Social housing policies in the era of financial accumulation: a comparative analysis between agents and impacts in Brazil and Mexico.

• In Event: Neoliberalismo y desregulación: retos en vivienda, servicios y abasto

Abstract

The housing issue in Latin America has always been marked by exclusion and precariousness. In countries such as Brazil and Mexico, it has only started to be dealt as a high-impact public policy after the 1960s, without, however, resolving the problem. With the rise of neoliberalism and the emergence of financial capital as an active agent in the production of space, the solutions proposed by governments have been increasingly targeted by policies guided by financial mechanisms such as the multilateral banks asked for. In a context of homeownership ideology, producing homes increasingly as commodities by the capitalist form, governments traced programs to produce social housing through the market and respond to the effects of economic crises. Financial capital, in turn, sees in the space production an alternative place to reproduce itself.
In both countries, large-scale projects to thousands of low-income housings located in areas far from employment centers, services and infrastructure, have generated serious impacts on the territory, expanding the urban boundaries to environmentally fragile areas and enhancing a historical landscape of exclusion and segregation in urban areas.
From a comparative analysis between the main current housing policies in Brazil and Mexico, the article will investigate the roles played by the state and capital, industrial and financial, as agents in the production of housing, highlighting the impact of their interventions on territory of its two major metropolitan areas - São Paulo and Mexico City - in the production of social housing as a commodity, by the market.

Author

• Higor R Carvalho, University of São Paulo