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.

About to Moving In. Maybe Not?

We are about to move in. Tomorrow. And today is the day where we do the official walk-through. There is a person that has been hired to do a list of the condition (or state) of all things, so that when we are moving out, we can check against that list if everything was left in order. Yesterday night, the lawyers came back to us. It took them a month to find out about some elements are missing to complete a proper lease registration. In fact, there are three issues preventing for the proper completing of all registration procedures, the two first being simple: officially the house is registered as a co-property of the owner and his wife, although she is deceased; and a paper is missing to show that all taxes have been cleared by the owner.  However the last but not least, the house is not found in the cadaster registration or Registro de Imoveis. Well, think about this. In other words, the house is not registered. The house does not exist legally... This is a real problem of land or property rights. Oops! Big oopsy.
I am not sure why it took one month for the notaries and lawyers to find this out. And why we are told the day prior to our move.  We are not sure also on how this could be corrected - administrative procedures here are complicated, and to say the least, lengthy. The lack of proper registration might be due to various reasons. The "correction" of the elements pointed out by the lawyers would allow us the register the lease, ensuring a proper protecting in case of legal need - for example if the owner sells. Not completing the registration procedures could mean that a new owner could quick us out, among other things.
Should we take the risks? we asked. We took a moment to reflect, and asked around for some opinions. Is the risk big, if there are no registration of a building? Maybe not so much - who would buy a building without the proper registration papers anyway. And we (more specifically me) really wanted to get out of our rental place. In the end, we touched wood, and chose to take the assumption that all would be fine, that the owner was a trustworthy guy. He did appear to be this way. Knock knock.
So today, I went anyway to do the walk-thought. The owner and his girl-friend were there. The house was standing empty, waiting impatiently to have us moving in. It was beautifully ready for us.
I was very nervous. I had to break the news, explain at best what the lawyers found, detail what was missing to the owner. Of course the lawyers would fill the blanks. Yet it felt like I was the jolly messenger coming to kill the party.
So despite my clear statements to the owner about our intention to trust that he would do all the necessary paperwork, despite being there for the transfer of the keys, the owner did not understand me at all.  His face went white. He jaw dropped open. Then tightened. He just understood the property issue - he saw the wall of bureaucracy in front of him. He probably was angry to have made all this effort transferring his things and moving. I had to explain at least four times.  His girlfriend, who understood well english, could translate. Yes, we would do this in good faith. We would trust that he does all the necessary paperwork to register the lease, in order to enable him - and us - with a better and more complete legal protection. It was probably so unlikely that he could understand my english.
We then did the walk-through. Here are some photos.