arturo closes off access to the more private parts of the house and hires assistants to watch out for damages or disturbances. “I live well, I keep up the houses and each one brings me about 3,000 dollars in profits per month,” Arturo said.

President Nicolás Maduro delivers a batch of houses in the northwestern state of Falcón, which form part of the 4.6 million homes that the government claims to have built and provided to Venezuelan families since 2013. The figure is questioned by organizations dedicated to monitoring economic and social rights. CREDIT: Minhvi

No empty houses in the shantytowns

In the shantytowns of the cities and towns of this country – which has a population of 33.7 million according to government figures and 28 million according to university studies – the situation is different and there are hardly any empty or unoccupied houses.

“In the shantytowns, no house is left empty. The very next day someone can invade it, occupy it, or take what is left inside by those who left, furniture or household goods. Someone stays in charge, the grandfather or in-laws, a trusted neighbor, or a relative is brought from the interior of the country,” explained Alejandra, from the Gramoven area.

She lives in a shantytown of informally constructed dwellings in the northwest of Caracas, similar to the ones that cover most of the many hills and hollows occupied by the capital’s most disadvantaged inhabitants.

“Many people leave, the young people emigrate, my children want to leave through the Darien jungle. But nobody leaves their house empty. If you do, you lose it,” Alejandra said.

In Santa Bárbara del Zulia, on the hot plains south of western Lake Maracaibo, “the situation is the same,” Julio, a bricklayer who migrated to Colombia for four years and has returned to care for his elderly parents, told IPS.

“You can’t leave your house alone in these towns,” said Julio. “When my parents went to Maracaibo and Caracas for medical treatment, they went and came back quickly, because the Community Council warned them not to leave their house empty for too long, because they would not be able to ward off people who wanted to occupy it.”

The Community Councils are committees set up by the government to represent and manage community affairs – such as the distribution of bags of subsidized food to poor families – and they channel decisions by the government.

“But people are leaving anyway. It’s something that won’t stop as long as people here earn only a pittance and can’t even eat properly (the minimum wage and official pensions in Venezuela are equivalent to four dollars a month). People care about their houses, but food has to come first,” said Julio.

View of a row of houses practically abandoned by most of their inhabitants in a town in eastern Venezuela. Migration from the countryside and small towns to large cities and oil producing areas marked the 20th century in Venezuela. And today, migration from this country mainly to other Latin American nations has become a regional crisis. CREDIT: VV

A matter for the government and the business community

While the plight of people leaving their homes continues to drag on, the government of President Nicolás Maduro announces more or less twice a year the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, in a program initiated by his late predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), called “Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission”.

According to official figures, since 2011, 4.6 million homes have been built and delivered by the Mission, mostly residential complexes to which the president goes to personally hand over the keys of one or more houses to their new inhabitants.

In accordance with the Mission, the occupants are tenants, not owners, so they cannot sell the homes. If they leave, the home can be reassigned to new tenants. To avoid this, those who choose to move to another city or country first look for relatives who can move into the house, and thus keep it.

However, the official figures on the number of homes built is not borne out by anecdotal evidence, to judge by the myriad of informal self-built houses still occupied in the slums, and by reports from business and civil society organizations.

The Chamber of Construction reports that the sector has decreased 96 percent in the last 10 years, and that its members employ 20,000 workers, down from 1.2 million in better times, while cement companies are working at 10 percent of their capacity and the steel industry at seven percent.

The civil society organization Provea, which specializes in the study of economic, social and cultural rights, has compared and contrasted the figures of the Housing Mission – which have not been audited, according to Provea – with independent studies, and reached the conclusion that the government has built and delivered only 130,856 housing units in 10 years.

In 1955 the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva (1908-1985) published his famous novel “Casas Muertas” (Dead Houses), describing the decline of Ortiz, a town in the central plains, caused by the loss of its population due to malaria and emigration to the big cities and oil production centers.

The flow of Venezuelan emigration in this century has not been enough to turn this into a country of dead houses. But its many closed doors bear witness to a collapse that has pushed millions of its inhabitants abroad, as do the small number of lights that are lit at night in the buildings of Caracas and other cities.

Martina Santa Cruz, a peasant farmer from the village of Sacllo in the southern Peruvian Andes highlands department of Cuzco, is pleased with her remodeled kitchen where a skylight was created to let in sunlight and a chimney has been installed to extract smoke from the stove where she cooks most of the family meals. She is disappointed because a wall was stained black when she recently left something on the fire for too long. But her husband is about to paint it, because they like to keep everything clean and tidy. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS

By Mariela Jara
CUZCO, Peru, Jun 15 2023 (IPS)

Adopting a “healthy housing” approach is improving the living conditions of rural Peruvian women like Martina Santa Cruz, a 34-year-old farmer who lives with her husband and two children in the village of Sacllo, 2,959 meters above sea level in the Andes highlands municipality of Calca.

“I used to have a wood-burning stove without a chimney, and the smoke filled the house. We coughed a lot and our eyes stung and it bothered us a lot,” she told IPS during a long telephone conversation from her village."Rural families have the right to decent housing that provides them with quality of life and guarantees their health, safety, recreation and the means to feed themselves.” -- Berta Tito

Santa Cruz, her husband, their 13-year-old daughter and their four-year-old son are among the 100 families who live in Sacllo, part of the Calca district and province, one of the 13 provinces that make up the southern Andes department of Cuzco, whose capital of the same name is known worldwide for the cultural and archaeological heritage of the Inca empire.

With an estimated population of more than 1,380,000 inhabitants, according to 2022 data from the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, four percent of the national population of 33 million, Cuzco faces numerous challenges to fostering human development, especially in rural areas where social inequality is at its height.

According to official figures from May, 41 percent of Peru’s rural population currently lives in poverty, and in Calca, where 55 percent of families are rural, there are high rates of childhood malnutrition and anemia.

One way Santa Cruz found to improve her family’s health and carve out new opportunities to boost their income was to get involved in the project for healthy housing.

In 2019, she took part in a contest organized by the municipality of Calca, which enabled her to start remodeling their house, making it healthier and more comfortable.

Her husband, Manuel Figueroa, is a civil construction worker in the city of Cuzco, about 50 kilometers away by road. She stays home all day in charge of the household, their children, the chores, and productive activities such as tending the crops in their garden and feeding the animals.

“When I only cooked on the woodstove, I also had to get an arroba (11.5 kg) of firewood a day to be able to keep the fire lit all day long to cook the corn and beans, and the meals in general,” she said.

In addition to cooking food, the stove provided them with heat, especially in the wintertime when temperatures usually drop to below zero and have become colder due to climate change.

In the small village of Sacllo, in the Peruvian municipality of Calca, Martina Santa Cruz (L) poses with her two children, proud of having a healthy home that has improved the family’s living conditions. The house has been plastered with clay and has two stoves and a wooden balcony on the second floor where the bedrooms are located. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS

Healthy rural homes and communities

Jhabel Guzmán, an agronomist with extensive experience in healthy housing projects in different areas of Calca province, told IPS that the sustainability of the initiative lies in the fact that it incorporates the aspect of generating income.

“It is not enough to propose changing or upgrading stoves, improving order in the home or providing hygiene services; rural families need means to combat poverty,” he said.

Of the projects he has been involved in, the ones that have proven to be sustainable in time are those in which, together with improvements in relation to health, the transformation of the homes contributed to generating income through activities such as gardens, coops and sheds for small livestock, and experiential tourism, expanding the impact to the broader community.

The case of Santa Cruz and her family is heading in that direction. Their original home was built by her husband in 2013 with the support of a master builder and some neighbors, a total of eight people, who finished it in a month. They used local materials such as stones, earth, adobe and wooden poles.

But the two-story home was not plastered, which made it colder. In addition, it was not well-designed: the small livestock were in cramped pens, the bedrooms were crowded together on the ground floor, the stove had no chimney and the house was very dark.

Their participation in the healthy homes initiative marked the start of many changes.

Peruvian peasant farmer Martina Santa Cruz (R) sits with her mother (2nd-L) and her two children in the brightly lit kitchen-dining room where she cooks with gas. CREDIT: Courtesy of Martina Santa Cruz

“We plastered the house with clay, it turned out smooth and nice, and we painted a sun and a hummingbird (on the wall outside). In the kitchen I installed a wooden cabinet, we made a skylight in the roof and covered it with transparent roofing sheets to let the sunlight in, and we made a chimney for the smoke from the stove and fireplace,” said Santa Cruz.

“It feels good. There is no smoke anymore, I can keep things tidier, there is more light, the clay makes the house warmer, and my small animals, who live next door, are growing in number,” she said..

She also created a space for a gas cylinder stove and a dining room that she uses when there are guests and she needs more cooking power than just the woodstove, to prepare the food in less time.

Due to traditional gender roles, Peruvian women are still responsible for caretaking and housework, which take more time in rural areas due to precarious housing conditions and less access to water, among other factors, reducing their chances for studying, recreation, or community organization activities, for example.

Building large coops with small covered sheds with divisions for her guinea pigs and chickens made it easier for Santa Cruz to clean and feed them, therefore saving her time, which she aims to use for future gastronomic activities: cooking food for a small restaurant that she plans to build on her property.

She explained that she has 150 guinea pigs, rodents that are highly prized in the Andes highlands diet, which provide her family with nutritious meat as well as a source of extra income that she uses to buy fruit and other food.

A typical, unhealthy house in rural Peru where cooking is done using firewood in a closed room without a chimney, which causes smoke to spread throughout the house and damages the health of the families. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Improving quality of life

Agronomist Berta Tito, from the Cuzco-based non-governmental organization Center for the Development of the Ayllu Peoples (Cedep Ayllu, which means community in the Quechua language), highlighted the importance of healthy housing in rural areas, such as Sacllo and others in the province of Calca, in a conversation with IPS.

She said they prevent lung diseases among family members, particularly women who inhale carbon dioxide by being in direct contact with the woodstove, while reducing pollution and improving mental health, especially of children.

“Rural families have the right to decent housing that provides them with quality of life and guarantees their health, safety, recreation and the means to feed themselves,” Tito said.

Berta Tito (C) stands in a greenhouse garden during a work day with peasant farmers from highland areas of Cuzco in Peru’s southern Andes. The agronomist from Cuzco stressed the importance of rural families accessing healthy homes as part of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

She said the project requires property planning, in which families commit to a vision of what they want to achieve in the future and in what timeframe. “And viewed holistically, this includes access to renewable energy,” she added.

In Santa Cruz’s house, the different areas are now well-organized: the ground floor is for cooking and other activities and the four bedrooms, one for each member of the family, are located on the second floor and are all lined with a beautiful wooden veranda.

At the moment she is frustrated that she left something on the woodstove too long, which stained the nearest wall black. But she and her husband have plans to paint it again soon, because the family enjoys having clean walls.

In addition to her two cooking areas, with the woodstove and the gas cylinder, she has a garden on the land next to her house, where she grows vegetables like onions, carrots, peas and zucchini, which she uses in their daily diet. And she is pleased because she can be certain of their quality, since the family fertilizes the land with the manure from their guinea pigs and chickens “which eat a completely natural diet.”

Future plans include fencing the yard and expanding an area to build a small restaurant. “That is my future project, to dedicate myself to gastronomy, cooking dishes based on the livestock I raise. I have the kitchen and the woodstove and oven and I can serve more people. But I will get there little by little,” she said confidently.

On Cerro 18, above the affluent municipality of Lo Barnechea, in the coveted eastern sector of Santiago de Chile with a stunning view of the valley and the Andes Mountains, 300 families live in five camps or irregular settlements, many without water, electricity or sewage. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Dec 10 2021 (IPS)

Camps made up of thousands of tents and shacks have mushroomed in Chile due to the failure of housing policies and official subsidies for the sector, aggravated by the rise in poverty, the covid-19 pandemic and the massive influx of immigrants.

“Three years ago we were about to be evicted and when my children would head off to school they never knew if our little house would be there when they got home. One morning we were going to school and the carabineros (militarized police) were coming. Many times I had to go home early from work. It was chaotic, difficult and distressing,” Melanni Salas told IPS during a visit to the site.

Salas, 33, presides over Senda 23, one of the five camps that bring together 300 families who occupied public land in Cerro 18, in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, on the east side of Santiago. They have been building shacks with wood and other materials within their reach, which they are gradually trying to improve.

The threat of eviction ceased at the start of the covid pandemic, but the shadow still hangs over their heads because the municipality “built us a septic tank and gave us gifts for Christmas, but has said nothing about housing,” she said.

The community activist previously lived for 19 years as an “allegada”, the name given in Chile to people or families who share a house with relatives or friends, in overcrowded conditions. In 2016 she occupied the land where she and her husband Jorge built the precarious dwelling where she now lives with her three children aged 15, 13 and five years old.

“This used to be a garbage dump and now it is clean and there are houses,” said Salas. “Mine gets a little wet inside when it rains because it is made of wood and because of the strong wind. But I have drinking water, electricity and sewerage thanks to my mother-in-law who lives further up. The neighboring family has neither water nor sewage. They are a couple with three children and one of them, Colomba, was born a week ago.”

She explains that her neighbors “use the bathroom at their brother’s place who lives nearby, but during the pregnancy she went back to her mother’s house.”

In the camps people cook, wash, sleep and live together, observed by passers-by who have become accustomed to this new urban landscape. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Hundreds of homeless tents now line the main avenues of Santiago de Chile.

Explosive situation

“Every day more than 10 families come to live in an encampment in Chile,” says Fundación Techo Chile, a social organization dedicated to fighting against housing exclusion in the cities of this South American country.

The problem is also seen along the avenues and in the parks where hundreds of men and women set up tents to sleep, cook, wash and live together in full view of passers-by who have become accustomed to the scene.

In the last two years, the number of families living in 969 of these camps with almost no access to water, energy and sanitation services has increased to 81,643, a survey by the Fundación Techo Chile found.

In Chile, the term “campamentos” or camps has also come to refer to slums or shantytowns known traditionally as “callampas”, such as the one where Salas lives, which are built on occupied land and consist of houses made of light materials, although the neighborhoods are sometimes later improved and upgraded, but still lack basic services.

These slums are mainly in Santiago and Valparaíso, 120 kilometers north of the capital, in central Chile. But they are also found in the northern cities of Arica and Parinacota and the southern city of Araucanía.

They are home to 57,384 children under the age of 14 and some 25,000 immigrants, mostly Colombians, Venezuelans and Haitians. “Today, families live there who six months or two years ago were ‘allegados’ living in overcrowded, informal, precarious or abusive conditions. That is what is understood as a housing deficit,” Fundación Techo Chile’s executive director, Sebastián Bowen, told IPS.

“The 81,000 families living in camps are the most visible part of the problem, but the housing deficit, covering all the families who do not have access to decent housing, exceeds 600,000,” he said.

The State provides some 20,000 social housing solutions each year, a figure that is highly insufficient to meet the current need.

According to Bowen, “if we want to solve the problem of the camps, we must structurally change our housing policy to guarantee access to decent housing, especially for the most vulnerable families.”

This explosion coincided with the social protests that began in October 2019 and with the arrival of coronavirus in the country in March 2020.

According to the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (Casen), 10.8 percent of Chileans currently live in poverty, which means more than two million people, although social organizations say the real proportion is much higher.

Chile, with a population of 19 million people, is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world, as reflected by the fact that the 10 percent of households with the highest incomes earn 251.3 times more than the 10 percent with the lowest income.

View of some of the houses in Cerro 18, a shantytown where 300 families live, most of them without even the most basic services. In what used to be a garbage dump, on the hillside of one of the wealthy neighborhoods of the Chilean capital, they have built their houses using scrap wood and waste materials. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The new constitution holds out hope

Benito Baranda, founder of the Fundación Techo, an organization that now operates in several Latin American countries, believes that the housing policy failed because it focuses on “market-based eradication, forming housing ghettos on land where people continue to live in a segregated manner.”

This policy is also based on a structure of subsidies “born during the dictatorship and which has remained in place because housing is not a right recognized in the constitution,” Baranda, now a member of the Constitutional Convention that is drafting a new constitution, which will finally replace the one inherited from the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, told IPS.

“The decision of where people are going to live was handed over to the market. Not only the construction of housing. And the land began to run out and the available and cheap places were in the ghettos,” he explained.

Baranda criticized the policy of “eradication”, “which created ghettos and generated much greater harm for people,” referring to the forced expulsions of slumdwellers and their relocation to social housing built on the outskirts of the cities, a policy initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship and which crystallized social segregation in the capital.

According to Baranda, “in the last four governments there has been the least construction of housing for the poorest families.”

Baranda was elected to the constituent assembly in a special election in May and proposes “to generate a mechanism that will progressively reduce the waiting times for housing, which today can stretch out to 20 years.”

Twenty-story buildings, where each floor has 50 17-square-meter apartments, are called “vertical ghettos” and are inhabited mainly by immigrants. These ones are located in the Estación Central neighborhood, along Alameda Avenue that crosses Santiago de Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Privatization of social housing

Isabel Serra, an academic at the Diego Portales University Faculty of Architecture, believes that “the housing issue in Chile will be solved in some way through family networks…There is a lot of overcrowding here and small families are becoming the norm,” she told IPS.

According to Serra, the mushrooming of camps “clearly has to do with the influx of immigrants and this has grown especially in cities that are also functional or productive or extractivist hubs.”

She criticized the subsidy policy because these “are transferred to the private sector and what they do is drive up housing prices… and most of them are not used because they are not in line with the price of land and housing.”

“A highly financialized private market has made housing a tool for economic speculation…investors have decided to put their funds into the real estate market,” she said.

The problem has already reached the 155-member Constitutional Convention, which has been functioning since Jul. 4 and has a 12-month deadline to draft the new constitution, which must then be ratified in a plebiscite.

In September Melanni Salas and representatives of eight organizations met with Elisa Loncón, president of the Convention, to present her with the book “Constitution and Poverty”, which includes proposals to guarantee the right to housing.

“I hope they include this in the new constitution. The proposals were made by 25,000 excluded people…this document seeks to ensure that we are not left on the sidelines as always,” the community organizer explained.

A human right

Baranda said “in the constituent assembly we are working to get this enshrined as a right and to get the State to assume a leading role, not in the construction of housing itself, but in determining where people are going to live and creating the land bank that people have been demanding for so long.”

“We need the policies, by making land available and expropriating property that is not owned by the State, to create housing projects in places where there is social inclusion,” he stressed.

Serra agreed that “when the issue of housing is discussed in the constituent assembly, it will have to look at how the State buys and sells land.

“Housing is a basic human right and should be enshrined in the constitution, with all the parameters that are established for decent housing,” she argued.

Serra also called for “modernizing the instruments and the institutional framework dedicated to the provision of housing” because, she said, “currently the role of housing provision is clearly played by the market.”

She said it would require “a great deal of political will because land issues in general are political issues, very difficult to implement because there are many economic interests involved.”

Celia “Charito” Durán lives in the Mesana camp on Mariposas hill in the port city of Valparaíso, along with 165 other families, and counting.

The municipality delivers 3,000 liters of water per week to each house, using tanker trucks.

Durán said, however, that the priority is access “because if there is no road, we are cut off from everything: firefighters, water, ambulances.”

In Mesana there is no sewage system, only “cesspools, septic toilets and pipes through which people dump everything into the creek,” she told IPS by telephone.

On the hilltop the wind is very strong and every winter roofs are blown off and houses leak when it rains.

Durán, 56, has lived there since she was 37. She is confident that a solution to the social housing deficit will come out of the constituent assembly, after participating in meetings with Jaime Bassa, vice-president of the Constitutional Convention.

“We have the hope and expectation that the right to housing will be included. So, if tomorrow it is not fulfilled, you could go to the authorities with the right to protest about it,” she said.

“We want to be part of the city and not be segregated and forced to return to the camps,” Durán said.

Long staircases, like the ones in this section of the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela, are the daily slog of residents of the steep hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – a symbol of Latin America's urban inequalities. CREDIT: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

The Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo recorded 932 flooded premises on Feb. 10, 2020. The Mexican city of Tula de Allende was under water for 48 hours in September 2021. In Lima it almost never rains, but the rivers in the Peruvian capital overflowed in 2017 and left several outlying municipalities covered with mud.

Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he told IPS by telephone from Bogotá."There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes." -- Pablo Lazo

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities.

Thus, in addition to the 932 points of flooding reported to the fire department on Feb. 10, 2020, São Paulo also suffered 166 landslides that destroyed many houses. No deaths were reported on that day, but torrential rains usually claim lives in Greater São Paulo, which is home to 22 million people.

Brazil’s largest city, which spreads among rolling hills and numerous small valleys, has many neighborhoods that have had to learn to cope with flooding in the rainiest summers. This is due to the 300 streams that crisscross the area, most of which are covered by avenues or enclosed in channels that are unable to contain heavy downpours.

A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

“The topography allows them to live close to their jobs” so the choice is “between formal employment or living where housing is cheaper,” said Carolina Guimarães, coordinator of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a non-governmental organization that seeks to promote a “fair, democratic and sustainable” city.

This favela is next to a middle-class neighborhood in São Bernardo do Campo, the former capital of the automobile industry on the outskirts of São Paulo. The industry attracted migrants from other parts of the country who, without the jobs they dreamed of, could only build their precarious houses on occupied land on a hillside. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Greater poverty, more impacts

In addition to the fact that these phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

It is a perverse logic.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

WRI Mexico designed the Urban Inequality Index (UDI), a tool for the formulation of public policies, which initially covers 74 metropolitan areas. It measures the public’s access to formal employment and services such as education, health and transportation, as well as food and culture.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital.

Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Rodríguez said this precariousness “is a widespread phenomenon in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 25 percent of the urban population lives in informal settlements.” Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center, he said.

Each one of hundreds of tents in a Homeless Workers Movement camp in 2017 represents a family that dreamed of obtaining a plot of land in the center of the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo. The land they occupied had unclear ownership, but the attempt did not pan out. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Making inequality even more glaring

“The covid-19 pandemic laid bare the inequalities,” Lazo stressed.

As an example, he said “there were more deaths on the eastern periphery of Mexico City, where inequality is greater. One factor is distance: it takes five times longer to get to the hospital from the periphery than from the center, so many people don’t even take patients to the hospital.”

In addition, without water for hygiene and hand washing, the disease spreads more readily among the poor.

There is also a disparate power relationship between cities themselves. Tula de Allende, a city of 115,000 inhabitants located 70 kilometers north of the Mexican capital, suffered a major two-day flood in September 2021, not only because of the rains.

Mexico City’s water authorities discharged an excess of rainwater and wastewater into the Tula River that could flood the capital and its outlying neighborhoods, to the detriment of the city downstream, where the river overflow displaced more than 10,000 people and left a hospital without electricity, resulting in the death of 16 patients.

Concerted action is needed. A new governance model based on planning and coordination at a citywide level could be the way forward, said Lazo.

In Rio de Janeiro, Aruan Braga, urban policy coordinator for the Favelas Observatory, told IPS that “building a more equitable and democratic city requires including, in planning, low-income areas that sustain the city in day-to-day life but don’t have the right to participate in decision-making.”

Favelas lining hills are the best-known image of Rio de Janeiro, but there is also a large vulnerable population in low-lying, flood-prone areas. One example is the Maré Complex, where some 130,000 people live in 16 favelas.

On the shores of Guanabara Bay and the Cunha channel, so polluted they are like an open sewer, the complex suffers “floods every year,” said Braga, a sociologist with a master’s degree in development policies, who explained that the Maré Complex was built on a large piece of land reclaimed from mangroves and flood plains.

It was built by settlers relocated from more central favelas or from wealthy and beachside neighborhoods five decades ago, in a wave of “expulsion” from favelas that continues today. Maré also grew because it is next to Avenida Brasil, the main access route to the city center, and because it is home to industrial facilities.

View of a favela on a central hill in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Tereza. The upper part is a middle-class neighborhood of intellectuals and artists. The city’s hillsides are home to many favelas known for their high rates of violent crime. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

New policies for a new model

The four interviewees agreed that public policies are needed to make it possible to start reducing urban inequality in Latin America.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Movements seeking community solutions, “social urbanism”, urban agriculture and mobilization of the population for a more equitable and inclusive city point to the future, according to Guimarães.

Her Rede Nossa São Paulo has conducted studies on inequality that pointed to a difference of up to 22.6 years – from 58.3 to 80.9 years – in life expectancy between poor and rich neighborhoods in the city.

Bogota is in the process of organizing its territorial planning and there is talk of the “30-minute city”, following the example of Paris, which seeks to ensure that no one has to walk more than 15 minutes to do everything they need, Rodriguez said, describing a new model in Latin America.

Members of families threatened with eviction ride in a boat down a mangrove channel in the community of Cuatro Vientos, in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura, on the Salvadoran coast. They denounced to IPS that one of the country's main banks now claims to be the owner of the land where they have lived for 20 years. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador, Dec 6 2021 (IPS)

Small farmer Francisco Martínez pushed his son’s wheelchair to another part of the courtyard of their house, located in a small coastal community in El Salvador, before saying sadly: “It would be a great injustice if they kicked us out of here.”

Martínez, 77, lives with his wife Gloria García, 50, and their severely disabled 21-year-old son Fredy Martínez in the Cuatro Vientos community, formed some 20 years ago by homeless families from different parts of the country.

The settlement is located in San Luis La Herradura, a municipality in the south of the department of La Paz, on the Salvadoran coast.

Martínez, his skin toasted by the sun, added: “Now we have reached the difficult moment when they want to remove us, which is very unfair,” referring to the threat of eviction that is hanging over his family and others in the settlement, from a bank and wealthy families in the area, as they told IPS during a day spent in their community."They are State lands, we have cadastral records that say they are State lands, but when people clear them and fix them up, others want to take them over." -- Mélida Alvarado

Driven by necessity, some 180 poor families settled in Cuatro Vientos, on what they considered to be public land: a narrow 17-kilometer-long strip of land separating the Pacific Ocean and the Jaltepeque estuary, one of the main wetlands in this Central American country.

A paved road runs through the middle of the strip connecting the highly touristic area with the rest of the country.

In addition to Cuatro Vientos, 18 other settlements or communities have sprung up in the area over the past 50 years and have also been threatened with eviction, either by private consortiums or by wealthy families who have beach houses there.

Extreme inequality

On this strip of land, ostentatious wealth coexists with painful poverty.

Some families do have legal title to their plots, the ones that are located along the roadside, lawyer Teresa Hernández of the Foundation for Legal Studies for the Application of Law (Fespad) told IPS.

However, some 40 meters further inland towards the estuary, the situation is different for most of the people, who live in conditions of poverty and without documents certifying that they own the land.

“In general, all 19 communities find themselves in this legally precarious position,” the lawyer explained.

Francisco Martínez, 77, with his wife Gloria García, 50, and their severely disabled 21-year-old son Fredy Martínez pose for a photo in the courtyard of their house in Cuatro Vientos, a settlement formed some 20 years ago by homeless families from various parts of El Salvador. The Martínez family fears that they will be evicted because the property is claimed by one of the country’s main banks. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Fespad and the Movement for the Defense of the Land in El Salvador (Movitierra) are providing legal assistance to the affected families, especially in 12 communities that have organized to fight for their rights.

About 850 families live in these 12 settlements, but the lawyer said she did not know the total number of inhabitants of the 19 communities.

Insecurity of title

According to official figures, about 10 percent of El Salvador’s 6.7 million people are in a position of land tenure insecurity.

Cases like those of the families in Cuatro Vientos, who thought they were living on land that they could call their own because it belonged to the State, but who now face the risk of removal.

The conflict over property rights in this area known as Costa del Sol arises from the fact that the land has a high value as a result of tourism, which drives the construction of hotel complexes.

In addition, for decades it has been impossible to establish exactly which land is privately owned and which belongs to the State, which has generated disputes over land ownership, the Fespad lawyer added.

Tourism businesses such as hotels and restaurants have set up shop there because of the beauty of the area: the sea on one side and the lush estuary, with its mangroves and wildlife, on the other.

Wealthy families have also built beach houses in the area for decades to spend vacations or weekends. That is why the real estate sector is also in high demand in the area.

Boats are moored to private docks in one of the channels of the Jaltepeque estuary. On El Salvador’s Costa del Sol, a narrow 17-kilometer-long strip separates the Pacific Ocean from one of the country’s main wetlands, where luxury homeowners and tourism and real estate companies are threatening to evict poor communities. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Institutions should clarify

Every beach, whether on an estuary or on the sea, belongs to the State, and wealthy families and companies have been buying up adjacent or nearby lands, initially considered private in origin. But after decades of disorder, the limits of what is private and what belongs to the State have become entangled.

Hernández said that in order to clarify these boundaries, the government’s land registry should carry out a cadastral survey to determine the background of these lands and define who owns them. But this has not been done and the communities do not have the resources to carry it out on their own.

She added that, in view of this situation, Fespad and Movitierra requested in 2019 that the governmental Institute of Property Legalization (ILP) conduct an inspection to determine the boundaries between State and private land in at least five communities on the Costa del Sol, as a pilot test.

The covid-19 pandemic stalled the effort, but it was resumed in April.

However, although the investigation into the legal status of the property in these settlements has been completed, the final report has not been released.

“The final report of those inspections has been requested and the ILP has not delivered it to us, the communities or Fespad, as applicants together with Movitierra,” said Hernández.

A group of women from the community of El Mozote, on the Salvadoran coast, express their concern about the uncertainty of not knowing if they will be evicted from their homes built on a plot of land claimed by a real estate company. They are asking the authorities to carry out a complete survey of the land. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Evictions have already started

Threats of eviction, which in some cases have already materialized, are based on the argument that the poor families do not have property titles, while the companies and wealthy families claim to possess them.

These sectors claim part of the land where poor people live, many of whom work in the hotels or in the vacation homes of the opulent families who generally sail their yachts in the estuary.

“There was a hole here, and with the pennies I earned, I filled it in and made my champita (hut) covered with coconut and banana palm leaves,” Martínez told IPS, while taking care of his son in the wheelchair.

On a visit to the area by IPS, the affected families in Cuatro Vientos said the threats come mainly from the private Banco Agrícola, one of the most important banks in the country.

According to the families, the bank owns a plot of land about a block and a half in size – approximately one hectare – where several families built their houses two decades ago believing that it was abandoned land, which is common in the area.

These plots had owners decades ago, but for one reason or another were no longer used and over time became overgrown by weeds.

Now the bank has reportedly found a buyer and wants to remove the families living on that specific plot.

“We did not come to this land to take advantage of anybody, but out of need. I had nowhere to live,” said Martinez, whose small house stands on the disputed land.

According to some estimates, El Salvador has a housing deficit of 1.3 million homes.

Along El Salvador’s Costa del Sol the ostentatious wealth of families who own beach houses and yachts moored at the docks stands in sharp contrast with the poverty of hundreds of families who have built shacks in areas that were considered state property and from which companies and families now want to evict them. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Several families in Cuatro Vientos met with IPS to explain how the situation affects them.

They live with the uncertainty of not knowing when they may be forced by the police to leave their homes, which took them so much effort and sacrifice to build.

“I have sleepless nights, my eye twitches, I have nightmares, I’m so worried,” Alba Díaz told IPS.

Diaz, 48, is a single mother raising three teenage sons and a daughter without many job opportunities. She manages to earn a living by going to take care of her mother and grandfather, for which an uncle pays her 100 dollars a month. She also sells pizzas from time to time.

“We are threatened by the bank, they want to take back the property and sell it, we don’t know exactly,” she added.

But that’s not all.

The bank also seems to be interested in seizing other areas outside the land it owns, plots of land where other families live.

Those affected in Cuatro Vientos mentioned a strange situation in which police officers wearing masks showed up in July accompanying two people who told some families that they were there on behalf of the government to carry out a census.

The two people, who they said were probably representatives of the bank, collected personal identity document numbers, they added.

“I ran, but I couldn’t find them. I asked myself: Masks? Masked policemen don’t come to conduct a census,” said Diaz.

Francisco Martinez’s wife Gloria García confirmed that the hooded men and the two other people came to their house.

“They came here, who knows why. We gave them our identify document numbers and signatures. We don’t know if they came from the bank or from where,” Garcia said.

On Nov. 16, the Banco Agrícola sent an official statement of its position in an e-mail to IPS.

“It is important to clarify that, as an agricultural bank, no eviction action is being considered or planned for the inhabitants of the Cuatro Vientos community,” it stated.

The bank confirmed a day later that it did own a piece of land there since June 2000, but that it sold it in March 2021 and that the property is currently in the process of being registered in the name of the new owner. The bank also denied that any of its representatives had visited the community.

Meanwhile, in another community located on the Costa del Sol strip, El Mozote, some 125 families are also living in uncertainty and threatened with eviction, because a real estate company is trying to evict them, claiming to be the owner of the land.

“They are State lands, we have cadastral records that say they are State lands, but when people clear them and fix them up, others want to take them over,” one of the residents, Mélida Alvarado, an activist in the collective struggle against eviction, told IPS.

Zimbabwean cities like Bulawayo are facing urban sprawl as regional African governments commit to decent and affordable houses. Credit: Ignatius Banda

By Ignatius Banda
Bulawayo, ZIMBABWE , Aug 11 2021 (IPS)

Ndaba Dube, a Bulawayo resident, says he built himself a home on a small piece of land after the authorities kept him on the housing waiting list for more than two decades. The land he chose is in an old township established before Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
“People are building their homes all over the place, and when you ask them, they will tell you council approved it, but I know from my own experience I couldn’t wait any longer,” Dube told IPS.

In the capital city Harare, authorities have recently responded to the practice of residents illegally occupying and building on council land by demolishing the buildings, even in some cases, imposing residential homes. This triggered a national outcry and fear that other municipalities across the country might follow suit.

With the demand for decent and affordable housing increasing in Zimbabwe’s second city, the municipality previously turned to what it called ‘in-fill’ stands, pieces of land that existed as gaps left in old townships, as a solution.

While the city says it has not issued building permits for the past five years, construction of such in-fill stands continues.

The proliferation of building of illegal housing comes at a time UN-Habitat says African governments need to make tough calls to realise the housing-for-all dream.

African finance and housing ministers met in Yaoundé, Cameroon, from June 21 to 24, 2021, where they noted that most African countries are currently facing housing crises driven by high population growth.

Added to that were increased urbanisation, poor urban planning, dysfunctional land markets, rising construction costs, the proliferation of informal settlements, and underdeveloped financial systems, the ministers said

Bulawayo’s urban sprawl has only exposed the extent of the city’s housing crisis, with city officials turning to private landowners and surrounding districts for more land.

While the municipality says it has made efforts to avert congesting urban areas by not issuing permits for in-fill stands, this has not stopped residents such as Dube from constructing their homes in a country where owning a house remains a pipe dream.

“Council recognises that land is inelastic and by all means, urban sprawl needs to be avoided,” said Nesisa Mpofu, Bulawayo municipality spokesperson, in an interview with IPS.

“We do not process individual in-fill stands. It should be noted that no in-fill stands have been processed in the past five years.”

Yet buildings on in-fill stands are sprouting across the city, with some homes being built on wetlands and rocky ground – a practice condemned by city planners.

“If local authorities claim that they are not aware of housing constructions, it may mean they are parallel structures within their system,” said Abigail Siziba. She represents the Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA), which lobbies the municipality on residents’ issues.

“A thorough land audit where red flags are attended to is necessary to ensure those involved in illicit land deals face the law so that residents regain trust in the housing system,” she told IPS.

Zimbabwe is one of several countries that signed the Yaoundé Declaration in June, which seeks affordable housing for all. The leaders recognised that to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, there was a need to accelerate the building of decent, affordable housing.

Zimbabwe’s long-running economic crisis characterised by mass retrenchments and eroded incomes have seen banks suspending housing loans as lenders routinely faced foreclosure and lost their homes.

But the illegal housing constructions have also come at a cost for residents.

Burst sewers have become the order of the day as existing infrastructure has not been upgraded to accommodate the additional houses.

“To be honest, we do not know who approves these homes because ever since these houses were added to our neighbourhood, we are experiencing clogged toilets. Even you report to the municipality nothing happens,” said Mariam Bhebhe, a resident in one of the city’s old townships.

“What we were previously told was that council was not issuing stands, and people were buying the stands from private developers, but it is clear now … this is not a private developer building these houses,” Bhebhe told IPS.

Mpofu insists that the local municipality does not approve of the new buildings.

“Some of these areas would have been left undeveloped when the various suburbs were initially developed, as they were considered difficult areas to develop,” Mpofu told IPS. She added this included rocky terrain, areas that required additional stormwater drains, and that needed deep or special foundations.

Effie Ncube, a community organiser in the city, said the municipality needs to make land allocations transparent if ordinary residents are to benefit from any housing projects.

“There has been a lot of corruption surrounding housing in the city where we have seen multiple allocations of land to individuals simply because they have financial clout,” Ncube told IPS.

“This has led to the exclusion of poor people who cannot raise capital to build their homes. That’s why there are a lot of suspicious housing developments across the city, but no one is being held accountable.”

Early July, the municipality announced its plans to take over part of the land belonging to the country’s largest psychiatric hospital located in the city, citing demand for residential housing, again highlighting the extent of shortage of land in the country’s second-largest metropolis.

The UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda for Africa, working with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and United Cities and Local Government of Africa (UCLGA), says it seeks to support local authorities and government to generate not only the best policy but also to generate data to inform the implementation of SDG 11.

SDG 11 seeks to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe and sustainable.”

According to Oumar Sylla, Africa Regional Director for UN-Habitat, between 800 and 900 million people in Africa currently live in the cities.

UN-Habitat estimates that by 2050, more than half of sub-Sahara Africa’s population will reside in the cities.

The UN agency seeks to reduce what it calls “spatial inequalities” and is “working with cities and municipalities to develop strategies on national urban policy, on housing policy and also, how to embed urbanisation into national development plans.”

Under President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe has established a National Development Strategy for housing that will explore other options for mass housing such as high-rise buildings on the realisation that land is “inelastic,” Mpofu says.

But the country’s economic performance could derail those ambitions.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Unfinished buildings in the Pope Francis neighbourhood, a modern social housing complex, and in the background the Villa 20 shantytown, where some 28,000 people live without basic services, in the south of Buenos Aires. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 24 2018 (IPS)

“We are the people who are excluded from the system,” says Rafael Rivero, sitting in his apartment in a new social housing complex next to one of the largest slums in Buenos Aires. The contrast sums up the complexity of the social reality in the Argentine capital.

Rivero, 66, and his wife, Felina Quita, 10 years older, lived for 38 years in Villa 20, an area of about 30 hectares in the south of the city, a crowded shantytown home to thousands of families who cannot afford regular housing. The neighbourhood has 27,990 inhabitants, according to the 2016 official census.

The plot next door belonged to the Federal Police, who for decades used it as a depot for crashed and abandoned vehicles, which turned it into a source of pollution."It is a big step forward that the authorities have taken the decision to urbanise and are allocating funds to do so. Although the work is progressing slowly, no one is talking about eradicating the villas anymore." -- Pablo Vitale

In 2009, more than a third of Villa 20’s children were found to have high concentrations of lead in their blood, and the courts ordered that the families be evicted.

That task had not yet been completed in 2014, when some 700 destitute families occupied the site. Several months later, in the midst of a social emergency, the occupants agreed to leave and the authorities promised to urbanise the area.

Today the land is the construction site for 90 four-story buildings being built by the city’s Housing Institute (IVC), the agency tasked with the monumental mission of solving the housing deficit of Buenos Aires.

In the Argentine capital proper, 233,000 people or 7.6 percent of the population, live in slums, known locally as villas. This does not count the population of the greater Buenos Aires or the vast low-income suburbs.

The construction project, named the Pope Francis Barrio, for the pope who comes from Argentina, consists of 1,671 apartments and was designed for families to move there from Villa 20. Families began to move in February, and 368 units have already been delivered. The IVC promises to complete the process next year.

“The house we had in the Villa was always getting flooded. Every time it rained, there was more water inside than outside,” said Rivero, who less than two months ago moved to his new home, which has an open plan kitchen, living room and dining room, and one bedroom, since the couple lives alone. There are units with up to four bedrooms, depending on the size of the families.

He’s happy, although he still doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for electricity, water, and municipal taxes. For now, he hasn’t received any of the bills for services, which in the last two years have caused enormous unrest in Argentine society, due to rate increases of up to 800 percent.

Felina Quita (L) and Rafael Rivero, in the kitchen-dining room of the apartment to which they moved in August, after living in a nearby shantytown for decades. They were chosen by the Buenos Aires authorities as beneficiaries of the social housing plan because their house was in an emergency situation due to frequent flooding. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Rivero told IPS in his home, where everything still smells new, that he came to Villa 20 more than 50 years ago, from the province of Jujuy, in northern Argentina.

“I was a boy and my aunt brought me. When the countryside was mechanised, there wasn’t so much work in sugar cane, many people were left without work and came to Buenos Aires. I’ve worked as a baker, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a waiter,” Rivero said. His wife is a retired domestic worker.

Juan Ignacio Maquieyra, president of the IVC, explained to IPS that “we are working towards the integration of shantytowns” into the city.

“Along with the construction of the Pope Francis neighborhood, we are urbanising Villa 20, which involves opening up streets, building infrastructure and leaving open spaces and courtyards, since one of the most serious problems is overcrowding and lack of ventilation,” he said.

The families chosen to move into the new apartments are those whose homes were in the worst condition or must be demolished to open up streets and urbanise.

Many local residents, however, point out that the construction works to urbanise the Villa are significantly slower than the construction of the apartment buildings.

“The city government did not comply with what it had promised. We are still waiting for the sanitation works. The storm drains mix with the sewers, and when it rains and overflows, we keep stepping on excrement,” Rubén Martínez, a 46-year-old man who grew up and still lives in the Villa, told IPS.

He is one of the members of the Mesa de Urbanización, a group taking part in the urbanisation process.

Martínez echoes what many others suspect: that the Pope Francis neighborhood was built to “hide” Villa 20 from view of another construction in the area – the Olympic Village, housing the athletes of the Youth Games that are being held this month in Buenos Aires.

The entrance to a block of completed buildings in the new Pope Francis neighbourhood, which will have 90 buildings and 1,671 apartments. The residents of the neighboring Villa 20 shantytown in the south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, have begun to be resettled in the new social housing units. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

According to a survey presented by the government this year, there are 4,228 slums and shantytowns in Argentina, 45 percent of which emerged after the severe economic and social crisis of 2001-2002 which cut short the government of Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001).

Three and a half million people live in the slums, out of a total population of 44 million.

Social conditions are once again growing worse today, as acknolwedged by President Mauricio Macri himself, who is implementing an austerity plan agreed in September with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The most complicated situation is found in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where there are hundreds of villas and child poverty exceeds 50 percent.

This year, the government introduced in Congress a bill agreed with social organisations, to recognise the ownership of their land by the residents of the shantytowns. It was presented as a first step towards the recognition of more rights.

But it is only in Buenos Aires proper that the authorities have begun to take steps towards the integration of the villas.

“Slum-dwellers in Buenos Aires have been demanding urbanisation for decades, but only in recent years has the state recognised that right. The initial impulse came from court rulings,” Horacio Corti, ombudsman for the City of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

The Ombudsman’s Office defends the vulnerable in the local justice system, which in 2011, for example, ordered the urbanisation of the Rodrigo Bueno Villa, which is close to Puerto Madero, a posh waterfront neighborhood.

For Pablo Vitale, of the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), which for 15 years has been working on legal support for community organisations that fight for regularisation of the villas, “it is a big step forward that the authorities have taken the decision to urbanise and are allocating funds to do so. Although the work is progressing slowly, no one is talking about eradicating the villas anymore.”

Vitale, however, told IPS that the urbanisation plans have begun in villas that due to their location could be the most coveted by real estate interests.

“That could indicate that the objective is for the market to end up evicting people, driving out the people who can’t afford the higher costs involved in paying taxes and rates for public services that formality brings,” he warned.

Cheila Patricia Souza, who participated in the São João 588 Occupation of an old hotel converted into housing for 80 families, stands in front of a collage of photos of the protagonists of the struggle for a home of their own, in the centre of São Paulo, Brazil. As in similar battles, most of the people involved were women. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO/SÃO PAULO, Mar 7 2018 (IPS)

“Here we empower women and we do not tolerate domestic violence, which we treat as our own, not as an intra-family, issue,” says Lurdinha Lopes, a leader of the squatting movement in Brazil.

She emphasises the rules of the Charter of Principles governing the Manoel Congo Occupation, through which decent housing was secured for 42 poor families, in the heart of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Other rules encourage children to stay in school and prohibit drugs and alcoholic beverages in the hallways and common areas of the 10-story occupied building, she told IPS at the site. The more than 120 residents include 27 children.

Women make up the immense majority and “about 90 percent of the owners” of the apartments in the building, which was a squat when it was occupied in 2007 by the National Housing Struggle Movement (MNLM).

“Some of the women were escaping abuse from their ex-partners,” others have gone back to school, said Lopes, ahead of International Women’s Day, on Mar. 8, given the theme this year by UN Women: “Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives.”

The squatting movement in Rio de Janeiro is less well-known than the one in São Paulo. They occupy abandoned buildings, arguing that the Brazilian constitution of 1988 stipulates that all property must fulfill a social function.

“Rio de Janeiro has a tradition of squatting, but the occupations are not very visible because they occur outside the city centre,” said Lopes, local coordinator of the MNLM, most of whose activists are women.

The Manoel Congo Occupation, named in honour of the leader of a black slave rebellion in 1838, is a milestone for its success in settling poor families in a key central part of the city. The building is right next to the city council, and just 30 metres from Cinelândia, the popular name of a major public square where the largest political demonstrations are held in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.

“It’s a miracle to win a place in the capital’s central corridor,” said Elizete Napoleão, a member of the MNLM’s national leadership and one of the heads of the movement in Rio.

The building originally belonged to the National Social Security Institute (INSS).

The 42 apartments have been renovated and have all the necessary amenities. All that remains is to rebuild the ground floor, which Lopes believes will be ready “in a month or a month and a half.”

Elizete Napoleão (L) and Lurdinha Lopes, coordinators of the National Housing Struggle Movement (MNLM), lead the Manoel Congo Occupation, which provided a home for 42 poor families in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

It is the result of a long battle that included numerous street marches, invasions of the Caixa Econômica Federal – a state bank that is an agent of federal government social policy – and occupations of the INSS offices.

After occupying the property, resisting pressure and eviction orders, and winning ownership for social housing purposes, the movement finally obtained financing to reform the building and adapt it for housing.

In 2007, the political scenario was favourable. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, of the leftist Workers’ Party, was beginning his second consecutive term and two years later he would launch the “My House My Life” programme, a new attempt to reduce the housing deficit in Brazil, currently estimated at six million units.

Finding alternatives in vacant buildings in the centre or central neighborhoods of large cities is the approach taken by the MNLM and similar movements.

“In the port area and the centre of Rio de Janeiro there are two or three hundred unoccupied buildings,” Napoleão told IPS.

In the city centre there is access to services, schools, hospitals, jobs and the best places for working as street vendors, said Lopes.

Meanwhile, neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where the poor are generally forced to move, are controlled by drug traffickers and militias – armed bands led by former police officers who control services and demand monthly “protection” payments by merchants.

Women also lead the struggle for housing in São Paulo

Repopulating the centre helps to revitalise run-down historic districts in the big cities of Brazil, said Antonia Ferreira Nascimento, a coordinator of the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) in São Paulo.

Her group occupied the old Columbia Hotel in 2010, on Avenida São João, a key reference point in Brazil’s largest city. Of the 80 families living in the hotel, “70 percent are headed by women,” estimated Ferreira, a married mother of three who has been involved in the struggle for housing for homeless families for 24 years.

“Our goal is not just housing itself, but to denounce the housing deficit, demand public policies, ensure rights, health and education for everyone,” she told IPS during a visit to the building, explaining her organisation’s struggle for urban reform.

The facade of the building occupied by 42 homeless families since 2007 in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to low-cost housing, its residents celebrate having escaped from the poor outlying neighbourhoods that are at the mercy of the violence of drug trafficking and vigilante gangs of former or off-duty police. Now they have access to public services, schools and better jobs. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

She estimates that the centre of São Paulo has 20,000 available housing units that have been empty for years and can thus be expropriated by the public authorities to serve “the social interest” of offering housing to those who need it.

Nazaré Brasil, a painter, promotes cultural life in the new community. Her unit is an example of how to adapt a simple hotel room into a comfortable apartment where she and her elderly mother live.

At her initiative, the squat receives artists and activists who stay for a few weeks to learn about the experience and, eventually, reflect it in art or articles.

A larger-scale and more complicated case is the so-called Mauá Occupation, in a hotel near the Luz railway station, where 237 families lived for 10 years under threat of eviction, until they were finally granted permission to live there in November 2017.

The city government agreed with the former owner to purchase the six-story building which has three U-shaped wings, for the families squatting there. The struggle was headed by Ivanete Araujo, of the Movement for Housing in the Struggle for Justice (MMLJ).

There are dozens of activist groups in São Paulo, a good part of them assembled in the Front for Housing Struggles (FLM), which launched an offensive in October 2017, when 620 homeless families occupied eight buildings in and around São Paulo.

Many of the leaders at the forefront of the movement are women, who are the main victims of the housing deficit and the main interested parties in public sector housing policies.

Felicia Mendes, an activist for 40 years, coordinates the FLM on the south side of São Paulo.

She is currently leading the struggle to obtain land to settle 868 families living in precarious conditions in the so-called Parque do Engenho Occupation, actually a wooden shack camp in Capão Redondo, a neighbourhood of almost 300,000 people at the southern end of the city of São Paulo.

Mendes obtained housing in a previous occupation, of Chácara do Conde, also in the south, but closer to the city centre than Capão Redondo.

“In addition to housing, people need to be offered a livelihood,” said the activist who “ran away from home at age 17,” lived in several Brazilian states, had “the privilege of studying theatre” and lost her husband because of her dedication to the struggle for housing, but remains committed to the cause of the homeless.

Excerpt:

The veranda of a house which has been used to provide shelter for four families, including the family of retiree Dania de la Cruz. In the eastern Cuban city of Baracoa, 167 people are still living in shelters after Hurricane Matthew destroyed their homes in October 2016. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
BARACOA, Cuba, Mar 23 2017 (IPS)

Clearings with fallen trees in the surrounding forests, houses still covered with tarpaulins and workers repairing the damage on the steep La Farola highway are lingering evidence of the impact of Hurricane Matthew four months ago, in the first city built by the Spanish conquistadors in Cuba.

Baracoa, a 505-year-old world heritage city in eastern Cuba, located in a vulnerable area between the coast, mountains and the rivers that run across it, is showing signs of fast recovery of its infrastructure, thanks in part to the application of its own formulas to overcome the effects of the Oct. 4-5, 2016 natural disaster.

“The ways sought to deal with the situation have been different, innovative. Necessity led us to involve the local population in addressing a phenomenon which affected more than 90 per cent of the homes,” said Esmeralda Cuza, head of the office in charge of the recovery effort in the people’s council of Majubabo, an outlying neighborhood along the coast.

Standing next to a mural announcing the delivery of bottles of water donated to the families affected by the hurricane, the 64-year-old public official, with experience in dealing with disasters since 1982, told IPS that “more local solutions were sought” before, during and after Hurricane Matthew hit the province of Guantánamo.

Internationally renowned for its effectiveness in protecting human lives during climate disasters, Cuba’s disaster management model is also undergoing changes within the current reforms carried out by the government of Raúl Castro, which includes local responses during the evacuation of local residents and the rebuilding process.

“We had some experience in this, but never with the magnitude and organisational level of this one,” said Cuza, referring to what the strongest hurricane in the history of Guantánamo meant for this city.

Workers unload materials for the reconstruction of a building damaged by Hurricane Matthew, on the seaside promenade of the historic city of Baracoa, in the eastern province of Guantánamo, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In a city where most houses have lightweight roofs, the hurricane wreaked havoc in 24,104 of the 27,000 houses in the municipality of Baracoa, population of 81,700.

The local government reports that 3,529 homes were totally destroyed, 3,764 were partially destroyed, 10,126 lost their roofs, and 6,685 suffered partial damage to the roofs.

This figure does not include multi-family buildings that were also damaged. One of these, located on the seafront, is waiting to be demolished. In addition, 525 government buildings were affected, as well as the power and communication networks, water pies, roads and bridges.

Authorities say 85 per cent of the city has been restored, including 17, 391 houses that have been repaired.

“At least here all the houses have roofs,” said Cuza, talking about the restoration of the 1,153 damaged houses in Majubabo. In the rest of Baracoa, 90 per cent of the damaged roofs were fixed, and you can still see some houses with no roofs or covered with tarpaulins on a drive through the city.

Like everyone else, the office headed by Cuza is waiting for more materials to finish restoring the damaged interior of the houses.

In the case of homes that were completely destroyed, authorities provided the so-called “temporary housing facility“, which consists of basic construction materials. With this support and salvaged materials, 3,466 families rebuilt part of their homes to be able to leave the shelters and shared houses where they were initially placed.

The remains of boats and bushes destroyed by Hurricane Matthew scattered on a beach in Baracoa bear witness to the violence of the biggest climate disaster ever to hit the province of Guantánamo, in eastern Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

This set of measures seems to be the reason for the rapid improvement in the city´s landscape, through which foreign tourists stroll. With painted facades and big signboards, the 283 rental houses and state-run tourist facilities have been operating since early November, when high season started.

Some parts of the seafront promenade are still impassable while workers fix the two-kilometre wall, which barely defended the city from the waves. Because of their vulnerability to the sea, 21 coastal communities are to be relocated before 2030, including Baracoa.

“The construction materials programme was launched to respond to the demand,“ said Rodolfo Frómeta, who is in charge of the state-run company that groups 12 small factories of natural rock materials and blocks, which plans to produce earthquake-resistant concrete slabs for roofs this month.

Baracoa has the largest number of these factories, which also operate in the affected neighbouring municipalities of Imías and Maisí. Up to February, the 22 factories in the area had produced 227,500 blocks, using artisanal moulds and rocks collected from the surrounding land and surface quarries.

“We only import the cement and steel,” said Frómeta, referring to the factories, of which three are state-run and the rest are private. “But all of them receive government support, like these mills that grind stones,“ he told IPS in Áridos Viera, a company in Mabujabo.

A psychologist by profession, Amaury Viera founded in 2015 this private enterprise, with the aim of turning it into a cooperative. Eight workers obtain sand, granite, gravel and stone powder. “Our main activity now is making blocks, some 800 a day, although we want to increase that to 1,200,“ said Viera.

With his bag full of tools, the young bricklayer and carpenter Diolnis Silot is heading home for lunch. “I have worked in the construction of 35 houses since Matthew, two were fully rebuilt and the rest involved replacing lightweight roofs. Most of them received state subsidies,” he told IPS.

Rodolfo Frómeta, in charge of the state company that groups 12 small local factories of natural rocky materials and blocks, next to a stone mill, near the city of Baracoa in eastern Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

A few metres away, the owner of a private cafeteria, Yudelmis Navarro, is installing a new window and making other improvements to his house. “The hurricane carried away the roof and some things from indoors. The government replaced the roof for free and now I am doing the smaller-scale repairs at my own expense,“ he said.

“People who expect everything for free will not solve very much,“ Navarro said.

On crutches, retiree Dania de la Cruz, one of the 167 people still living in shelters in the municipality, watches people going home for lunch, from the doorway of the large house where she lives with her daughter and three other families. “I used to live with my daughter along the Duaba river, on a farm, where I lost almost everything. I won’t go back there. We don’t know when or where we will have our new house,” she said.

“The longest-lasting damages were in agriculture and housing,” said Luis Sánchez, the mayor of Baracoa. He stressed that the recovery strategy included modernising the new infrastructure and making it more resistant, for example in communications.

So far, he said, 3,900 low-interest bank loans were approved for people to rebuild their homes, in addition to 700 subsidies, and more than 10,000 allowances for low-income families. Some families paid for the rebuilding out of their own pocket.

“And we have gained experience in evacuation,“ said Sánchez, who mentioned the use of traditional shelters in caves and rural buildings known as “varas en tierra” made of wood and thatched roofs that reach all the way to the ground.

A street in Hornos, a low-income neighbourhood on the west side of Greater Buenos Aires, where local residents are waiting to receive the deeds to their property, as the key to access to other rights and public services that will provide them with a dignified urban life. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MORENO, Argentina, Jul 28 2016 (IPS)

Now that the wind no longer blows her roof off and her house belongs to her, Cristina López feels safe in the shantytown where she lives on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. But she and her neighbours still need to win respect for many more rights they have been denied.

She is not complaining because her situation was much more difficult before she and her teenage son moved four years ago to Hornos, a newly emerging neighbourhood in the municipality of Moreno, to the west of Buenos Aires.

She paid rent until the municipal authorities granted her a plot of land where she built a makeshift home. “Since I built it by myself it wasn´t stable, and a storm tore the roof off,” López told IPS. After that, she and her son stayed at the homes of various friends and neighbours.

Her new house was built with the help of Techo (Roof), a non-governmental organisation that promotes decent housing in urban slums and shantytowns throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, with a collaborative effort by local residents and volunteers.“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good.” - Juan Pablo Duhalde

In Hornos, home to 200 families, and the adjacent neighbourhood of Los Cedros, where 1,200 families live, Techo Argentina has built 225 small one-family units. Simple and low-cost, they are put together in just two days, with the aim of resolving housing emergencies.

But for the 59-year-old López, who does odd jobs to support herself and her 15-year-old son, the little prefab house has meant the difference between indigence and a dignified life.

“It was a total change. Nothing compares to this. You realise that when you have a house, you start to change your way of life, because you know it’s your own, and although I don’t have the ‘papers’ for this land yet, the house is mine. No one will take it from me,” she said.

The papers she mentioned are the property deed that she is to be issued by the municipal authorities who granted her the plot of land; not having received them yet makes her nervous.

“There´s always some shrewd person who will show up and claim the land is theirs. Until the municipality says ‘this belongs to you’, we won´t feel completely secure,” she said.

López added that in order to stop being a “second-class citizen”, she also needs utilities: running water, sewerage and electricity with a meter “so it isn’t cut off all the time.”

Furthermore, Hornos, 42 km from the capital and over 20 from the county seat, means she is far away from everything. “We have no school or health clinic nearby, no paved roads, and ambulances won´t come here – we need everything,” she said.

Land and inequality

“It is acknowledged that rights are violated in many areas, and slums are the main expression of inequality and the violation of rights,” Techo Argentina regions director, Francisco Susmel, told IPS.

“Without secure ownership they have no guarantee that they won’t be evicted, and that they can go ahead and improve their homes and their surroundings,” he said, adding that it also undermines their right to access to public services.

Among the issues found by a 2013 survey carried out by Techo Argentina in 1,834 slums home to a total of 432,800 families in the biggest cities in the country was the right to land – a problem common to shantytowns around Latin America.

The report says that 64 percent of land in these informal settlements is prone to flooding, 41 percent is located less than 10 metres away from a river or canal, and 25 percent is less than 10 metres away from a garbage dump.

“Land is a factor that conditions inequality because today it is in the hands of a select group of people and isn´t available to the rest of the population,” sociologist Juan Pablo Duhalde, director of Techo International´s social research centre, told IPS.

According to Paola Bagnera, author of the book “The right to the city in the production of urban land”, published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), land is one of the key factors of inequality in the exercise of the right to the city.

“When we´re talking about urban land, we are referring to the basic foundation of the city…where the streets and blocks are laid out, and which requires the presence of grids (water, power and sewage, etc),” Bagnera, an architect who is an expert in urban planning and urban poverty at Argentina’s National University of the Litoral, told IPS.

“The value of land is directly related to location (near or far), provision (or absence) of services and infrastructure, and environmental characteristics (which lead to varying levels of exposure to risk),” she added.

For example, the construction of developments like gated communities in suburban areas in Argentina in the 1990s drove up prices of land on the outskirts of cities that until then was inhabited by the poor and was worth very little.

This has become one of the decisive elements in the habitat of low-income segments of the population in large cities, as they are pushed farther and farther to the outskirts or packed more and more densely into existing slums in the cities themselves, Bagnera said.

She pointed, for example, to slums that grow “upwards” in large cities like Buenos Aires, and to soaring property sale and rental prices in those areas.

“With regard to Latin America, to conditions in the slums, when the market makes decisions about the distribution of land, we are governing ourselves in an inefficient manner with no proper view to the future,” said Duhalde.

The expert said the right to access to urban land should be one of the central issues of debate at the third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), to be held in the capital of Ecuador in October, which is to give rise to a New Urban Agenda.

“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good,” said Duhalde.

“A variety of institutions are needed, in the government, the social sector, academia, different interest groups, to be part of the equitable distribution of resources, in this case land, which we must remember has a social function. It is not merchandise.”

Bagnera proposes increasing the value of urban land through the incorporation of infrastructure and improvements.

“That means the generation of community organisation processes through housing cooperatives, groups or social organisations that undertake their own processes of urbanisation and provision of infrastructure on collectively-acquired areas of land,” she said.

“And fundamentally with the participation of the state, promoting inclusive policies of access to services, and contributing to the generation of public-private urban planning arrangements,” she said.

These policies “tend to reduce the costs of infrastructure, providing public land, or based on the production of urban land by the state itself,” she added.

“Bajo Autopista”, a slum in the Villa 61 shantytown wedged under an expressway, just a few blocks from Retiro, one of the most upscale neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires. At least 111 million of Latin America’s urban inhabitants live in slums. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 7 2016 (IPS)

For the inhabitants of “Bajo Autopista” (Under the Freeway), a slum built under an expressway in the Argentine capital, “they” are the people who live in areas with everything that is denied to “us” – a simple definition of social inclusion and a metaphor for urban inequality.

Karina Ríos’ roof is the Illia freeway, one of the main accesses to Buenos Aires. The shantytown is at the edge of Villas 31 and 31 Bis, where some 60,000 people live just a few metres away from El Retiro, one of the poshest neighbourhoods in the capital.

Rios gets light and ventilation through the space between the two halves of the elevated expressway, which is the roof for her two dark, damp rooms with bare brick walls where she lives with one of her daughters.“[I]n the past 20 years, the general tendency seen in Latin America was the growth of urban inequality.” -- Elkin Velásquez

“Ambulances won’t come in here unless the police accompany them. That’s because here, as the police say, a ‘negrito’ (poor, dark-skinned person) who dies is just another negrito. For them, we negritos are nobody,” Ríos told IPS.

That’s how her son Saúl, 19, died last year, when he was stabbed in a fight, defending a friend. The knife perforated his liver and spleen, and he bled to death, she said, because he wasn’t “one of them.”

“If the ambulance hadn’t taken so long to get here, my son would be alive today,” lamented Ríos.

As an activist with the community organisation “Powerful Throat”, Ríos represents her neighbourhood now, demanding better living conditions. The main demand is “urbanisation”.

“We slum-dwellers are stigmatised. And it’s because we’re not urbanised, we don’t have decent streets,” she said.

“When we look for work, we don’t say where we live because if you give an address from here, they won’t hire you. ‘Villeros’ (people who live in ‘villas miseria’, the name for slums in Argentina) are all seen as thieves.”

For Ríos, urbanisation means streets have names and are paved. The streets here, most of which are dirt, are muddy and impassable when it rains.

It also means there are clinics. “There is a health post but the doctors only see five patients (a day) because they aren’t getting paid, and they attend the kids outside. They weigh the babies naked outside in this terrible cold,” she said.

Nor are there basic public services. The list of demands is long: “We need sewers, electric power. Fires happen here because everyone is illegally connected, and short-circuits happen and the houses start to burn,” said Ríos.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, with a total population of 625 million, 472 million people live in cities, including more than 111 million (23.5 percent) who live in slums or shantytowns like this one, according to a regional report by U.N.-Habitat and other organisations.

A muddy unpaved street in Villa 31, a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires that is home to some 60,000 people. In the background are seen buildings in one of the poshest districts of the capital, just 200 metres away. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The report, “Construction of More Equitable Cities: Public Policies for Inclusion in Latin America”, states that despite the reduction in income inequality in urban areas in the region since the 1990s, the number of slum-dwellers increased in at least one-third of Latin American cities.

“The first thing the report says is that in the past 20 years, the general tendency seen in Latin America was the growth of urban inequality,” said Elkin Velásquez, director of U.N.-Habitat for Latin America and the Caribbean.

This inequality creates cities of the excluded inside large cities, where access to rights is unequal.

“We should understand ‘the right to the city’ as the possibility and the right of each citizen to have access to high-quality public goods and services in cities,” Velásquez told IPS from the regional U.N.-Habitat office in Rio de Janeiro.

It also includes “access to all possible opportunities for personal development, family development, community development, and of course all of the elements that make optimal quality of life in the city possible,” he said.

But this right is not accessible to the people who live in “Bajo Autopista” or other “favelas”, “cantegriles”, “ranchos”, “tugurios”, “callampas” or “pueblos jóvenes”, among the dozens of terms used for slums in Latin America.

“Them” and “us”, again – the divide between two for-now irreconcilable worlds.

The region is hosting the third U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) Oct. 17-20 in Quito, Ecuador, which will seek solutions to combat urban inequality.

“This is another world. They are clearly two very different worlds. Here everyone knows each other, everyone is friends, and when you go out there it’s not just that no one knows you, or that it’s not the same way of life, but out there you live with stigma, discrimination,” said computer technician Ariel Pérez Sueldo.

For this resident of Villa 31, the most pressing need is security or safety, in a broader, more inclusive sense.

“Not just from the police, but in terms of the power lines, the sewers, the streets. There are places where people, to get to their homes, have to wade through knee-deep mud. There are places where power lines hang down, and kids can be electrocuted. Safety also in the sense of having a place that fire fighters and ambulances can get to,” he said.

To include these “excluded cities”, a new appreciation of them is necessary, said Alicia Ziccardi at the Institute for Social Research of the Autonomous National University of Mexico, who is also an expert in social and urban issues in the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).

“In the case of Mexico City, for example, the ‘colonias populares’ (a term used for slums) are vital spaces full of life where people have managed to have a habitat that is much better, sometimes, than the ones they are given with homes produced by housing policies that force them to live in distant outlying areas without services,” she told IPS.

“I think what is needed now is a new appreciation of self-production,” said Ziccardi, the editor of the book “Processes of urbanization of poverty and new forms of social exclusion; the challenges facing social policies in Latin American cities in the 21st century”, published by Clacso.

In Ziccardi’s view, “the social production of housing means governments have the capacity to make a public version of these neighbourhoods created by the people, because the results will surely be better than when popular housing is turned into a commodity.”

It’s as simple, according to Pérez Sueldo, as “having what everyone has: an address where they can install public services. Just be able to live normally.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Nora Pavón and one of her daughters in the informal garbage dump behind their home. The swamp acts as a sewer in Villa Inflamable, in the suburb of Avellaneda on the south side of Buenos Aires. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AVELLANEDA, Argentina, Sep 18 2015 (IPS)

Children have been poisoned by lead in Villa Inflamable, a shantytown on the south side of the capital of Argentina. Resettling their families involves a socioenvironmental process as complex as the sanitation works in one of the most polluted river basins in the world.

As soon as you enter Villa Inflamable, which is located right in the Dock Sud petrochemical hub in the Buenos Aires suburb of Avellaneda, you taste and feel chemicals and dust particles in your throat, saliva and lungs.

But in this shantytown, where more than 1,500 families are exposed to industrial pollution in precarious homes built on top of soil contaminated with toxic waste, the children suffer the problem in their blood.

“When she was one, she had 55 µg of lead in her blood. I had to put her in the hospital,” Brenda Ardiles, a local resident, told IPS, referring to her daughter, who is now three years old. Her other daughter, eight months old, is also suffering from lead poisoning.

Her mother-in-law, Nora Pavón, whose four children also have lead poisoning, said “Every night they get nosebleeds, they can’t stand the headaches, their bones hurt, but since there’s no transportation at night I can’t take them to the emergency room until the next morning.”

Lead poisoning in children is defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as a blood lead level of greater than 10 micrograms (µg) per decilitre of blood.

Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities and other chronic health problems, such as stunted growth, hyperactivity and impaired hearing. Young children are the most vulnerable.

“One of my daughters is in third grade and the other is in fourth and they don’t know how to read. The doctors said the delay was caused by lead,” said Pavón.

Villa Inflamable suffers from all of the environmental problems that plague the 64-km Matanzas-Riachuelo river, which cuts across 14 Buenos Aires municipalities before it flows into the Río de la Plata or River Plate. Of the more than 120,000 families living in 280 slums along the river, 18,000 are set to be relocated.

On one hand are the companies that pollute the river: petrochemical plants, oil refineries, chemical and fuel storage sites, and toxic waste processing plants.

On the other are the problems typical of poverty, such as substandard housing, flood-prone land, clandestine garbage dumps and a lack of sanitation.

“That lagoon is putrid, I don’t know what they dump there,” said Pavón, pointing to a swamp behind her home surrounded by trash, which functions as a natural sewer in the neighbourhood.

Of the five million people living in the river basin, 35 percent have no piped water and 55 percent have no sewage services.

“A lot of kids have diarrhea. The water pipes are polluted and the clandestine connections aren’t safe,” said Claudia Espínola, with the Junta Vecinal Sembrando Juntos, an organisation of local residents that jugs of clean drinking water in Villa Inflamable.

The industrial area in the Riachuelo, with the port in the background, in Buenos Aires. There are 13,000 companies registered by ACUMAR along the riverbank, 7,000 of which are industrial. The agency has identified 1,254 toxic substances. Some 900 factories have presented reconversion plans. Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

In 2008, the Supreme Court ordered the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin Authority (ACUMAR) – created in 2006 – to clean up the area. In 2011, ACUMAR established an integral environmental clean-up plan.

The plan, whose goals include sustainable development, involves the reconversion of factories, the clean-up of rivers and riverbanks, garbage collection and treatment, water treatment and drainage works, and slum redevelopment or relocation.

It covers a total of 1,600 projects to be completed by 2024, including the construction of 1,900 housing units, with a total investment of four billion dollars.

“They offered us another place, but I said no because we are three families, 15 people living in this house. We couldn’t have fit in the other one, even if we worked wonders,” said Pavón, who did accept the offer of a second housing unit, although she complained that there wasn’t room for the children to play.

Many families did not accept the resettlement, for a variety of reasons. Some did not like the houses offered, while others were simply unaware of how serious the contamination was in their neighbourhood.

“Sometimes the houses are small, and many families are used to large lots. Others work or have their businesses in their homes, they’re garbage recyclers, and they don’t know how they could continue to work there,” Espínola told IPS.

Another reason, more difficult to solve, is the rivalry between the football teams of the old neighbourhood and the new one where they are to be resettled, also in the suburb of Avellaneda.

“It’s a longstanding problem between the fans of the Dock Sud and San Telmo clubs, a rivalry that is sometimes violent. It’s a cultural problem that we think we can work through, which we’re trying to do,” she said.

In Villa Inflamable, an environmental health centre now monitors the levels of contamination.

But according to Leandro García Silva, the head of environment and sustainable development in the Defensoría del Pueblo de la Nación, or ombudsperson’s office, which is monitoring compliance with the court-ordered clean-up, a risk map is needed first.

“The health system doesn’t have many tools to act on illnesses arising from environmental questions because the doctor can’t write a prescription for cleaning up the environment. We need to adapt public health tools to this new problem,” he said.

A street in Villa Inflamable, a shantytown in southern Buenos Aires, in the Dock Sud petrochemical complex on the banks of the Matanzas-Riachuelo River. In that neighbourhood, more than 1,500 families are exposed to industrial pollution and toxic waste, which are poisoning their children. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

At the same time, ACUMAR has undertaken ambitious infrastructure projects, like the construction of an 11-km sewage collector and an 11.5-km outfall, with 840 million dollars in financing from the World Bank. The project, which will prevent the direct discharge of untreated sewage into the Río de la Plata, is to be completed in 2016.

ACUMAR director of institutional relations Antolín Magallanes told IPS that the collector is a tunnel on one side of the Riachuelo to carry sewage to two settling tanks in Dock Sud and Berazategui. The tank is already operating in the latter.

“The collector is very important because 70 or 80 percent of the pollution in the Riachuelo comes from sewage. This will almost completely resolves the issue,” he said.

In addition, six waterfall aeration stations will be built to add oxygen to the water, projected by the Argentina’s water and sanitation utility, AySa, and the University of Buenos Aires.

“The clean-up chapter is extremely important; the planned infrastructure works will provide greater sanitation and treatment, above all in sewage effluent and the potable water supply,” said Javier García Espil, coordinator of the Riachuelo team in the Defensoría.

“But if this is not accompanied by environmental management – that is, zoning, monitoring of industries, flood control, and new forms of using this territory – it would be a limited response,” he told IPS.

ACUMAR stepped up inspections in this region, which accounts for 30 percent of Argentina’s GDP.

“We have around 13,000 registered companies, of which some 7,000 are industrial, and we have identified 1,254 pollutants. Some 900 have already presented reconversion plans,” said ACUMAR’s Magallanes.

The Defensoría recognises these advances but says the credit made available for the reconversions and strategic plans has been insufficient.

“The problem is not simply inspecting and adjusting some process, which is necessary but is part of a bigger problem: defining what kind of industries we want in the future – a major pending challenge,” said the García Espil.

“New mechanisms have to be put in place: environmental management with zoning, taking into consideration the capacity of ecosystems, and the complexity of the territory, involving social participation,” said García Silva.

It has been seven years of complex struggle to remedy two centuries of neglect of a river basin which according to Magallanes “has been the historic refuge of millions of people who didn’t have anywhere to go because of social problems.”

Pavón, an immigrant from the northern province of Chaco, summed it up: “I would go back to the Chaco, which is healthier and nicer for raising kids, but there’s no work. I saw on the news that a kid died of malnutrition there.”

She tried to return to her hometown anyway, “to see if the kids’ lead blood levels went down.” But the attempt failed because she couldn’t find work. Between malnutrition and lead, she had to choose lead.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Migrants send a message – “We are humans, not animals”. Credit: Amnesty International France

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 13 2015 (IPS)

Human rights groups are calling for a sustainable solution to the migrant crisis in Europe, especially following the dismantling of refugee camps in Paris and Calais, France, over the past two weeks.

In one of the latest incidents, tense confrontations occurred in the French capital when security forces evicted migrants from a park last Thursday, with activists later blocking the police from entering a former barracks where the migrants were temporarily sheltered.“The state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum” – Marco Perolini, Amnesty International

Amnesty International, present as observer during the operation, said that the state needs to do more to find housing solutions for migrants who have been sleeping on the street and in public parks.

“The state can evict people for various reasons, but migrants also have rights,” Stephan Oberreit, director general of Amnesty International France, told IPS.

“If the state informed people, explained the regulations and offered decent shelters, then that would be fine,” he added. “But this is not the case. They are not providing enough shelters for migrants and asylum seekers.”

Some of the migrants in the park – at the Bois Dormoy in the city’s 18th district – had already been evicted from a makeshift camp set up under a metro overpass, where conditions had become increasingly unsanitary.

Others came from a second cleared camp in northern Paris where about 350 migrants had been living. Most of those affected are from Sudan but there are also Somalis, Eritreans, Egyptians and other nationalities among the groups, officials said.

Activists and migrants protest evictions in Paris. Credit: Amnesty International France

The authorities had additionally evicted about 140 migrants from two makeshifts camps in Calais, northern France, where more than 2,000 migrants have been living in rough conditions in tent settlements.

On Thursday, at the Bois Dormoy, in incidents that lasted late into the night, the migrants took steps to organise their own response to the security operations after they had been told to leave the park. They held meetings among themselves and liaised with activists – who have been providing food and support – to make their concerns known.

City officials initially offered about 60 places at state shelters but eventually increased the number to accommodate more of the migrants, following negotiations. Rights groups feared, however, that many would still remain homeless.

“The French authorities cannot just keep moving these migrants and asylum seekers from pillar to post without seeking viable alternatives – the state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum,” said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Discrimination in Europe.

“Real and viable alternative solutions must be found to give these migrants and refugees adequate shelter and services, including access to asylum procedures,” he added.

Other groups such as GISTI (Group for Information and Support to Immigrants), told IPS that they were also providing legal assistance to the migrants, with their lawyers representing asylum seekers at court hearings.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said she would like to open a “welcome centre” for migrants who may be en route to other countries, or who may eventually decide to seek asylum in France.

“We are facing a huge increase in the numbers, and we need to open some kind of welcome centre,” she told French media. “One thing is certain – they cannot sleep on the streets.”

Such a centre would only be for temporary stays, and groups such as Amnesty International say that more permanent solutions are urgent and necessary.

This week, the European Commission, the executive branch of the 28-nation European Union (EU), called for member states to endorse its proposal to resettle 40,000 migrants as the boats keep arriving at Italian and Greek shores.

According to United Nations figures, more than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean since the start of 2015, and about 1,800 have died in the perilous boat trips, as they flee poverty and warfare in their homelands.

Thousands have entered France, often in an attempt to reach other countries such as Britain.  But while both France and Britain are against the proposed EU quotas, the number of people who would be relocated in France is just a “drop in the ocean”, Oberreit of Amnesty International told IPS.

“We can’t keep looking at temporary solutions,” Oberreit warned. “Individuals must be able to have a proper process of their situation in order to have refugee status, and migrants must have some form of shelter so they don’t have to be out in the street and go hungry.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Sipho Mthathi
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 12 2015 (IPS)

Africa is known as the ‘paradox of plenty’. How can a continent so rich in natural resources be so poor?

Economic growth is predicted to increase by 4.5 percent across the continent this year, despite falling oil prices and the Ebola crisis. South Africa’s economy, the second biggest in Africa is expected to continue to grow by 3.5 percent this year; Nigeria will grow by an enviable 5.5 percent.

Sipho Mthathi, Executive Director of Oxfam South Africa

However, millions across Africa are struggling.  Economic inequality is on the rise, and public coffers are insufficient due to an increasing demand for public services like health, education and housing.

Recently, Thomas Pogge and other distinguished academics have written about the cost of progress. Surprisingly, history provides us with examples of countries where, if there is a balance between economic growth and public spending, it is possible to address inequality.

There is no time to waste in looking for ways to address this widening gap across Africa.

It is urgent that, collectively, African nations look at the billions of dollars flowing out of the continent every year, most of which can be attributed to corporate tax dodging.

In January, the report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) from Africa, chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, contended that IFFs from Africa increased from about 20 billion dollars in 2001 to 60 billion in 2010 in the merchandise sector alone.

According to Global Financial Integrity’s 2014 report on IFFs from developing countries, South Africa alone may have lost more than 122 billion dollars between 2003 and 2012 in IFFs.

This is a lost opportunity for money that could have been reinvested in advancing Africa’s development and increased access to public goods for her Africa’s people.“It is urgent that, collectively, African nations look at the billions of dollars flowing out of the continent every year, most of which can be attributed to corporate tax dodging”

But this is only the half of the story. Multinational companies are gaining at the expense of African people through other ‘legal’ forms of corporate tax dodging, and through negotiated tax breaks. This is happening because of a lack of fair global tax rules, and behind-closed-door deals between corporations and governments, rushing to seal deals under pressure.

Africa’s astounding growth is affecting human development. And these losses in tax revenue come at a time when the role of official development assistance to Africa is declining.

Fair and progressive tax systems should be providing financing for well-functioning government programmes to enable governments to uphold citizens’ rights to basic services (such as healthcare and education), and cement trust between citizens and governments.

Establishing an effective tax system is critical if Africa is going to mobilise the resources it needs to tackle poverty and inequality.  Africa is home to six out of ten of the world’s most unequal countries – South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Central Africa Republic.  Some estimates on Africa’s financing needs include 40-$60 billion dollars per year to finance the post-2015 development agenda.

This is not just Africa’s problem. Around the world, many lower-income countries have been subject to harmful tax practices, including transfer pricing, whereby a transfer price may be manipulated to shift profits from one jurisdiction to another, usually from a higher-tax to a lower-tax jurisdiction.

After revelations of how multinational enterprises (MNEs) such as Starbucks, Google and Apple deliberately structured themselves to minimise their tax bills, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched an effort to reform this base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) practice. This reform is expected to wind up by the end of 2015.

However, since the launch of the BEPS Action Plan, developed countries have not had a real voice or influence in the process.  Just four African countries, including South Africa as a G20 member country, have been invited to participate as observers.  These countries are bringing attention to the many mining corporations which are offered lucrative tax incentives which must be addressed in the BEPS plan.

The African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) is a regional tax body that has been invited by the OECD/G20 to participate in the BEPS reform process.  This should provide further scope to influence the BEPS process with an African perspective.

At the same time, the South Africa Revenue Services (SARS) is going after billions lost through wasteful incentives and trade mispricing. SARS has recovered 5.8 billion rand (460 million dollars) over the three-year period 2011-2014, 55 percent (3.4 billion rand or 274 million dollars) of which is attributed to the mining industry.

South Africa’s membership in the G20 (and its role as co-Chair of the G20 Development Working Group) provides an enormous opportunity to insist on broad inclusion of all nations in the BEPS reform process.

At a recent conference convened by ATAF, South African Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene called for “Africa to protect its own tax base, and advance domestic resource mobilisation through a common voice, a common concern and a common action plan.”

It is time that all African finance ministers wake up to the possibility that tax revenues for financing essential services for their citizens, or investment in small-holder agriculture or infrastructure, could come from the recovery of billions of dollars lost from corporate tax dodging and unfair tax competition.

Tax breaks provided to six large foreign mining companies in Sierra Leone, for example, are equivalent to 59 percent of the total budget of the country – or eight times the country’s health budget.

It is time for a global inter-governmental body on international tax cooperation to allow for a more inclusive and coordinated approach to ongoing tax reform, beyond BEPS.

All countries should be able to participate in tax negotiations on an equal footing, which guarantees one country, one vote, and where representatives will have the political mandate to speak on behalf of their governments.  Simply relying on the BEPS process to re-write tax rules will not be enough to end international tax dodging.

Through the BEPS reform process and this new tax body, there would be real potential for an African taxation renaissance.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Fredrik S. Heffermehl and Tomas Magnusson
OSLO, Apr 10 2015 (IPS)

The Nobel Peace Prize is about to bow out to critics. As of Jan. 1, the Oslo-based Norwegian Nobel Committee that selects the winners has a new secretary, Olav Njølstad, who announced that “changes loom” in a recent interview.

However, Njølstad added, the changes “will not be dramatic”, making it unlikely that they will satisfy the full makeover demanded by The Nobel Peace Prize Watch, a newly-formed advocacy group wishing to reverse and undo international militarism.

Fredrik S. Heffermehl

In a letter sent in February to the Nobel Prize awarders, the group pointed to the purpose Alfred Nobel actually had in mind and presented a selection of candidates among the 276 nominated for the 2015 prize who are actually qualified to win. The Nobel Prize awarders have promised to respond to the letter, which, along with the valid candidates, is posted on the group´s website.

The group has chosen to ignore the wishes of the Nobel Committee that has a policy of strict secrecy around candidates and the selection process. By publishing, for the first time, the full nominations of the 25 “valid candidates”, the group has made it possible for everyone to see what types of peace work Nobel actually intended the prize to promote and its “imperative urgency” in the current period.

For over one hundred years, the secrecy rule has shielded the awarders from being held responsible for its neglect of the true Nobel “champions of peace” and they have been able to get away with assertions that the winners Nobel had in mind no longer exist.

According to the group this is untrue. It says that the committee ignores the simple, indisputable – and never disputed – evidence showing that when he designated his prize to the “champions of peace”, Nobel “meant the movement and the persons who work for a demilitarised world, for law to replace power in international politics, and for all nations to commit to cooperating on the elimination of all weapons instead of competing for military superiority.”

Tomas Magnusson

To make the prize comply with its actual purpose will require a dramatic change of the award policy. The Nobel Peace Prize Watch therefore doubts that the impending changes, described as “undramatic”, will be sufficient to satisfy the legislation on wills and foundations and the decisions of two public agencies in Sweden tasked with overseeing that foundations spend their funds in accordance with the law.

Even if the nominations are secret, The Nobel Peace Prize Watch was able to identify 24 names properly nominated for the 2015 prize. The list of valid candidates for 2015 is dominated by Americans and by people involved is nuclear disarmament, with nominees like Japanese hibakusha (nuclear survivors) Samiteru Taniguchi and Setsuko Thurlow; U.S. lawyer Peter Weiss and the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), David Krieger and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Further candidates are David Swanson, the U.S. activist for full disarmament; whistleblowers Kathryn Bolkovac, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, all from the United States; veteran organisers of a law-based world order, such as lawyers Benjamin Ferencz and Richard Falk, also from the United States; and the Womens´ International League for Peace and Freedom, formed during the First World War.

It seems as if Norwegian politicians, imbued in Western militarism and loyalty to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), are unable to understand Nobel´s idea of peace: to liberate the nations of the world from weapons, warriors and war. The idea to be supported by his will was that all nations must cooperate on disarmament.

Laureates like U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009 and the European Union in 2012 both believe in military means and clearly are not the type of winners to whom Nobel dedicated his award.

If the world succeeded in realising the Nobel peace plan, this would release enormous funds to cater to human needs. It would cost only a tiny fraction of the world´s military expenditure to secure everyone access to food, clean water, housing, education, health care. It would become possible to secure decent circumstances for all people, all over the globe, poor and rich, East and West, North and South – and make them more secure in the bargain.

To a realist it must be obvious that a world filled with weapons and warriors, even nuclear weapons, is inherently an unsafe world.

In the letter requesting changes, The Nobel Peace Prize Watch refers to basic rules of law regarding wills and foundations and furthermore invokes decisions passed by two Swedish public agencies during the last few years.

The authorities expect the purpose of the Nobel testament to be respected and also that the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm will keep its Norwegian sub-committee for the peace prize under strict and effective supervision and also refrain from paying the prize amount to a winner outside the purpose Nobel actually had in mind.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, elected by the Parliament of Norway, now has until Apr. 17 to decide whether it will serve the great mandate that Nobel entrusted to it, to illuminate and promote the vision of preventing future war by what Nobel in his will called “creating the brotherhood of nations”.

Governments and citizens all over the world should unite in demanding that Norwegian parliamentarians respect Nobel and help liberate us all from the very dangerous common enemy called militarism. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* Fredrik S. Heffermehl is a Norwegian lawyer, former Vice President of the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and author of Peace is Possible and The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted. Tomas Magnusson is a Swedish civil servant in immigration and integration issues, and former president of the International Peace Bureau (IPB). The two are founding members of the Lay Down Your Arms Association and organisers of The Nobel Peace Prize Watch

Excerpt:

Safa Subha and three-year-old Rahat rely on Oxfam aid for food to fight malnutrition after having been accustomed to living on a diet of bread and tea. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
BEIT LAHIYA, Northern Gaza Strip, Mar 1 2015 (IPS)

Extensive damage to Gaza’s environment as a result of the Israeli blockade and its devastating military campaign against the coastal territory during last year’s war from July to August, is negatively affecting the health of Gazans, especially their food security.

“We were living on bread and tea and my five children were badly malnourished as my husband and I couldn’t afford proper food,” Safa Subha, 37, from Beit Lahiya told IPS.

“My children were suffering from liver problems, anaemia and weak bones. It was only after I received regular food vouchers from Oxfam and was able to purchase eggs and yoghurt that my children are now healthier.Lack of dietary diversity is an issue of concern, particularly for children and pregnant and lactating women, due to the lack of large-scale food assistance programmes and the high prices of fresh food and red meat

“But it is still a struggle as I have to ration out the food and my doctor has warned me to keep giving the children these foods to prevent the malnutrition returning,” said Safa.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in several communities, lack of dietary diversity was highlighted as an issue of concern, particularly for children and pregnant and lactating women, due to the lack of large-scale food assistance programmes and the high prices of fresh food and red meat.

Before the war, Safa’s husband Ashraf worked as a farmer, renting a piece of land on which he grew produce that he then sold.

“My husband used to earn about NIS 300 per week (about 75 dollars) from farming. After the land became too dangerous to farm, because of Israeli military fire and much of it destroyed in Israeli bombings, my husband tried to earn some money renting a taxi,” said Safa.

However, Ashraf’s attempts to support his family as a taxi driver did not provide sufficient income for their survival.

“He can only use the taxi a couple of days a week because it doesn’t belong to him and he often doesn’t have money to buy fuel because it is so expensive and Israel only allows limited amounts of fuel into Gaza because of the blockade,” said Safa.

Kamal Kassam, 43, from Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, has had to rely on Oxfam’s Cash for Work programme to support his wife and five children aged 6 to 12.

During the war the Kassam’s had to flee to a U.N. shelter after the family home was destroyed by Israeli bombs, which also wounded his wife and left one of his daughters severely traumatised, suffering from epilepsy and soiling herself at night.

Kassam’s wife Eman is ill and another daughter needs regular medical treatment for cancer.

The Kassams were provided with a temporary tin caravan to live in by aid organisations but were unable to purchase food or school clothes because they had received housing aid and were therefore “less desperate”.

“I used to work in a factory but lost that job after Israel’s blockade. Before the war I made about NIS 30 (about 7.50 dollars) a day by picking up and delivering goods from my donkey cart,” Kassam told IPS.

But during a night of heavy aerial bombardment, a bomb killed his donkey and destroyed the cart as well as his only way of supporting his family.

Israel’s extensive bombing campaign during the war also destroyed or damaged, infrastructure, including Gaza’s sole power plant and water sanitation projects.

As a result, untreated sewage is pumped out to sea and then floods back into Gaza’s underground water system, contaminating drinking water and crops and leading to outbreaks of disease.

Israeli restrictions on imports, including vital spare parts for the repair of sewerage infrastructure and agricultural equipment such as fertiliser and seedlings, has limited crop production.

Furthermore, the regular targeting of fishermen and farmers, trying to access their land and Gaza’s fishing shoals in Israel’s Access Restricted Areas (ARAs), by Israeli security forces has severely hindered the ability of Gazans to earn a living from farming and fishing.

OCHA identified the most frequent concerns regarding food security and nutrition as “loss of the source of income and livelihoods due to severe damage to agricultural lands; death/loss of animals; inability to access agricultural lands, particularly in the Israeli-imposed three-kilometre buffer zone; and loss of employment.”

Food insecurity in Gaza is not caused by lack of food on the market alone. It is also a crisis of economic access to food because most Gazans cannot afford to buy sufficient quantities of quality food.

“As a result of the lack of economic access to food due to high unemployment and low wages, the majority of the population in Gaza has been pushed into poverty and food insecurity, with no other choice but to rely heavily on assistance to cover their essential needs,” said ‘GAZA Detailed Needs Assessment (DNA) and Recovery Framework: Social Protection Sub-Sector’, a report by the World Bank, European Union, United Nations and the Government of Palestine.

“The repetition of one harsh economic shock after the other has resulted in an erosion of household coping strategies, with 89 percent of households resorting to negative coping mechanisms to meet their food needs (half report purchasing lower quality food and a third have reduced the number of daily meals),” said the DNA report, adding that the situation was expected to worsen in 2015.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Israeli settler home in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, following the eviction of a number of Palestinian families. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank , Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

A deliberate Israeli policy to Judaise East Jerusalem has forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and created a chronic housing shortage in the occupied part of the city.

Simultaneously, Israeli settlers have been encouraged by the Jerusalem Municipality to settle in the growing number of settlements mushrooming in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, all illegal under international law.

The municipality has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has pursued a declared policy of maintaining a 72 percent majority of Jews over Palestinians in the city,” according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).The municipality [of Jerusalem] has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state

“Towards that end it has not allowed Palestinians to build new homes, creating an artificial shortage of some 25,000 housing units in the Palestinian sector, while Palestinians are not able to access most of the Jewish neighbourhoods.

“This induced shortage raises the price of renting or buying, and since 70 percent of Palestinians live under the poverty line, they are forced to move outside the Jerusalem borders to acquire affordable housing where they can be stripped legally of their Jerusalem residency,” explains Halper.

“Such are the political machinations behind the seemingly justified policy of demolishing ‘illegal’ homes, a key element of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing,” he adds.

The International Peace and Cooperation Centre (IPCC) – a Palestinian non-governmental organisation specialised in urban planning and community development – issued an East Jerusalem Housing Review 2013 report describing some of the obstacles Palestinians face in trying to build new homes or extend current homes.

“House construction is severely stifled by deficiencies in the planning and, to a lesser extent, delivery systems, both of which have been derailed by Israeli policy makers,” stated the report.

“Building legally, by obtaining a permit through the planning system, is impossible within the majority of land in East Jerusalem. The permit system rigidly maintains requirements that cannot be met as a result of the planning and infrastructural deficiencies.”

According to IPCC, these include “insufficient outline and detailed master plans, inappropriate zoning of urban areas as low density or ‘green’ land, insufficient physical infrastructure, including road, sewage and water networks and the near total absence of registered land.”

Most of the land in East Jerusalem (92 percent) is unregistered, making it impossible to obtain building permits.

The IPCC report said that “development is further stifled by institutional shortcomings such as the unavailability of suitable housing loans, insufficient capacity or willingness of the private sector to plan and deliver large housing projects, the limited amount of suitable development land for sale and its extraordinary cost.”

As a result, Palestinians have been forced to build without the requisite permits. Over 70 percent of new construction from 2001 to 2010 was undertaken without building permits, with informal dwellings comprising between 42 and 54 percent of all housing.

Average room density is 1.9 people per room, making it 90 percent higher than in Jewish West Jerusalem.

While the Israeli authorities have set strategies concerning the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers have been using other methods to slowly take over.

Muhammad Sabbagh is a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem who, together with other Palestinian activists, is involved in a long, ongoing battle with Israeli settlers over home ownership and possible eviction.

His extended family is part of a group of 28 Palestinian refugee families who live right next to several Israeli settlement homes.

These Palestinian families were allocated land by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956 when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. The Jordanian government had said that after three years the Palestinians would be given the homes.

However, following Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967 Israeli settlers tried to evict the Palestinians claiming they had documents proving ownership of the homes from the late 1800s during the Ottoman Empire.

The case went back and forth to the Israeli courts until an agreement was reached that the Palestinians could stay for the next 90 years if they agreed to pay rent.

When some of the families refused to pay the rent on the basis that the homes belonged to neither the Israeli government nor the settlers, they were evicted in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers and police.

Subsequent court action and original Turkish documentation proved that the settlers’ documents were forged and that the homes had never belonged to the Jewish community several hundred years ago as the settlers had claimed.

Further evictions have currently been frozen by the Israeli courts on the basis of the documents being forgeries but Sabbagh says that is insufficient.

“We are now fighting to have the homes returned to us as their legal owners and so that the families who were evicted can return home.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Palestinian families take shelter at an UNRWA school in Gaza City, after evacuating their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, July 2014. UNRWA has now launched a humanitarian reconstruction programme. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has launched an ambitious recovery plan for Gaza following the 50-day devastating war between Hamas and Israel which has left the coastal territory decimated.

However, the successful implementation of this plan requires enormous international funding as well as a long-term ceasefire to enable the lifting of the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the territory.

“We are working on a 24-month plan aimed at 70 percent of Gaza’s population who are refugees but this will only be possible if the blockade is lifted and construction materials and other goods are allowed into Gaza,” Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA), told IPS.

“Taxpayers are being asked once again to fund the reconstruction of Gaza and at this point there are no security guarantees, so a permanent ceasefire is essential if we are not to return to the repetitive cycle of destruction and then reconstruction,” Gunness said.“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future, it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price” – Chris Gunness, UNRWA spokesman

The attack on Gaza, euphemistically code-named “Operation Protective Edge” by the Israelis, now stands as the most severe military campaign against Gaza since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.

“The devastation caused this time is unprecedented in recent memory. Parts of Gaza resemble an earthquake zone with 29 km of damaged infrastructure,” said Gunness.

Following the ceasefire, the Palestinian death toll stood at 2,130 and more than 11,000 injured.

Over 18,000 housing units were destroyed, four hospitals and five clinics were closed due to severe damage, while 17 of Gaza’s 32 hospitals and 45 of 97 its primary health clinics were substantially damaged. Reconstruction is estimated to cost over 7 billion dollars.

According to UNRWA, 22 schools were completely destroyed and 118 damaged during Israeli bombardments, while many higher education facilities were damaged.

Some 110,000 displaced Gazans remain in UN emergency shelters or with host families, according to UNRWA.

The reconstruction of shelters alone will cost over 380 million dollars, 270 million of which relates to Palestinian refugees.

According to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, 419 businesses and workshops were damaged, with 129 completely destroyed.

“We have a two-year plan in place which addresses the spectrum of Palestinian needs. Currently we have 300 engineers on the ground in Gaza assessing reconstruction needs,” Gunness told IPS.

Palestinian boy inspecting the remains of a house which was destroyed during an air strike in Central Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, July 2014. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

UNRWA’s strategic approach has been divided into the relief period, the early recovery period and the recovery period of up to four months following the cessation of hostilities.

“The relief period, which will continue for the next four months, involves urgent humanitarian intervention including providing shelter, food and medical needs for displaced Gazans,” said the UNTWA spokesman.

“The early recovery period will continue for the next year and will address the critical needs of the population such as repairing damage to environmental infrastructure, restoring UNRWA facilities and supplementary assistance for livelihood provisioning.

“The recovery period will last for two years and will focus on the impact of the conflict through a sustainable livelihoods programme promoting self-sufficiency and completing the transition of UNRWA emergency and extended-stay shelters back to intended use and full operational capacity.”

One thrust of UNRWA’s programme will focus on protection, gender and disability. The increased numbers of female-headed households and households with disabled men is having an impact on unemployment patterns.

“Women are the primary caregivers and are closely linked to homes and the psychological trauma being exhibited by children. Furthermore, there have already been signs of increased gender-based violence,” explained Gunness.

“We want to focus on raising awareness of domestic violence, how to deal with violence in the home and building healthy and equal relationships through our gender empowerment programme.”

The UN agency will also address food distribution by providing minimum caloric requirements through basic food commodities, including bread, corned beef or tuna, dairy products and fresh vegetables. Non-food items provided include hygiene kits and water tanks for 42,000 families.

Emergency repairs to shelters are also being undertaken with 70 percent more homes destroyed or damaged than during the 2008-2009 hostilities. Emergency cash assistance for refugee families to meet a range of basic needs is also being distributed.

“Due to the enormous damage done to hospitals and health facilities, UNRWA has so far established 22 health points to provide basic health services to the sick and wounded, and health teams have been deployed to monitor key health issues,” noted Gunness.

The psychological impact of the war is another area that concerns UNRWA.  “There isn’t a person in Gaza who hasn’t been affected by the war. In consultation with UNRWA’s Community Health Programme, we have hired additional counsellors and youth coordinators who will provide a range of services to groups and individuals.”

“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future,” said Gunness, “it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Members of Abu Sheira's family in front of the tent they set up in the grounds of Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

“When the [Israeli] shelling started, I gathered up my family and headed for what I though was a safe place, like a school, but then that became overcrowded and lacked sanitation, so we ended up in the grounds of the hospital.”

Islam Abu Sheira from Beit Hanoun, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Gaza Strip, was speaking to IPS in front of what has been his family’s makeshift ‘home’ at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the last two months. His eyes misted over as he recalled his devastated home and his efforts to find a safe refuge for his family."I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families" – Islam Abu Sheira, a refugee from Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip

In his forties, Islam described his family’s ordeal after Israeli shelling left them homeless and they first sought refuge in a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. relief and development agency for Palestinian refugees, and were then forced by overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions to move out and seek shelter elsewhere.

“I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families, ” said Islam,  adding that “during the war, the only thing we were looking for was a place that could protect us from the shelling.”

Like the majority of Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed, they have lost their belongings and, for the time being, their chances of living a life of dignity. Most families in the Gaza Strip were forced to leave their homes so quickly that they had no time to take anything with them.

“We simply have no livelihood and my children sleep every night on the ground without even a blanket to cover them,” lamented Islam. “We have been living a primitive life since we fled our home without even taking the clothes we need.”

As the numbers of people escaping the shelling mounted, so did the difficulty of sheltering them. Schools did their best, but there were insufficient basic necessities and medical supplies, and they were housing four or five persons, if not more, in each classroom.

Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed by Israeli shelling of Gaza sheltering in a UNRWA school. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

Jamila Saad, a housewife who is taking care of her 12-member family and also fled to one of the UNRWA schools, told IPS: “The school was receiving more and more refugees, and we and the other refugee families were sharing one toilet. We need a better life for our children and we hope that our home will soon be rebuilt so that we can begin a new life there in our new home.”

The complex and harsh conditions that the Palestinian refugees are suffering in schools and other shelter centres has pushed most international organisations to provide the refugees with as much aid as possible, but this is far from finding a final solution for the refugees’ suffering.

The conditions of the thousands of refugees who have lost their homes has placed the new Palestinian government before an enormous challenge and a huge responsibility to provide these refugee families with care and a secure environment, as well take on the responsibility of implementing the reconstruction programmes financially aided by the European Union and donor states in accordance with ceasefire agreement brokered in Cairo between Israel and Hamas, especially in terms of the reconstruction of Gaza.

Mufid al-Hasayna, Minister of Public Works and Housing in the new Palestinian unity government, told IPS that “the amount of destruction of houses and economic facilities is massive, and the population of Gaza is living under hard conditions, so we are working hard to improve the living conditions of people. We are working on programmes to start reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and rebuild destroyed houses and

Al-Hasayna believes that the blurred vision Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have of their future after 50 days of war and their constant fear of being retargeted by the Israeli occupation forces have only added to a worsening of their situation.

Amjad Shawa, Director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told IPS: “The harsh circumstances that the Gaza Strip underwent over the 50 days of the Israeli occupation’s war reduced the population’s access to water and food and threatened people’s security, while the bombing of residential high ‘towers’ housing dozens of families has left serious impacts on civilians.

According to Shawa, the housing situation is now all the more dramatic because, even before Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the Gaza Strip was already suffering from the deficit of 70,000 housing units that had been destroyed in the 2009 and 2012 wars.

“Following the two wars, scheduled housing projects to rebuild the infrastructure were not implemented, and the deficit of housing units has reached a state that has put the population in a situation of real disaster,” Shawa told IPS.

He called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to form an independent body of Palestinian civil society organisations to create a plan for reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

According to a report prepared by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), in June 2014 the Gaza Strip was home to an estimated population of 1.76 million living in a coastal area that extends along the Mediterranean Sea and covers approximately 365 square kilometres with a maximum width of 12 kilometres.

The PCBS believes that Gaza Strip’s narrow surface area and high population has contributed to some extent to the distribution of people in large blocks and increased its population density, turning the Strip into one the most densely populated areas in the world.

Population density in the Gaza Strip has reached 2,744 per square kilometre, and experts say this means that food, health and education should be the top priorities for the future development agenda of decision-makers.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Families demonstrating to demand respect for their right to a roof over their heads, before the authorities evicted 13 families, including a dozen children, from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat in the southern Spanish city of Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

“I don’t want them to grow up with the notion that they’re poor,” says Catalina González, referring to her two young sons. The family has been living in an apartment rent-free since December in exchange for fixing it up, in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

Six months ago González, 40, and her two sons, Manuel and Leónidas, 4 and 5, were evicted by the local authorities from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat – an old apartment building with a common courtyard that had been occupied by 13 families who couldn’t afford to pay rent. The evicted families included a dozen children.

Since then, she told IPS, her sons “don’t like the police because they think they stole their house.”

Spain has the second-highest child poverty rate in the European Union, following Romania, according to the report “The European Crisis and its Human Cost – A Call for Fair Alternatives and Solutions” released Mar. 27 in Athens by Caritas Europa.

Bulgaria is in third place and Greece in fourth, according to the Roman Catholic relief, development and social service organisation.

The austerity measures imposed in Europe, aggravated by the foreign debt, “have failed to solve problems and create growth,” said Caritas Europa’s Secretary General Jorge Nuño at the launch of the report.

“We’re doing ok. The kids are already pre-enrolled in school for the next school year,” said González, a native of Barcelona, who left the father of her sons in Italy when she discovered that “he mistreated them.”

She started over from scratch in Málaga, with no family, job or income, meeting basic needs thanks to the solidarity of social organisations and mutual support networks.

According to a report published this year by the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, in 2012 more than 2.5 million children in Spain lived in families below the poverty line – 30 percent of all children.

UNICEF reported that 19 percent of children in Spain lived in households with annual incomes of less than 15,000 dollars.

“Child poverty is a reality in Spain, although politicians want to gloss over it and they don’t like us to talk about it because it’s associated with Third World countries,” the founder and president of the NGO Mensajeros de la Paz (Messengers of Peace), Catholic priest Ángel García, told IPS.

Spain’s finance minister Cristóbal Montoro said on Mar. 28 that the information released by Caritas Europa “does not fully reflect reality” because it is based solely on “statistical measurements.”

But in Málaga “there are more and more mothers lining up to get food,” Ángel Meléndez, the president of Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche, told IPS.

Every day, his organisation provides 500 breakfasts, 1,600 lunches and 600 dinners to the poor.

For months, González and her sons have been taking their meals at the “Er Banco Güeno”, a community-run soup kitchen in the low-income Málaga neighbourhood of Palma-Palmilla, which operates out of a closed-down bank branch.

According to Father Ángel, child poverty “isn’t just about not being able to afford food, but also about not being able to buy school books or not buying new clothes in the last two years.”

“It’s about unequal opportunity among children,” he said.

The crisis in Spain is still severe. The country’s unemployment rate is the highest in the EU: 25.6 percent in February, after Greece’s 27.5 percent.

In 2013, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy approved a National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2013-2016, which includes the aim of reducing child poverty.

Caritas Europa reports that at least one and a half million households in Spain are suffering from severe social inclusion – 70 percent more than in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis broke out.

“Entire families end up on the street because they can’t afford to pay rent,” Rosa Martínez, the director of the Centro de Acogida Municipal, told IPS during a visit to the municipal shelter. “More people are asking for food. They’re even asking for diapers for newborns because they are in such a difficult situation.”

Of the nearly 26 percent of the economically active population out of jobs, half are young people, according to the National Statistics Institute, while the gap between rich and poor is growing.

As of late March, 4.8 million people were unemployed, according to official statistics. The figures also show that the proportion of jobless people with no source of income whatsoever has grown to four out of 10.

Social discontent has been fuelled by austerity measures that have entailed cutbacks in health, education and social protection.

A report on the Housing Emergency in the Spanish State, by the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and the DESC Observatory, estimates that 70 percent of the families who have been, or are about to be, evicted include at least one minor.

“The right to equal opportunities is dead letter if children are ending up on the street,” José Cosín, a lawyer and activist with PAH Málaga, told IPS.

Cosín denounced the vulnerable situation of the children who were evicted along with their families from the Buenaventura corrala on Oct. 3, 2013.

Fifteen of the people who were evicted filed a lawsuit demanding respect of the children’s basic rights, as outlined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into effect in 1990.

The Convention establishes that states parties “shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.”

The number of families in Spain with no source of income at all grew from 300,000 in mid-2007 to nearly 700,000 by late 2013, according to the report Precariedad y Cohesión Social; Análisis y Perspectivas 2014 (Precariousness and Social Cohesion; Analysis and Perspectives 2014), by Cáritas Española and the Fundación Foessa.

And 27 percent of households in Spain are supported by pensioners. Grown-up sons and daughters are moving back into their parents’ homes with their families, or retired grandparents are helping support their children and grandchildren, with their often meagre pensions.

“When times get rough, the social fabric is strengthened,” said González. She stressed the solidarity of different groups in Málaga who for three months helped her clean up and repair the apartment she is living in now, which is on the tenth floor of a building with no elevator, and was full of garbage and had no door, window panes or piped water.

González complained that government social services are underfunded and inefficient, and said she receives no assistance from them.

Like all young children, her sons ask her for things. But she explains to them that it is more important to spend eight euros on food than on two plastic fishes. It took her several weeks to save up money to buy the toys. Last Christmas she took them to a movie for the first time.

An intersection showing mostly empty homes at the heart of the Lumane Casimir Village near Morne à Cabri on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Named after a famous Haitian singer, the Lumane Casimir Village sits in the desert-like plain at the foot of Morne à Cabri and will eventually have 3,000 rental units. About 1,300 are now ready.

The project was financed with 49 million dollars from the Petro-Caribe Fund, money that will eventually have to be paid back to the Venezuelan government.

During the May 16, 2013 inauguration, the president handed out keys to a group of families that had been assembled for the media. But they did not move in. From May to September, nobody actually lived in the apartments. Families only moved in starting in October. In the meantime, many were looted.

“Between 120 and 150 apartments were vandalised,” explained David Odnell of the Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. UCLBP is the supervisor of the site.

More than 50 toilets, and dozens of locks, windows, brackets, bulbs, electrical cables and outlets were stolen. Many apartments were also damaged by would-be thieves who used crowbars and other tools to try to wrench sinks, doors and windows from walls.

“The thieves still come,” Bélair Paulin told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Paulin spends a lot of time in the area because he is waiting to see if he will be chosen as a renter.

About 200 families have already moved in and others have their keys. Some 1,100 homes remain empty.

During a visit to the site on Dec. 20, 2013, Martelly announced that 250 police officers will be getting apartments and handed over keys to 75 of them, again, in front of the cameras. Several later denounced the fact that they were asked to hand the keys back after the ceremony.

All of the apartments have water and electric systems, new trash cans, a gas stove, a container for receiving and purifying drinking water, plants growing in a garden which will benefit from a regular watering service, and the promise of round-trip transportation to the capital for 20 gourdes (about 50 cents).

Under the heavy sun, the sounds of the new residents echo though the site. Voices, doors opening and closing, cars coming and going. The village is coming to life.

According to Odnell, eventually the village will have “a waste disposal system, a police station, a health center, a drinking water reservoir, a public square, a soccer field, a connection with the electricity system, a vocational school, an elementary school and a marketplace.”

The government is also building an industrial park across the street, where – authorities hope – residents can work.

“The mini-industrial park will have all the facilities necessary to create local jobs for housing beneficiaries,” Odnell promised, noting that a Canadian company has already expressed interest.

The park is not yet finished and – as of late 2013 – has not yet been registered as a “free trade zone” industrial park.

Like other projects, the new residents of Lumane Casimir Village are not necessarily earthquake victims. (Read Part One)

“There are three criteria for being eligible: 1) You have to have been affected by the earthquake, 2) the person has to have a family of not more than three to five people, and 3) the person must have a revenue. That is the most important, so you can pay your rent, which will be between 163 and 233 dollars per month,” according to Odnell.

Christela Blaise is one of the new renters. A cosmetician, she has lived at the village with her older sister and baby since October.

“After the earthquake, we lived in Bon Repos on the main highway. We were not direct victims of the earthquake, but like everyone who was looking for a place to live, we got a temporary shelter. But that didn’t last past three months, so we moved back to our home,” she said.

Housing: An immense challenge

The Haitian government recognises that it faces an enormous challenge. Some 150,000 earthquake victims still live in about 300 camps and another 50,000 live in the new sprawling slums Canaan, Onaville and Jerusalem.

Half of the camps have no sanitation services and only eight percent are supplied with water, according to an October 2013 report from the UCLBP and the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM)/Shelter Cluster, part of the U.N.’s humanitarian presence in Haiti.

Residents of over 100 camps are in imminent danger of being evicted. In December, 126 families were forced to leave their homes and shacks in Canaan, near Village Lumane Casimir, and on Jan. 11, a camp in Delmas was consumed in flames. One woman and three young children were burned to death.

According to the government, the housing deficit will only continue to grow as people leave the countryside and smaller towns and move to cities.

“Haiti needs to meet the challenge of constructing 500,000 new homes in order to meet the current and housing deficit between now and 2020,” according to the UCLBP’s new Policy of Housing and Urban Planning (PNLH), released in October.

The new policy is ambitious but vague. The Executive Summary sketches out five “strategic axes” that will help “grow access to housing,” including “social housing” that meets construction norms, and through the promotion of “models of housing that assure access to basic services.”

The language of the document implies that the government will seek to resolve the deficit in partnership with the private sector. In the introduction to the PNLH, for example, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe notes that “under the coordination of the UCLBP, the PNLH also makes clear the important role that the private sector is being called upon to play, side-by-side with the state.”

While this kind of orientation should not necessarily be rejected out of hand, already with the Lumane Casimir Village and the 400% and Chavez Houses projects, it appears that the government is no longer going to build social housing that is within reach of the majority of Haitians.

According to the World Bank, 80 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars per day. Even if a couple combines incomes, it would have only about 60 dollars a month. How could that family pay rent that runs from 39 dollars all the way up to 233 dollars per month?

Speaking at an event at the Lumane Casimir Village on Nov. 11, 2013, Lamothe affirmed his pride in the project, which he called “social housing.”

But, if the housing is not for the poor – such as, for example, the majority of the earthquake victims – and if, with monthly rents that reach 233 dollars, it is out of reach of 80 percent of the population, is it really correct to call it “social” or public housing?

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

One of the 400% residents coming home with a bucket of water on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Four years after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, questions continue to haunt the four main post-disaster housing projects built by the Haitian government.

Who lives in them? Who runs them? Can the residents afford the rents or mortgages? Are the residents the actual earthquake victims?“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes." -- Miaud Thys

By some estimates, the catastrophe killed 200,000 people and made 1.3 million homeless overnight by destroying or damaging 172,000 homes or apartments. But the new projects do not necessarily house earthquake victims, over 200,000 of whom still live in tents or in the three large new slums.

In total, the new projects, with homes for at least 3,588 families, cost 88 million dollars. (In contrast, international donors and private agencies spent more than five times that amount – about 500 million dollars – on “temporary shelters” or T-shelters.) See HGW #9

Three of the new housing projects are in Zoranje, a new settlement not far from downtown, on the border between Cité Soleil and Croix des Bouquets. The fourth is at the foot of Morne à Cabri, about 25 kilometres north of the capital on the highway that leads to Mirebalais. (Read Part Two)

Clinton’s pet project now home to squatters

On Jul. 21, 2011, President Michel Martelly, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and then-Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive inaugurated the Housing Exposition, a fair featuring about 60 model homes in Zoranje.

One of the first projects approved by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the Expo cost over million dollars in public reconstruction money. Foreign and Haitian construction and architecture firms also spent at least two million dollars more. The objective was to provide models for the agencies and businesses engaged in post-earthquake housing construction.

Everyone agrees the Expo was a failure. Few visited the site and fewer still chose one of the model homes – many of which were very expensive by Haitian standards – for their project. See HGW #20

“There were some really odd examples,” according to David Odnell, director of the government’s Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. “Some had nothing to do with the way we Haitians live or think about housing. It was a completely imported thing.”

Today, surrounded by weeds and goats, the fading and cracked houses are home to dozens of squatter families.

“All the houses have new owners. They have been taken over,” explained a young pregnant girl who said her parents are “renters.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” Odnell, an architect, said in a Nov. 19, 2013 interview. “And you know why. There is a void… and there is no authority there. But [the project] is not exactly a waste. I could call it poor planning, because the houses can always be recuperated.”

Odnell’s counterpart at the government Fund for Social and Economic Assistance agency (FAES), a government office also involved in housing, said much the same thing.

“Aside from the inauguration week, the project has been forgotten,” Patrick Anglade explained. “It’s a problem that can be solved, but we have to figure out how to do that.”

The director of the third government housing agency, the Public Enterprise for the Promotion of Social Housing (EPPLS), had little to say. (“Social housing” is known as “subsidised” or “public” housing in English.)

“We have nothing to do with that,” director Miaud Thys told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

Anarchy reigns in the House(s) of Chavez

Another new project sits across the street from the Expo: 128 apartments built by the Venezuelan government for 4.9 million dollars (according to its figures) during the Hugo Chavez presidency. They are usually called “The Chavez Houses.”

Earthquake-resistant, sporting two bedrooms, a bath, a living room and a kitchen, and painted in bright colours, today most of the homes house people who simply broke down the doors and moved in. Only 42 of the 128 have “legal” inhabitants: families invited by the Venezuelan Embassy. Empty for 15 months, some were vandalised. Fixtures, toilets, sinks and other items, including water pumps, were stolen. See HGW #12

“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes,” Thys admitted to HGW. “We know that. Now we are trying to recuperate them.”

Inhabitants are already making adjustments: changing some doors, adding rooms and windows, building gates and fences.

Surrounded by neighbourhood men, Jules Jamlee sits on a broken chair across the street from a home that is being expanded. Like his friends, he is insistent about his right to “his” home.

“The president knows very well that we are revolutionaries,” he said. “He might make threats but he knows we don’t agree with them.”

Told of the residents’ insistence, Thys had a response: “Revolutionaries or not, we are not going to lose those apartments. We are going to send those people letters and invite them to leave so that we can recuperate them. Today we are starting with the carrot. We’ll use the stick later.”

The housing development still lacks water and residents complain that the lack of adequate water means that the toilets don’t work well. Many residents instead use nearby weedy areas for their physiological needs.

New Owners Not 400% Happy

Known as the 400% or “400 in 100” project because Martelly promised 400 homes in 100 days, the nearby 30-million-dollar project funded by the Inter-American Development Bank was inaugurated on Feb. 27, 2012. The development has three kilometres of paved streets, a water system (which lacked water until just recently), an electrical system, street lamps and a square with a basketball court.

“Everything was in place so that residents would have all the basic services. In that sense, we proved that in a short time and with minimal funding, we could do well,” Anglade explained in an Oct. 2, 2013 interview.

But not all of the new residents are earthquake victims. Many are public administration employees. There was a rush to fill the houses at the beginning. And there are other complications, because the houses are not gifts. Residents must pay a five-year mortgage.

“During the first phase, and because we were in a hurry… we weren’t that choosy. Some people who got housing do not actually have the means to pay for it,” Anglade admitted.

The mortgages are between 39 and 46 dollars per month. The contract says that “non-payment by the renter/beneficiary for three consecutive months will result in a 5% penalty for each unpaid month” and that “non-payment could lead to expulsion.”

The contract has caused a great deal of grumbling.

“The president did not give us a house. He is selling it to us. They are too expensive. What can a person do in this country where there is no work? How can one find 1,500 gourdes (39 dollars) each month?” asked Yves Zéphyr, an unemployed father of two who has lived in the development since November 2012.

FAES admits it faces a challenge.

“We are not achieving 100 percent payments, not even 70 percent,” Anglade said. “At least 30 percent are behind.”

A small poll by HGW gives an idea of why some people are behind. One-half of 10 residents questioned said they are unemployed.

When the project was launched, the government received financing to prepare the land, build the houses, and set up the electricity system, but not for the actual services necessary for a housing development, like water, septic system cleaning, a marketplace, schools, a clinic and affordable transportation to downtown.

“The project isn’t finished yet,” Odnell noted. “The government needs to continue working, in order to improve the lives of the people there. Normally when you plan a housing development, all of the services are supposed to be in place and the houses come at the end. But just the opposite happened with the 400% development.”

While many residents say they are happy with their new homes, HGW found problems. Some roofs leak every time it rains, and residents say electricity is rare. Some of the houses had been vandalised before residents moved in: tin roofs and toilets had disappeared.

Also, the septic systems for some of the houses are causing problems.

“They fill up in a quarter of an hour!” claimed André Paul, who has lived in “400%” since July 2013. “Some of them are completely blocked, others are just totally filled.”

EPPLS, which shares responsibility with the FAES for the site, recognises that the septic systems were “poorly built.” Director Thys promised: “We will correct them” although he was not sure how that would be funded.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Mimose Gérard, 57, washes clothes and collects plastic bottles from the trash in order to survive. She is still living in a tent camp four years after Haiti's earthquake. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
Carrefour, HAITI, Jan 20 2014 (IPS)

Mimose Gérard sits in her tent at Gaston Margron camp, surrounded by large bags filled with plastic bottles. She earns just pennies for each, but that’s better than nothing.

“I’ve lived in the camp since Jan. 13, 2010, when I was set up with a tent. It’s been a painful existence,” she tells IPS. “I’m just a regular person on this piece of land. I have nowhere to go.”"It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor." -- Sanon Renel

Collecting bottles to recycle is the livelihood of at least a dozen people in this camp that about 800 families call home, located in Carrefour, on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince. Four years after the earthquake, there are still about 300 internally displaced person (IDP) camps mostly scattered around the capital region, and in a large new slum on desertic slopes outside the city.

Gérard is 57 years old, and has 11 children. She also does laundry to earn a few more pennies. Her hands are rough and chapped.

“The conditions are inhumane, but we have nowhere to go. Those whose families helped them have gotten out. But I don’t have anything like that, so I am staying,” she says.

Gérard added that residents are also forced to consume untreated water – in a country gripped by a cholera epidemic.

“We have no toilet. This is where people drop off their bag of fecal matter,” she says, pointing to a weedy area where residents open or dispose of the little plastic bags used as “portable toilets” in the night, when it can be dangerous to leave one’s tent.

On top of thieves, camp residents have to deal with the police and armed men working for landowners.

“The police try to force us to leave the camp,” Gérard claimed. Officers appear and shoot in the air, trying to scare residents. “The owner himself has come three times.”

According to the U.N., residents in about one-third of the 300 or so remaining camps are at risk of eviction.

On Jan. 11, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the earthquake, an inferno raced through the 100 or so tents and shacks on a camp in Delmas, not far from downtown Port-au-Prince. Four people – a 38-year-old woman and three small children – were burned to death and dozens injured.

Aside from transporting some victims to the public hospital and handing out mattresses, municipal and federal authorities have not made any statements, nor have they launched an investigation into the origin of the blaze, which many suspect was arson. The land is owned by a Haitian printing company.

“Four people died in the fire, including three young children, whilst around thirty others were hospitalized with burns. All of the makeshift shelters of the 108 families who lived in the camp were completely destroyed by the flames, along with their personal belongings,” Amnesty International noted in a statement released on Jan. 17.

Sanon Renel, leader of the Front for Reflection and Action on the Housing (FRAKKA) coalition, said the murderous fire and the lack of official response do not augur well.

“It seems like the private sector is stepping up its evictions,” he told IPS. “They realise that the government practically supports their actions, so they can do whatever they want.”

“It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor,” he continued. “They don’t consider them as human beings. I think they see them as animals.”

Four years vs. 35 seconds

Thirty-five seconds. That’s all it took the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010 to wipe out almost a quarter of a million people, collapse almost half a million buildings – leaving 1.5 million people homeless – and trigger widespread destruction. The estimated cost of damages to the housing sector alone almost hit 2.5 billion dollars.

Four years later, some 200,000 people are still stuck in camps, like Gérard. Only 7,515 new permanent houses have been built while 27,000 have been repaired, and about 55,000 families have received one-time payments of about 500 dollars to leave the camps.

But a year later, those families “face another housing crisis as their housing subsidy runs out,” a recent study from the Washington-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti found.

A U.S. government plan to build 15,000 new houses has reduced its goals by over 80 percent, according to the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). Now the plan is to build only 2,500. Although USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, has built over 900 houses in Haiti, it has decided to withdraw continuance.

Overall, of the 6.43 billion dollars disbursed by bilateral and multilateral donors to Haiti from 2010 to 2012, just nine percent went through the Haitian government while the rest went to foreign contractors.

“It’s a really profitable business for U.S. contractors to make money off of this disaster,” CEPR’s Dan Beeton told IPS. “This was an opportunity to turn a disaster into something that could benefit Haitians as they rebuild their own country, but they were just bypassed.”

“I’ll pick up pots in the street and get 20 to 25 gourdes [46 to 57 cents],” she says. “Every morning when we wake up, we pick up bags of feces and go throw them in a hole. The stench prevents us from cooking.”

Like Gérard, Ilien deplores the lack of potable water.

“When the camp was first built we had drinking water, but not anymore,” she says. “The water we drink isn’t good.”

Nor surprisingly, Ilien and other camp residents are afraid of being infected with any one of Haiti’s water-borne diseases, particularly cholera. Studies by numerous authorities, incuding the U.S. Centres for Disease Control (CDC), say the bacteria was brought to Haiti by Nepali peacekeepers who are part of the 9,500‑strong U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

Introduced to the country in October 2010, to date it has infected almost 700,000 people, killing almost 8,500 of them. The CDC says that approximately two people per day still die from cholera. While U.N. agencies consider it an epidemic and a humanitarian crisis, so far the body has refused demands for compensation.

“Cholera and housing are being ignored, but they do go together,” Beeton says. “There’s no clean water, so the disease will spread. Cholera eradication is also lack of political will.”

The U.N. has 18 organisations – including MINUSTAH – currently operating in Haiti. They collaborate with approximately 43 large non-governmental organsations or NGOs, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the government, and hundreds of smaller agencies.

Reduced funding, however, has caused humanitarian assistance to dwindle, although MINUSTAH’s approved budget has remained high – almost 577 million dollars for July 2013 to June 2014.

“MINUSTAH is a waste of money, in my opinion, because there is no armed conflict in Haiti, and the money could instead be spent on ending the cholera epidemic that MINUSTAH troops started,” Beeton said.

UN-Habitat notes that Haiti already had an immense deficit in adequate housing dating back before the earthquake, with many living in slum areas.

“We are clearly out of the emergency stage and we will allow Haiti to take care of itself, but that cannot go forward unless there are means,” a spokesperson for the agency told IPS.

With additional reporting by Lorraine Farquharson at the United Nations.

Families and activists protest the Oct. 3 eviction from the Buenaventura squatter community. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

A police cordon kept everyone out of the Buenaventura “corrala” on Thursday after the police evicted 13 families living in the occupied building in the centre of this southern Spanish city early in the morning.

“Tonight we’ll sleep at a friend’s house. I don’t have any work or money. We have to start over again from scratch, and it’s really complicated,” Catalina González, 39, told IPS, crying.

The families, who have been living here since February, unable to afford other housing, have a total of 12 children between them.

The corralas are communities of squatters that have emerged in crisis-stricken Spain in the last few years, as foreclosures and evictions have skyrocketed due to the housing and mortgage crisis.A total of 362,776 people in Spain lost their homes because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012. -- Platform for Mortgage Victims

The term corrala refers to the galleried tenement buildings with common courtyards and shared services that proliferated in working-class neighbourhoods in Spain’s cities in the 16th to 19th centuries, and has been adopted to stress the sense of community in the occupied buildings.

González, who comes from Barcelona in the northeast, sought shelter in one of the apartments in Buenaventura, a four-storey block of flats, two months ago. She had just arrived from Italy, fleeing her husband who she said mistreated her sons, four-year-old Leónidas and three-year-old Manuel.

The children were playing, sitting on the ground with their two dogs, near a police van while several officers tried to reach, with the help of fire fighters, three activists who were resisting the eviction order and protesting from their perch on the rooftop of the building.

Dozens of people who have been evicted, members of social movements like Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions), the 15M “indignados” movement, and squatters from other corralas in Málaga gathered for several hours in the street under intermittent rainfall, chanting slogans like “people without a home, homes without people, how can this be?” or “another eviction, another occupation”, until the authorities arrested several activists and left.

The Buenaventura building belonged to the Bankinter bank, which acquired it after the construction company went under and sold it – complete with families living in some of the apartments – to Gestiones Hospedalia, a real estate company.

There are some 3.5 million vacant housing units in this country of 47 million people, equivalent to 14 percent of the housing stock, and 700,000 of them are in the southern region of Andalusia, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

Although most of the people who were occupying the Buenaventura apartments have found a place to stay for the time being, “some families have nowhere to go,” José Cosín, a local lawyer, told IPS.

Cósín is an activist with the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), which helps block evictions and foreclosures and repairs empty buildings to provide housing for people in need, while trying to negotiate social rents.

Montse, who has an 11-year-old daughter and preferred not to give her last name, told IPS that she was going to live in a trailer.

Andrés Clemente said he would ask a friend if he could stay in his garage again.

Carolina, who also wanted to remain anonymous, and her children will stay for now at a friend’s place in the La Suerte corrala – another occupied building.

Since the start of the economic crisis in 2007, the number of occupied buildings has soared. Many of the buildings are brand-new, and owned by banks or real estate companies.

The squatters in Buenaventura held months-long talks with the local and regional authorities, the bank and the company that owns the building.

“But in the end we got nowhere. They’ve been fooling around with us, and merely referred us to the social services,” said Leticia Gómez, 32, who was living in the corrala because she “had nowhere to go” after breaking up with her partner.

The Málaga city government gave each family evicted from the corrala an average of 1,000 euros (1,362 dollars) to cover the cost of rent for the first few months. But those who received the payment say it is not enough help, and are asking for the empty units to be converted into affordable housing, where each family pays according to their income.

“They gave me 900 euros (1,226 dollars) for three months rent. And after that what am I supposed to do? We’ll be back on the streets again,” said Yuli Fajardo, 42, hugging her cinnamon-coloured dog.

José Manuel, standing next to her, said he would occupy an apartment in another empty building. He described how early that morning, the police broke through a human chain that had formed around the corrala to prevent the eviction operation.

Finding a place to rent is not easy for these people, who often have no guarantor to sign for them and no formal job, and who can’t afford to put down a deposit of several months’ rent.

Some of the people who were evicted complained that the police used excessive force and “tore the doors off.”

The police, however, told IPS that the operation “went normally.”

“Even the heavens are crying for us,” Kira Vela, 37, exclaimed when she heard thunder.

Vela ended up in Buenaventura after she lost her home in the Málaga neighbourhood of Ciudad Jardín because she got behind on her mortgage payments. One of her three children, Yolanda, was also living in the corrala with her one-year-old baby.

A total of 362,776 people in Spain lost their homes because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012, according to a report by PAH.

So far, the organisation has managed to block 757 evictions and has rehoused 712 people.

Soaring unemployment, which stands at over 26 percent in Spain – the highest rate in Europe after Greece – has led many families to lose their homes when they are unable to meet rent or mortgage payments. Dozens of people have committed suicide because of the evictions.

“There are many empty homes,” Carmen Gil, who lives near Buenaventura, commented to IPS while watching the protesters shout at a dozen police officers posted at the entry to the building. “They should give them to these families with kids. It’s not a crisis, it’s a scam.”

A number of the people evicted from the building have been out of work for years. Many of them used to work in the construction industry.

“If I could afford to pay rent, I would,” Clemente, a carpenter, told IPS.

In April, the government of the autonomous region of Andalusía, where Málaga is located, approved a decree-law on the social function of housing, establishing the need for a stock of social housing units.

The regional law also provides for the temporary expropriation – for a period of three years – of the housing units of families facing imminent eviction, “in cases where there is a risk of social exclusion or a threat to the physical or mental health of persons.”

“Why do we have to leave?” eight-year-old José asked his mother Silvia, who was holding him and his six-year-old sister Esther by the hand during a protest demanding “the right to a roof over our heads” the day before the eviction.

In May, the legislators of the governing right-wing People’s Party (PP) passed a law containing measures to strengthen protection for mortgage-holders, make more affordable housing available, and require banks to renegotiate mortgages.

The law was originally based on two bills: one presented by the executive branch, and the other by PAH, which collected 1.5 million signatures and presented a “popular legislative initiative” to Congress.

But the PAH proposals were eliminated from the final version of the bill.

Moshe Goldshmidt and his wife Lea at a new synagogue under construction in the Israeli settlement Itamar in the West Bank. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
HAR BRACHA SETTLEMENT, Occupied West Bank , Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Large spools of black tubing and plastic-wrapped water tanks lay strewn across a dusty construction site. A handful of Palestinian labourers, speaking quietly in Arabic, shuttle the items to the two unfinished, three-storey apartment blocs behind them.

This is Har Bracha, an illegal Israeli settlement near Nablus, one of the West Bank’s largest Palestinian cities. And on a sunny day this July, construction was moving quickly.

“The bigger and bigger we get, the more difficult it will be to ever evacuate us,” said Yonatan Behar, a resident of Har Bracha, during a press tour of the settlement.

“Ariel [a nearby Israeli settlement] is a city of 20,000 people or more. Who in their right mind would ever think of evacuating a city of 20,000 people? A small community of 300 families [like Har Bracha], that’s possible. But if we get to 1,000 families, and 2,000 families, and 5,000 families, then it’s very, very difficult,” Behar said.

The importance of establishing these “facts on the ground” – which means rapidly building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – is not lost on the Israeli government.“Itamar is continuing to grow throughout the decades. I call it a growth spurt and we haven’t stopped building.” -- Moshe Goldshmidt, resident of the ideological settlement Itamar near Nablus

As Israeli and Palestinian leaders resume negotiations Aug. 14 towards a peace agreement, Israel has untaken several steps to strengthen and expand its settlements. How this will impact the so-called peace talks does not seem to be a factor.

Earlier this week, Israel approved construction of nearly 1,000 new housing units in seven different West Bank settlements, and it plans to build 900 more units in East Jerusalem, south of the West Bank city Beit Jala.

The Israeli government has also added several West Bank settlements to its list of so-called priority communities that are eligible for government funding. This includes three settlements that were originally considered outposts – built in violation even of Israeli law – that earned retroactive recognition last year.

Israeli army radio reported that the Israeli population in West Bank settlements grew more than the population inside Israel proper in the first half of 2013, with the settlement population growing by 2.1 percent, compared to just a two percent increase in Israel.

Housing start-ups in West Bank settlements also increased during the first quarter of 2013 by an astonishing 355 percent compared to the last quarter of 2012, according to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.

These ongoing and seemingly accelerated efforts to expand Israeli settlements as negotiations re-start show that the Israeli government has no intention of uprooting its sprawling settler population, estimated to number more than 600,000 today.

Instead, Israel continues – as it has done since the settlements were first established decades ago – to flout international law by actively promoting settlement growth, with a complete disregard for the consequences – since there are, in fact, none.

While some have argued that recent promises to build in the settlements are meant to appease right-wing factions within the ruling Israeli coalition government that oppose a return to negotiations, the reality is that negotiations have, since their inception 20 years ago, only facilitated the continuation of Israeli colonial policies.

Indeed, so-called peace talks have historically served as nothing more than diplomatic cover for Israel as it continued to confiscate Palestinian land and expand its settler colonies.

The last major agreement signed between the two parties was the 1993 Oslo Accords. Meant to be only a five-year interim agreement, the Oslo framework is still in place.

Today, it is hard to view Oslo as anything more than a failure. Through Oslo, Israel entrenched its occupation policies, and increased its settler population exponentially.

Between 1993 and 2010, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem more than doubled, going from 241,000 to over 500,000, according to Israeli human rights group Btselem.

Many Israeli settlers are unperturbed by the return to negotiations or by the prospects of an agreement; after decades of impunity, many boast just how secure they feel.

“Itamar is continuing to grow throughout the decades. I call it a growth spurt and we haven’t stopped building,” Moshe Goldshmidt, resident of the ideological settlement Itamar near Nablus, told IPS.

Goldshmidt said he has been hearing about possible evacuation of the settlements for 20 years now, but efforts to get them to move only strengthen the settlers’ resolve to stay.

“We’re not going to live in fear,” he said. “We believe very strongly in what we’re doing.”

The Carlos Manuel de Céspedes plaza in central Santiago lost a large number of trees, which will take years to replace. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA , Aug 10 2013 (IPS)

Nine months after Hurricane Sandy, the worst disaster to hit this city in eastern Cuban in decades, local residents say they are now better prepared for catastrophes.

“We have more information now, and more awareness of what happened, which was very hard to accept,” 31-year-old musician Melly Álvarez, who lives in the hard-hit centre of Santiago, told IPS.

“We never thought something like this could happen to us. Since Sandy we keep alert to meteorological warnings and we take precautions, to avoid further surprises,” she said.

Experts say every city in this Caribbean island nation should take precautions against hurricanes, especially places like Santiago de Cuba, which is in mountainous terrain and has densely-populated residential buildings.

“Education must be stepped up in parts of the country that don’t suffer these things frequently or with great intensity, to increase awareness of the risks,” meteorologist José Rubiera said in a recent interview with IPS.

The collapse of an adjacent building caused serious damage to Álvarez’s house, still only partially rebuilt despite a huge effort by her family. “At first there was corruption in the distribution of materials, but the authorities took measures and the reconstruction process was accelerated. It is more organised now,” she said.

The housing sector undoubtedly took the brunt of the up to 200 kilometres an hour winds that swept the city in the early hours of Oct. 25, 2012.

According to official figures, 15,888 housing units were completely destroyed and 22,000 partially collapsed. The total number affected is equivalent to half the housing stock in this city 847 kilometres from Havana.

Many buildings lost their roofs, and families are impatient over the delays in replacing them. “We need six million square metres of roofing and the country produces barely one million,” Madeleine Cortés, vice president of the state administrative council in Santiago province, told foreign journalists.

People whose homes were damaged receive a state discount of 50 percent on the cost of building materials and low-interest bank loans with long-term repayment plans. In the case of families who were left without a home, the state pays the cost of bank loans, while it also subsidises the lowest-income families.

Cortés said that as part of the recovery strategy, a programme has been designed to build 21,400 housing units for those affected by Hurricane Sandy, as well as families in the poorest neighbourhoods, by 2019.

According to the authorities, every new building must take into account the risk of hurricanes and earthquakes.

In Mar Verde, a beach community west of the city of Santiago, close to the spot where Hurricane Sandy made landfall, more than 40 families are waiting for new housing to be built to replace their homes, which were laid waste by the sea. In the meantime, they are living in cabins that used to be rented out to holiday makers.

“They are looking for solid land further away from the coast, as had been decided before the disaster,” said Heriberto Téllez, a 53-year-old caretaker of an agricultural cooperative who, like his neighbours, hopes that the new homes will come equipped with the electrical appliances that were swept away by the waves.

“We are a poor country, not everything can be done all at once. It will be our turn soon,” he told IPS.

Campesinos or small farmers from the southern coast of the province of Santiago said the worst thing in that area was the aftermath of the hurricane.

“Usually you’re happy because the cyclones bring rain,” Carlos Arias, president of an agricultural cooperative in the area, told IPS. “But Sandy did not alleviate the intense drought in these parts. It has barely rained at all in the last nine months.”

The farmer added that due to post-disaster stress, rabbits, pigs and other farm animals stopped breeding, hens laid fewer eggs, cows gave less milk and even bees did not make honey for a time. “We will be feeling the effects of the catastrophe for several years,” he said.

The government of President Raúl Castro reported in late July that the damage caused by Sandy to housing, roads and utilities like electricity and telephone lines in the three most heavily affected provinces – Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo – and by heavy rainfall and flooding in the central region of the country was estimated at seven billion dollars.

In Santiago alone, losses amounted to some 4.7 billion dollars, according to the provincial authorities, including 2.6 billion dollars due to total or partial destruction of housing.

In 2008, tropical storm Fay and hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma damaged 647,111 housing units in the country.

Extreme weather events have compelled the Cuban government to devote the majority of its housing resources to replacing homes damaged by hurricanes and heavy rains. The country has a housing deficit of approximately 700,000 units, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The eastern part of this island of 11.2 million people is also at risk from earthquakes due to its proximity to the Bartlett or Cayman Trough, a complex fault zone that forms part of the tectonic boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates. This poses yet another threat to housing in the region.

Activists and local residents protesting eviction of a Moroccan family on Oct. 24, 2012 in Málaga. Credit:Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

A new mortgage bill approved by Spain’s lower house of parliament would merely put a bandaid on the plight of people whose homes are being repossessed, and would not guarantee protection for most families facing eviction, activists complain.

The bill was passed Apr. 18 thanks to the votes of the right-wing governing Popular Party (PP), and is expected to make it through the Senate because the party also holds an absolute majority there.

Hundreds of thousands of families have been evicted since 2008 in crisis-stricken Spain, which has the highest unemployment rate in the EU – 26 percent.

The vote on the bill came after the European Court of Justice ruled Mar. 14 that Spain’s legislation was in breach of EU consumer protection laws because it did not allow judges to halt evictions, even if mortgage contracts contained unfair terms.

The verdict stated that judges must be granted the authority to delay repossession and eviction while reviewing mortgage contracts to determine whether they have “abusive” clauses.

The abusive terms referred to by the court ruling include late interest payments of 18 percent or evictions of homeowners after they have missed just one or two payments on a 30-year mortgage.

Under Spanish law, people must continue to pay off their mortgages, complete with interest and late fees, even after they have been evicted and their home – whose value is appraised by the bank itself – has been repossessed.

Several people who lost their homes or were on the verge of losing them have committed suicide in recent months, and the protest movement against evictions has ballooned.

The bill that has now gone to the Senate allows courts to suspend eviction for two years in certain cases where unfair mortgage terms have been identified, and sets a limit on late charges.

But it failed to respond to the main demand of the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), a movement that collected 1.5 million signatures to demand that all defaulters be allowed to merely hand over the keys and walk away from the outstanding mortgage payments.

The petition, which also claimed that the change should be retroactive, was delivered to Congress on Feb. 12 as part of a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP).

“This is a law to protect the banks,” Sara Vázquez, a lawyer with the PAH chapter in the southern city of Málaga, told IPS. “The public institutions have been taken hostage.”

The social movement accuses the government of distorting the ILP, which also called for a moratorium on evictions and the conversion of vacant housing in the hands of banks into affordable rental units.

The National Statistics Institute reports that there are 3.4 million vacant housing units in Spain – nearly 14 percent of all housing – and that most of these units are owned by banks.

Evictions totalled 363,000 between 2008 and 2012, according to a report released by PAH in January.

The new law delays eviction for two years for low-income families who meet certain standards of vulnerability. It also forces banks to renegotiate the debt and agree to a discount of 35 percent if the homeowners pay off the loan in five years and 20 percent if they do so in 10 years.

But Vázquez said that “paying 65 percent of the debt in five years starting from the original date set for repossession is impossible for nearly all of the affected families.”

“The PP disappoints people and is not living up to what citizens are demanding when it approves a law that distorts the demands of the ILP,” PAH national spokeswoman Ada Colau told a public radio station. She said the bill “excludes most victims.”

But the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said it was “very satisfied” with the bill. After the vote in the lower house, Vicente Martínez, PP legislative spokesman on the economy, said the new law “was designed looking into the eyes of thousands of people…whose living conditions will now be improved.”

Vázquez, however, said banks in Spain “take advantage of the repossession procedure, which is illegal according to the European court ruling,” and has been “since 1993, when the EU consumer protection law was passed.”

Who is wondering about what has happened to the hundreds of thousands of families who have been evicted over the past few years without a chance to defend themselves from unfair terms in their mortgage contracts? she asked.

“Most of the evicted families in Spain signed unfair contract clauses,” said Vázquez, who described the chaos in the courts as “hell” because, in light of the European ruling, all of the evicted families should have the right to demand reparations from the state for damages.

Meanwhile, judges have begun to apply the European Court of Justice ruling.

“Given the government’s failure to act, judges are moving ahead of the legislators,” José Cosín, a lawyer and activist with PAH Málaga, told IPS. He described the law as “a bandage on a mortal wound in the aorta.”

Judges in Málaga agreed Friday Apr. 19 to halt evictions in cases where unfair contract clauses have been found. The judiciary has set a May 8 deadline for courts nationwide to come up with unified criteria to apply the European Court of Justice verdict.

To foment the conversion of vacant housing to rental units, the government of the southern autonomous community of Andalusía, where Málaga province is located, approved a decree- law on Apr. 9 that slaps fines on banks, companies and individuals who do not release empty units for rent.

The decree-law also makes it possible to expropriate, for up to three years, housing units in the process of being repossessed, in the case of poor families who will be left in the street.

Of the 17 autonomous communities that make up Spain, Andalusía, governed by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), has the second largest number of evictions, after Valencia in the east. Unemployment in Andalusía stands at nearly 36 percent, far above the national average.

Gated residential communities on the Paraná Delta have sprawled out of control in recent years, and are plugging up the local ecosystem and preventing the natural runoff of water that cushions the impact of floods in a vast area near the Argentine capital.

The problem was particularly highlighted after the tragic flooding in early April in the city of Buenos Aires, and especially in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, where torrential rains caused the death of almost 60 people.

Traditional homes in the Delta del Tigre are built on stilts, coexisting in harmony with the changing water levels. Credit: Javier Vidal/CC BY 2.0

The real estate construction boom, the lack of infrastructure such as storm drains to cope with increasingly frequent and heavy rains, and the lack of contingency plans in response to disasters are now at the centre of debate in Argentina.

The Paraná river delta is an immense wetland covering 17,500 square kilometres in the lower course of the nearly 5,000-kilometre long Paraná river, which divides into a labyrinth of smaller branches before flowing into the Río de la Plata estuary.

Traditional houses on the islands of the delta are built on stilts, have wooden jetties and are surrounded by reed beds. They coexist harmoniously with an ecosystem that is prepared periodically to receive large amounts of floodwater.

It is an area of high biodiversity which also provides many environmental services. The most outstanding are provision of water and the capacity to regulate the river’s floods, which are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change caused by global warming.

In recent years, however, 229 housing developments of different sizes have been built on the floodplains of the delta, most of them with luxury homes, golf courses, tennis courts, shopping centres, schools and horse-riding centres.

Town planners said that about 90 percent of these developments were built on floodplains subject to overflow from rivers and streams, and 10 percent on silt islands that were artificially levelled or filled in to support the residential complexes.

Daniel Blanco, the head of Fundación Humedales (Wetlands Foundation), told IPS in an interview that the building expansion was “very aggressive.” Now the area is at risk of losing its natural capacity to absorb water, just as storms are becoming more intense.

Experts with the NGO, which works for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, say that under the false pretext that the land is unproductive, real estate projects went ahead with levelling, draining and diverting water courses, affecting the natural functions of the wetland.

“They are trying to convert the place into a dryland system,” complain the authors of “Bienes y servicios ecosistémicos de los humedales del Delta del Paraná” (Ecosystem Goods and Services in the Paraná Delta Wetlands), a study that warns of the risk of flooding in adjacent areas.

The study, by Patricia Kandus, Natalia Morandeira and Facundo Schivo of Fundación Humedales, indicates that the delta ecosystem does not prevent flooding, but cushions the rise of the river level, retains part of the volume, filters the water and releases it slowly thanks to its plant cover which acts like a sponge.

Warnings from environmentalists and local residents, added to the severe impact of heavy rains in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, managed to block some investment projects, and have led to progress in regulating new building on the islands.

One of the projects brought to a halt is Colony Park, which promised “a private island of peace and tranquillity” on 300 hectares of the Delta del Tigre, the lowest-lying section of the wetlands, in the northeast of the province of Buenos Aires. According to its promotional advertising, the building of 1,000 “luxury” dwellings was planned.

Due to the controversy generated by the project, as well as a lawsuit brought by residents, in 2012 the municipality of Tigre with the help and expertise of environmental organisations drew up stricter planning regulations for building on the islands in that district.

Acknowledging the fragility of the delta ecosystem, the new regulations require buildings to be constructed on stilts, forbid the alteration of the natural elevation of the islands – which usually grow by accumulating sediment – and ban artificial filling in of the centre of the islands.

The islands of the delta are normally bowl-shaped, with a hollow in the centre that contributes to retaining excess floodwater. But these hollows were being filled in to raise the elevation and avoid flooding the building site.

In Campana, another municipality of Buenos Aires, a local association, Vecinos del Humedal, got a temporary stay against a residential development planned for 40,000 people on the Luján river, one of the delta tributaries.

Alejandro Fernández, a member of the association, told IPS that local people got together to resist the project in their area, where several gated communities are already causing flooding in the surrounding areas.

In late October a heavy storm caused the level of the Paraná river to rise by nearly five metres, creating severe flooding not only along the riverside but also in the centre of the city of Luján, where the floodwater reached the basilica, an international tourist attraction.

“All along the Luján river, the building of private complexes has been allowed on the floodplains that alter the natural ebb and flow of the river. If they cap a virtually flat area with cement, they create a serious problem,” Fernández said.
“Then when the floods come, political leaders clutch their heads, but they were the ones who signed off on the permits for those real estate projects without proper urban planning,” he said.

The severe crisis crippling Spain is also sparking some creative responses, such the Okonomía project, a teaching initiative that helps individuals and communities to understand the workings of the economy and make more informed decisions to manage their finances.

“Things have gotten so bad, with people out of work, losing their homes and watching their savings vanish, that something has to be done to economically empower people,” said activist Raúl Contreras, one of the academics behind this initiative that in February will open its first school in Benimaclet, a multicultural neighbourhood in the southeastern city of Valencia.

Contreras – an economist who also heads the company Nittúa, which sponsors this project – spoke with IPS about the powerlessness and fear that is taking hold of many people who do not understand how the economy works and how it affects their lives, and are thus made vulnerable to manipulation.

“Doubts, ignorance and fear – in some cases spread intentionally – lead to mistakes, anxiety and difficult situations that could be avoided if people are better informed and equipped to make decisions or choices,” Nittúa’s website reads.

One out of every four economically active persons is currently unemployed in Spain, where dozens of families are evicted daily from their homes for failure to meet their mortgage payments, and the measures implemented by the right-wing government of Mariano Rajoy to address the crisis involve huge cuts to health, education and other basic services.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Spain fell prey to “preferential shares” and other financial product schemes and lost all their savings. As the crisis deepened and banks became desperate for cash, they convinced more and more savers to buy these products, taking advantage of their lack of understanding of the ins and outs of investment, and using misleading and distorted sales pitches.

Okonomía – which is financing its start-up needs through a crowdfunding campaign – calls itself a “popular economics school” that “develops dialectical educational processes, building on the reality and economic knowledge of each participant, to enable participants to understand their economic situation so that they can make informed and conscious decisions, both individually and collectively, that will lead to the transformation of society through economic empowerment.”

The school is formed by professionals from the fields of economics and education and its activities include training multiplying agents who will spread their newly-acquired knowledge in their immediate social environment.

“The school won’t solve people’s problems, but it will provide a toolbox to help individuals make more informed decisions based on their specific needs,” Contreras explained, highlighting the project’s cross-cutting approach to solidarity economy, as it emphasises sustainable alternatives.

While the head of Nittúa stresses the solidarity aspect of this economic model, he says it is not the school’s intent to preach any one model or solution. Rather it seeks to give participants an understanding of economics in general, including a range of economic alternatives, such as ethical banking, responsible consumption, fair trade and the cooperative model.

“A large part of society has realised that a different way of teaching economics is needed,” Carlos Ballesteros, a lecturer on consumer behaviour at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University, told IPS. “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s business schools stick close to the neoliberal paradigm,” which is profit-driven and based on maximising earnings.

Ballesteros said that while Okonomía’s target public is civil society as a whole and its main objective is to teach and inform, on the understanding that “the economy is everyone’s responsibility,” it also aims to gather and systematise knowledge on solidarity economy practices that may prove useful to people working in that field.

Okonomía offers semester courses, with in-person classes held every two weeks. The methodology is based on the popular education model developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997), who believed that “to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.”

In each session an issue is presented and material is provided to facilitate reflection. “The learning process is a group activity. The classes are not lectures, but rather dialogue-based and interactive,” Contreras said.

He added that after each session the conclusions drawn from the group’s discussions are published online and posted in an intranet, which will form a database of the school’s results, a sort of “Wikipedia of Popular Economy”.

Economist Arcadi Oliveres, one of Okonomía’s advisers, said this project is valuable because it “seeks to reveal to the people the underlying workings of the economy” and “because we’re really in the dark” when it comes to the financial world, he told IPS.

Oliveres, a professor of applied economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, believes that “people don’t know that there are alternatives to the traditional economic system” and calls for critically aware citizens who can make informed decisions.

Independently of how financial markets and governments behave, the actions of common citizens also have an impact on the economy, so that people must be conscious that they too can make irresponsible choices as consumers or that their deposits can go to financing environmentally-harmful corporate activities, the economist argued.

“We have to start asking ourselves where our money goes – what do I do with my savings, where do I deposit them and why? – and learn to take control of our finances,” Contreras said.

The aim of the school is to help people “understand and then make free, but conscious decisions,” he added.

The expert noted that he has not found similar projects anywhere else in the world and that Okonomía, which combines a methodology inspired by Paulo Freire with social innovation methods, has the potential to be replicated outside of Spain “with the support of the social fabric of neighbourhoods and communities”.

Protesters in Málaga demonstrating against foreclosures. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Oct 25 2012 (IPS)

Shouting slogans against bank foreclosures, dozens of protesters in this southern Spanish city gathered Wednesday to prevent the eviction of a Moroccan family who couldn’t afford to meet their mortgage payments.

“I lost my construction job and I have two small children,” the head of this immigrant family, who gave his name as Mohammed, told IPS outside the house he began making payments on in 2007 in the Málaga neighbourhood of La Palma.

About a hundred neighbours and members of the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) gathered for hours in front of Mohammed’s family home, in spite of Wednesday’s heavy rain, to keep out the justice system authorities in charge of the foreclosure.

Thousands of immigrant and Spanish families are in the same situation as a result of the severe economic crisis, which has driven up unemployment to the highest level in Europe, depressed wages, and prompted a raft of austerity measures introduced by the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the rightwing People’s Party.

A total of 29,275 evictions were carried out between April and June – a record for this country, according to a report on the impact of the crisis on the judicial branch, published Sept. 2 by the General Council of the Judiciary.

The official figures indicate that the Spanish justice system foreclosed on 271,570 homes because of default on mortgage payments between 2007, when the crisis began, and 2010.

“This is a very harsh war,” Antonio Alarcón, an activist with the Málaga PAH, told IPS. He said Spain “is in a state of housing emergency, with many families living in dreadful conditions in garages, garrets and shacks,” while others face imminent eviction.

But at the same time, there are over five million vacant dwellings, equivalent to 20 percent of the country’s housing stock, according to housing experts. The National Institute of Statistics recorded 3.1 million uninhabited housing units in 2001, but will only update its figures in early 2013.

According to the newspaper El País, the General Council of the Judiciary this month studied a report by six magistrates which accused banks of “malpractice” for granting mortgages “without evaluating the borrower’s real ability to pay,” demanded a moratorium on mortgage payments, and called for government bank bailout funds to be extended to the financial institutions’ indebted clients.

The growth of unemployment, which has reached 24.6 percent, has caused growing numbers of mortgage-holders to default on their payments and to be evicted. And in spite of being on the street, they are still liable to the banks for the outstanding debt.

“Where will they go with their children? We need a solution, a job so that we can pay,” a female relative of Mohammed’s wife told IPS on the brink of tears, while her husband, Abdesselan, complained that they were deceived because they took out a mortgage for 117,000 euros (151,758 dollars) when the title deed states the value of the apartment is only 70,000 euros (116,754 dollars).

“Let’s form a human chain of passive, peaceful resistance. We’re here to protect a home and a family. We are human beings,” Sara Vázquez, a Málaga PAH spokeswoman, exhorted the neighbours shortly before the time set for the eviction, which in the end was suspended without a new date set, IPS was told.

“It is the neighbours who are stopping the evictions,” said Alarcón, who complained about the lack of effectiveness of the foreclosure mediation programme launched by the government in recent months, whose offices have not been able to solve cases like that of Mohammed’s family.

PAH lawyer José Cosín told IPS that foreclosures can be stopped or delayed by means of “frontal and physical” opposition by civil society, organised in groups like the May 15 Movement (15M), which arose from spontaneous mass demonstrations in the central squares of Spain’s large cities on that date in 2011.

PAH, formed in Barcelona in 1994 as an association of people affected by mortgage debt, has joined with other social organisations and with trade unions to promote a so-called Popular Legislative Initiative, which would make it possible for mortgage-holders to give up a house in full payment for the debt, request a moratorium on mortgages and convert them to affordable rents.

The Rajoy administration will face its second general strike in protest against the cuts in less than a year of government on Nov. 14. In February it announced a “code of good practice” on giving up houses in full payment – known as “dación en pago” – that was merely a declaration of intent and not binding on the banks.

The proposal, according to Cosín, “was not worth the paper it was written on,” as it left it up to the banks to accept or not the return of the houses, or to negotiate affordable rent payments.

“Our weapons (against evictions) are our voices and our hands,” one of Mohammed’s neighbours shouted through a loudspeaker, surrounded by signs reading “Indignation” and “Can’t Pay, Not Won’t Pay.”

In late 2010 there were 687,523 new housing units in Spain that lacked buyers, according to a July 2011 report by the Ministry of Public Works. Meanwhile, evictions are growing exponentially.

Cosín believes solutions exist, and he gave the example of Miguel, an unemployed bricklayer who was squatting in a decrepit house in Málaga, but signed an agreement on Oct. 12 with José, the owner, which allows him to live in the house temporarily in return for renovating it so it can be sold.

“This is a solution in a society where there are millions of empty houses that are depreciating and thousands of people without a home,” said Cosín, who proposed the formula that suited both parties when he received José’s lawsuit against Miguel.

José will receive a pre-arranged sum of money when the house is sold, and the difference between this amount and the final value will be used to buy another dilapidated house for restoration, said Cosín, who is also a 15M activist.

A bill on Urban Rents before the Spanish parliament includes a contract on “restoration in lieu of rent,” regulating the opportunity for the tenant to restore the property instead of paying rent.

Governments should promote alternatives to housing policy based on credit and property, among other things by means of developing a private rental sector, Raquel Rolnik, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, said in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly.