The issues of housing and urban planning are complex and controversial all over the world, but in our country (as in almost everything) it goes against common sense.
Although it is a distressing problem for the vast majority of inhabitants of all social classes, ages and geographical areas, it is foreign to public debate and, in particular, to politics.
Brutal example of this is the disaster caused by rental law. It is estimated that in the city of Buenos Aires alone there are 130,000 vacant apartments and the listings of properties on offer have fallen by more than half.
Another case is the use of housing improvement subsidies through political leaders. As well as the absurdity of massively selling public land in the northern part of the city, the richest, with an offer for the richest sectors and weakening investments in the center. Or change the Town Planning Code again in less than two years and in the middle of the quarantine, generating inexplicable capital gains.
For decades, national plans for massive housing construction have been largely ineffective and suspected of corruption. Meanwhile, informal settlements continue to increase, as does the housing and habitat shortage.
Of course, the central issue is that housing is getting more expensive and wages are getting lower. On the side of the cost of housing, this is explained by the increase in the value of the land. There are no planning tools for the land market, only the logic of increasing the tax burden on existing homes.
Not to mention the non-existent mortgages with 100% inflation and the capital market and pension savings subordinated to covering the deficit of an almost bankrupt state are a pipe dream.
If for the medium sectors the situation is distressing for the popular classes it is desperate. They are condemned to live on the edge of metropolises, or large cities, in plots without services, without property titles, away from transport, school or health care, or they fall into the hands of the mafias of land grabbing, or they live in villas .
Concepts such as planning, social inclusion, accessibility to housing, the right to the city, innovation, sustainability are words without content.
It is not clear that it is not recognized that this situation increases inequalities, poverty, weakens social cohesion, endangering the democratic contract.
To do? Quoting Carlos Montes, Chile’s Minister of Housing and Urbanism, “you have to do everything at the same time. You have to take care of the housing, the neighborhood and the city.”
We need to provide short-term answers while long-term ones are launched. Provide conditions for capital to flow massively to the largest number of social sectors, both for construction and for financing.
We must attack the qualitative and quantitative deficit. Encourage ownership as a rental. Addressing accessibility, sustainability and innovation. Unleash the capabilities of an intelligent, modern and dignified state to plan and regulate, to build governance with citizens and not against them.
A State that covers what private initiative does not arrive, that guarantees legal certainty and inclusion of development bases, that balances Argentine macrocephaly and enhances opportunities in mid-range cities All this and much is the pending task, as years ago Ortega y Gasset harangued us: “Argentines on things! on things!”
The author is the architect UNMDP, MDI Polytechnic University of Madrid, AMDP Harvard University
Source: Clarin
