ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Different rental housing policies models and the ongoing difficulty of overcoming the housing crisis

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 13 | HOUSING AND SHELTER

Speakers

Dr Débora Ungaretti (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP)) Felipe Suzuki Ursini (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP))

Description

This paper aims to analyse how the current housing and rental crisis unfolds in Brazilian and Latin American cities in a context of both (i) the rising role of rental housing as a new frontier for the accumulation of financial real estate capital, and (ii) the limitations of overcoming the housing crisis through planning.
The global cases discussion at the Rental Housing Policies Seminar (2024) brought examples from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, with the Brazilian experience as a reference, highlighting the wide scope and diversity of rental policies worldwide. This panorama showed three distinct models of rental policies, although neither of them has been able to respond to the main issues of access to housing.
One model is based on the Public-Private Partnership strategy proposed on pilot cases that grant private entities the right to build new units and manage housing services for decades.
Another model seeks to scale up pilot experiences of social rentals on public-owned units, maintaining public management and seeking to improve them. There are very few cases, because in Latin America, unlike countries in the Global North that have had a Welfare State and have a public rental housing stock, rental housing policy has always been residual compared to home ownership agenda.
The most widely implemented rental policies are “precarious” ones – transferring a monthly amount as rental assistance in response to the need to remove residents from areas of public interventions, disaster-prone sites, or in response to cases of violence against women, for homeless people and/or drug users, among others. These policies have limits in terms of housing response: they are temporary and have to be frequently renewed, because government is unable to offer permanent and adequate housing; the properties are not inspected by specialists, and families may be living in precarious places; they stimulate a real estate market as a consequence, which may be formal and expensive, or informal and precarious; the amounts paid are insufficient to access the housing market; and they are understood as social benefit policies, and may not be used for housing; among others.
The cases in which civil society or social movements are responsible for the housing management are limited to a few buildings or units, usually aimed at a specific target audience, which is also evident in the international experiences presented.
In short, different conceptions of the State seem to coexist with different arrangements in national and international experiences, while in Brazil the various cases presented appear to be guided by three models of public policy for social rental in progress. One, which resists the dismantling of the public housing stock and strives to overcome the challenges of the current social rental programs, admitting that it is only subsidized rental that effectively serves the most vulnerable families on a permanent basis. The second seeks to outsource public management, in pilot projects that are of interest to the market but do not serve those most in need. The third has the politics of urgency as the main concern, offering precarious and constant benefits without any control by public policy as to whether these benefits are being used for effective access to housing.
All models, despite being structurally distinct, form parts of the same housing policy agenda without revealing their ambiguities. The challenge seems to lie in structuring a more socially diverse model, involving civil society and social movements in the constitution of non-speculative policies aimed at testing the decommodification of housing. This democratic alternative has to be supported by public authorities and correspond to the scale of the housing demand.

References

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