Your House Your Life

One of the cliché images we have from Brazil is the favelas, the shanty towns filled with poor people. Indeed Brazil is struggling with a huge number of its population that is not able to access decent housing, and ends up living either in slums or on the streets. About 6% of the country's population lives in favelas, or about 11.4 million people reports the IBGE in their 2010 census. Homeownership is unaffordable for more than 60% of the Brazilian population says the IDB.
However living in Brasilia keeps our eyes away from the issue: there is not really any slums to see. There are various reasons for this, one of the main is that Brasilia was never designed to include lower segments of the population. In fact Brasilia has rather been described as a city of exclusion, you can read some more about the topic here.
In one of my driving afternoon to shoot Emmanuel to sleep I ended up in São Sebastião. It is a small community of about 100,000 souls a few kilometers from where we live. It is a typical low income suburb of Brasilia, far from the city center. Very different from Brasilia, it is unplanned, with one main street along which small concrete buildings line up their garage-door storefront, and with people hanging out and socializing in front of them. The area looks less manicured, more densely occupied, more vibrant, more real Brazil, and yet probably more rough and tough. Before reaching the town center, at the intersection from the main road and the highway, this housing complex was under construction. The vision of these aligned small concrete structures with empty openings on several hundred of square meters of land initially pleased me; it looked like a mini Chinese housing development (I admit to be nostalgic in strange ways). These are part of the social housing program the country is currently developing.

Indeed, during his presidency, Lula put in place a program addressing the housing problem of lower segments of the population. It is called "Minha Casa Minha Vida", My House My Life. Launched in 2009, the public housing program initially had for objective the creation of one million housing units; since a much larger number have been developed.
The mechanisms are similar for all of them: banks finances the development of the units and provides mortgages to the eligible families. The developers make the initial investments in land acquisition and developments. The government provides a number of guidelines regarding the units and the complexes, but does not directly oversees the projects. Upon completion, the government provides its approval while the banks give the financial structure to provide the mortgages to the participating families. In practice it means that the low income segments of the population have access to this type of housing, but not the poorest. As there is a mortgage involved the families beneficiaries of the programs are usually earning an income, even if very limited.

This photo shows an other development we passed on our way to Val Paraiso. From the looks you can tell right away that architects are not part of the design process. However, I am curious to know more about this program and its mechanisms. I will return with more details later.
Until then I will keep on driving around with Emmanuel sleeping in the back.