Moving on up? The downside to the high life in Buenos Aires social housing

BENITEZ, JOAQUIN

The Sociological Review website and online magazine

Sociological Review Foundation Limited

Año: 2022

2754-1371

From the 1930s to the mid-2000s, slums and informal settlements in Buenos Aires grewslowly, as migrants and poor families accessed housing in strongly decommodified terms.Anyone could grab a vacant piece of land, no more than a few hundred square meters insize, and progressively build a home of their own. In those rare cases of people selling theirhomes, they would choose their buyers and price them based on moral conditions, like theirneed for help, being a hard worker, or a close relative or a friend.However, in the last 15 years, informal communities grew in population without expandingtheir footprint, running out of land, growing in density, and verticalizing. Although we don’thave official accounts by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (GCBA), someacademics and NGOs have estimated that the informal settlement’s residents almost tripledsince the 2001 census and doubled since the 2010 census. As settlements densified,makeshift homes became brick-and-mortar buildings with some of them growing up to fivestories high. Many informal “homeowners” started to build extra rooms to rent, in somecases to complement their income, but many took the opportunity to become real slumlords,running multiple tenant-like buildings with up to 50 rooms to let. With these spatialtransformations, communal ties began to shift as well. Informal land markets became highlycommodified, now people pricing their homes based on location and the quality of thebuilding materials, rather than the buyer's moral fiber. Today, between 30% and 50% of theresidents of informal communities in the city of Buenos Aires rent rooms with sharedbathrooms or kitchens, with no protection from eviction or abuse from their landlords due tothe informal, undeclared nature of their contracts.These spatial transformations brought a divide between homeowners and tenants,weakening a historical mobilization for upgrading and formalization. Owners did not wanttheir tenants to be enumerated by upgrading programs, in fear that authorities would passtenure regularization to those renting their rooms and houses. Meanwhile, tenants distrustedmany community leaders precisely because they owned their homes and would not defendtheir interests as tenants.In Playon de Chacarita, a medium-sized informal community undergoing an upgradingprogram, these communal relationships seem to be shifting once again due to a new form ofverticalization. Around 70% of its 1046 families will be relocated to social housingapartments right next to the settlement, while the rest will be allowed to stay as long as theybring their housing to (somewhat relaxed) zoning standards. In my interviews withcommunity leaders, there were fears that these apartments up to eight stories high, wouldhollow out the dense fabric of solidarity that allows people in these communities to surviveon a daily basis. In sociological jargon: they were concerned that the upgrading programwould damage the social ties that grow in dense housing and narrow alleyways, and replacethem with distant civil inattention and fleeting encounters of apartment life.