One million nine hundred thousand people live in favelas (shantytowns) in São Paulo, a million in slum tenements, and around three million in precarious housing. This reality worsens every year. The number of people living in favelas evolved from one million two hundred thousand in 1990 to almost two million in the year 2000. The number of tenements also grew. Precarious housing on the outskirts (in areas that are not urbanized) grew at a frightening pace. The population living on the street grew to almost 15,000.

Housing: A right and a struggle

Manoel Del Rio*

Access to housing is a major problem in Brazilian cities. The housing deficit in Brazil has reached 6 million families. The problem requires building new units, as well as adopting adequate policies.

The city of São Paulo is a good example of the dramatic picture at the national level. One million nine hundred thousand people live in favelas (shantytowns), a million in slum tenements, and around three million in precarious housing. This reality worsens every year. The number of people living in favelas grew from one million two hundred thousand in 1990 to almost two million in the year 2000. The number of tenements also grew. Precarious housing on the outskirts (in areas that are not urbanized) grew at a frightening pace. The population living on the street grew to almost 15,000.

The factors that create the housing drama in the city of São Paulo are various. But the primary ones are as follows:
a) Low wages: Wages do not even cover a third of the basic necessities for low-income workers;
b) Unemployment affects 2 million people in São Paulo.
c) The drastic real-estate speculation that raises the price of houses and of rent (while the average inflation was 92.5%, rents went up by 538.68%);
d) Public finances drained by IMF policies. The city of São Paulo alone is required to block more than R$1 billion per year to pay the debt.

These factors combined exclude the homeless workers from the urbanized regions. They are pushed to the outskirts, areas that cannot be considered either rural or urban space because they have no infrastructure. In many cases they are areas alongside rivers.

Low-income workers do not have access to dignified housing. As a result, they are excluded from the urban regions, while in the city there are more than 400 buildings and entire lots that have been closed or under-utilized for 5 to 15 years.

The IBGE/2000 census quantified São Paulo's housing contradiction. Alongside 420,327 empty dwellings, there exist millions of homeless workers. The population of the city center went down by 20%: 101,327 people left this urban region in the last 10 years, leaving nearly 20,000 empty dwellings.

The migration of approximately 600,000 people from São Paulo to the outskirts of the city, such as Itaquaquecetuba, Francisco Morato and Ferraz de Vasconcelos, follows the same logic as that shown in the table above.

Linked to the expulsion of low-income workers from the urbanized regions is the build-up of large pockets of precarious housing and favelas. Workers are forced to get away from high rents, and go to the favelas, to the banks of rivers, to risky areas or to completely degraded housing, in overcrowded conditions.

According to the Center for the Study of the City (Centro de Estudo da Metrópole), the city gains a new favela every eight days. From 1991 to 2000, 464 favelas were raised. On an average, 74 people become favela dwellers every day. While the city's population grew by 8% in that period (1991 - 2000), the number of people in favelas grew 30%.

This internal migration is provoked by the following facts: low salaries, unemployment, economic policies that prevent investment in productive sectors, and real-estate speculation. This last factor prevents access of low-income workers to housing and makes it impossible to build affordable housing. As soon as the region receives public investment, the urban infrastructure is put in place and the price of real estate doubles.

The housing programs that exist today do not serve families who earn even three times the minimum wage. Therefore, low-income workers continue to be displaced from urbanized regions.

Faced with this situation, action is necessary on three combined fronts:
1. To dedicate public resources to a housing program for low-income families, in order to keep workers in the urbanized areas, near the labor market, assisted by complementary social programs. To consolidate permanent public policies to assist families who earn under three minimum salaries.
2. To create policy instruments for urban development that control the use of urban property, implementing the social function of property. To use the laws that already exist, such as the Federal Constitution, the Civil Code, the City Statute, and the Director Plan, to give a social function to the empty and abandoned housing. But it is necessary to advance even more; it's necessary to put forward laws that allow expropriation of abandoned properties. Without an adequate fight against real-estate speculation, the city will not be able to receive its workers.
3. Finally, the homeless workers need to build up their grassroots organizations. They need to build groups that struggle for housing in all the districts, and work with the organized communities of homeless people. People need to take collective actions to make the right to housing a reality.

* Manoel Del Rio is a lawyer and an advisor with the MSTC (Movimento Sem Teto do Centro, Homeless Movement of the Center)