Tenants in Spain Win First Battle against Evictions

February 17, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

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The ILP calls for “payment in kind", meaning that a person’s debts are written off once they have surrendered their home. Credit: Inés Benítez

Inés Benítez

MALAGA, Spain, Feb 15 (IPS) – Public outcry against evictions this week led Spain’s parliament to accept a popular initiative against mortgage-related evictions for unpaid debts, which in the past seven days have led to four suicides."The banks chase me to pay every cent," while they are rescued with public money, complained Benigno, a 47-year old unemployed man, who with his three children has for nearly a year occupied one of 29 vacant apartments in a building project in the southern city of Malaga, which closed down when the developer went bankrupt.

Benigno has had two houses foreclosed on. He spent three years working for a company with an open-ended contract when he decided to take out a loan to buy a bigger second home, offering the first as collateral.

"Everybody did it (bought property)," he told IPS. "But overnight I was fired. I’ve lost everything and I owe 102,000 euros (135,000 dollars), payable in 28 years."

The Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP), promoted by the citizen movement Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (Platform for those Affected by Mortgage), is backed by nearly a million-and-a-half signatures.

It calls for “payment in kind,” meaning that a person’s debts are written off once they have surrendered their home, and wants this to apply retroactively. It also wants a moratorium on evictions, and the creation of social housing with homes confiscated by banks.

"We are the European country with the most evictions, and at the same time the one with the largest millions of accumulated empty homes," PAH spokesman, Ada Colau, said in a televised interview earlier this month.

Between 2007 and the third quarter of 2012, there were 400,000 foreclosures in Spain, according to data from the General Council of the Judiciary.

"I heard that there were empty houses and I came. I had no other choice. I could not pay rent," said Antonio, a 22-year-old living with his wife Encarni, 19, and their two-year-old daughter. The little he earns as a street vendor, he spends on food.

"I have no electricity and water, but at least I don’t have my daughter on the street," said Antonio, who is a neighbor of Benigno and 20 other families, who make up for the lack of electricity with candles and generators, and fill containers with drinking water from nearby pumps.

The debate over the ILP, which given the social pressure was accepted "in extremis" by the ruling right-wing Popular Party (PP) with a parliamentary majority, "is a first step", said Antonio Alarcón, a core activist of the Malaga PAH, which in four years has stopped more than 500 evictions. It negotiates payments in kind and relocates families into affordable rental schemes.

It remains to be seen whether the measures proposed in the ILP will be incorporated unchanged into a bill on the same subject which is already passing through the parliament.

If by law the banks apply payment in kind retroactively, many people who have lost their homes would avoid facing lifelong debts. "They will save me from a 28-year trap,” said Benigno.

Some in economic circles oppose payment in kind, arguing it will make credit more expensive and hurt the financial system.

"But the fact is that today there is no credit for anyone and the financial system is already broken," Sara Vásquez, an attorney for the PAH in Malaga, told IPS.

For Vásquez, the admission of the ILP project was the result of "arm-twisting " and “marks a milestone in this country". It shows that "the only way out is pressure" by of citizens, who increasingly feel less represented by institutions, and are outraged by the corruption charges shaking the PP and members of the royal family.

"They receive envelopes with money and we receive envelopes with bills," said Azahara, another resident of the occupied building, referring to the alleged illegal payments to members of the PP, as reported by the national newspaper El País.

In the past four months there have been seven suicides of people who were to be evicted, including four in just the last seven days. On Feb. 13, the judicial commission that was to carry out the eviction of a man found him hanging at his home in the southeastern city of Alicante.

Unemployment is now affecting a whopping 26.2 percent of the workforce in Spain, even as there are drastic cuts in key areas such as health and education.

"(The government) is not rescuing people, but the banks," said Alarcon, referring to public money allocated to clean up the financial institutions and the creation of a so-called "bad bank", a manager of unpaid property loans or unsold homes that the banks took from bankrupt construction companies to whom they had lent money.

During the housing boom, "everything in this country was pushing you to buy a home instead of renting… and the banks themselves drafted the mortgage contracts," Colau recalled in the interview.

The PAH has called for demonstrations this Saturday "for the right to housing and against financial genocide".

The Court of Justice of the European Union declared last November that the Spanish foreclosure system is incompatible with the laws of the EU bloc.

In a preliminary ruling, which will serve as a basis for judgment, the court granted national judges the power to suspend evictions until the terms of credit have been reviewed to see whether or not they are abusive.

The debtors come to the PAH with "complete ignorance" about their situation: they don’t know how to negotiate with the bank or how their lawyer can help them, said Alarcon, who criticised the lack of training of lawyers in charge of defending the interests of those affected.

"None of us live here today because we want to," said Benigno. With the help of the PAH, they want to negotiate with the owner and continue to stay in the building, in exchange for its maintenance, for which each of them provides 20 euros per month, according to a list attached to an elevator that never functioned.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Economic Crisis, Europe, Human Rights, Lead, Social Justice Tagged With: , , ,

Kinshasa Graveyard Home to Hundreds

December 28, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emmanuel Chaco

KINSHASA, Dic 27 (IPS) – Despite the health risks, hundreds of families are living in a cemetery in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa. Municipal authorities seem powerless to act.Visiting the Kinsuka cemetery in early December, IPS counted 100 families, including around 500 children aged from less than a year old to 10.

The first structures sprang up here in 2010. Fridolin Kaweshi, the minister in charge of land-use planning, urbanisation and housing, told IPS that the government has repeatedly banned the construction of homes on this site.

In April, houses in the cemetery were demolished on orders from the provincial governor, but late at night, the occupants rebuilt their small shelters of earth and wood.

"We have nowhere else to go," resident Cynthia Bukasa told IPS. "The government has to take steps to protect us and give us a place where we can build."

Bukasa explained that her husband, a police officer, is stationed in Bas-Congo Province, in the western part of the country. He had built a small house for her here and then left. She added that living on his salary of around 50 dollars, the family doesn’t have the resources to pay rent elsewhere.

Olivier Mandja, mayor of Mont Ngafula Commune, within whose boundaries the cemetery lies, told IPS, "The structures on this site are the work of soldiers and members of the police force over which the commune has no authority."

Approached by IPS, soldiers and police officers at Kinsuka refused to speak, preferring to let their wives answer questions. Even the higher-ranking officers preferred to remain silent.

Other residents were happy to speak. "We got official authorisation from the authorities to build houses here and live in them," said Jean Mbulu, a resident at the cemetery and father of three little girls, the oldest of whom is six.

Mbulu said he bought the plot from Eddy Mambuya, the traditional chief of Mont Ngafula – though he declined to show IPS the documents proving this. "I was stunned when people said we were illegally occupying this land," he said.

Reached by IPS, Chief Mambuya, stated that while he is an authority established and recognised by the law, he denied all responsibility for the sale of land for construction on the site.

"It’s thanks to us that the cemetery is regularly cleaned up," said Michel Aveledi, another Kinsuka resident. "We pull up the grass and pick up the plastic bags which invade the place from time to time."

He said he wanted to see the government decommission the cemetery and build a school for the children next to the houses that are already there.

But experts believe the health of the families who live on this site is at risk, and have called on the government to take urgent steps to protect the children in particular.

Jean Myasukila is an epidemiologist based in Kinshasa. “The health risks for people living in houses built in a cemetery are enormous," he told IPS.

"When bodies decompose, they give off odours and gases which are very harmful to health, especially of children," he said.

"We also have to consider the flies which land on particles of bodies or bones which become unearthed, which can then alight on food or kitchen utensils. These flies are vectors for harmful microbes," according to Myasukila. "It’s not acceptable to leave these families there, if only for reasons of hygiene."

Chancey Maroy, a member of civil society and an environmental protection expert, told IPS that the land the graveyard is built on is not stable, as it is on a slope that is not protected by any anti-erosion mechanisms. "The structures on the burial site could also accelerate landslides, which have already been seen there. This adds to the dangers faced by the families who live there," he said.

Kinsuka residents have also come into conflict with those using the graveyard for its intended purpose. In early December, a group of people coming to bury a body encountered strong resistance from the cemetery’s residents. On the eve of the burial, residents built a shack on the spot purchased by the bereaved family of the interment. The family was forced to bury their loved one elsewhere in the cemetery, but the authorities took no action.

Damas Balinga, director of the DRC’s Ministry for Planning and Monitoring the Implementation of the Revolution of Modernity, told IPS, "In the framework the five-year plan of action, the government is preparing the implementation of its programme to modernise the city of Kinshasa. New housing developments are in the process of being created. Families in distress need only have confidence in the government in order to benefit."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Poverty, Report Tagged With: ,

U.S.: Occupy Targets Foreclosures

December 7, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Judith Scherr

 

occupy

People march through West Oakland to the foreclosed home now owned by Fannie Mae that will be occupied as a community centre.

Credit:Judith Scherr/IPS
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OAKLAND, California, Dec 7, 2011 (IPS) – Five months ago, Gayla Newsome was at work when she got the call. A sheriff had come to her home of 15 years and put her two pajama-clad daughters out on the curb of her West Oakland street. Newsome knew the bank was about to foreclose, but thought she still had time to fight it.

On Tuesday, she marched in triumph back to her former abode – along with some 75 supporters. It was Occupy Our Homes Day across the nation, feted by Occupy organisations in more than 20 cities; it was a day to condemn the bank seizure of more than one million U.S. homes in 2010.

Newsome’s home will be occupied 24/7 by volunteers from Occupy Oakland and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

"I’m here to reclaim what belongs to me and to the community," Newsome said, standing in front of the home, as a masked man affixed a "Save Gayla’s home" banner to the front of the two-story townhouse.

The day of actions marked a new direction for Occupy Oakland and many other Occupies which have been chased from their tent cities. Their decision to use a "diversity of tactics" can translate into occupying a foreclosed house one day or calling a general strike the next – whatever they can do to continue to shine a glaring light on what the Occupy Oakland General Assembly has called "a deliberate Wall Street strategy that has made billions for those at the top while devastating the 99 percent".

———-

Reclaiming Vacant Space

On the coast in Santa Cruz, a town of about 60,000, a group of protesters, independent of Occupy Santa Cruz, entered a former bank building on Nov. 30, but after negotiations with police, left peacefully four days later.

They intended to turn the space into a community centre –and to make the point that unused private space should be reclaimed for public use. A few blocks away, another Santa Cruz group transformed a privately-owned vacant lot, unused for at least 20 years, into a community garden with benches, native plants and fruit trees.

The property owner bulldozed the garden Tuesday.

Also in Santa Cruz, police warned they will clear the 100-tent Occupy Santa Cruz encampment by 5 p.m. Wednesday; Occupy Santa Cruz plans to go to court Wednesday afternoon to stop them.

———-

The housing crisis in Oakland has reached crisis proportions. Between 2006 and 2009, 14,941 property owners in Oakland received a notice of default on their mortgages – that’s about one in four homeowners, according to the 2010 report, "Rebuilding Neighborhoods, Restoring Health: A Report on the Impact of foreclosure on public health", authored by Causa Justa:: Just Cause and the Alameda County Health Department.

"Unfortunately, the situation is poised to get worse as more adjustable rate mortgages reset, unemployment rates remain unabated, and subprime lending persists, particularly in communities of color," the report says.

Before marching the half-block to her foreclosed home, Newsome, who is African American, addressed supporters at Defermery Park, underscoring the legacy of activism in Oakland, and noting in particular that Defermery Park was a significant gathering place for the Black Panther movement.

Newsome talked about losing her home. After losing a job and falling behind in her mortgage, she tried to work with Chase Bank for a loan modification.

"I kept faxing loan modification applications," she said. "I kept calling; they said they never got it. I faxed it again; they said they never saw it."

Finally, the bank turned down the modification and foreclosed on the property, which is now advertised as "WONDERFUL FAMILY HOME IN FENCED COMMUNITY; 3 BEDROOM, 2.5 BATHS IN MOVE IN CONDITION. MUST SEE!!!!" Newsome said saving her home was more than trying to help her family – it was part of stopping the rapid gentrification of West Oakland. "I’m not just here personally to reclaim my house," she said, "I’m here to encourage people to reclaim this community."

Earlier in the day, about a mile from Newsome’s home, Nell Myhand from Causa Justa addressed a crowd at the West Oakland subway station. Putting the housing crisis into perspective, Myhand condemned the federal government for disinvestment in affordable housing.

"For the last 30 years, they have neglected public housing (and) failed to put any pressure on developers around affordable housing," she said. "That set us up for the banks to then target us for predatory loans."

These sub-prime loans were directed to black, Latino and elders in three East Oakland neighbourhoods, and "cost our communities wealth and even our health," she said.

Stress, blight and crime are just some of the consequences foreclosures have on entire neighbourhoods, further devastating communities of colour "that have suffered from decades of policies rooted in discrimination", says the "Rebuilding Neighborhoods" report.

Margarita Ramirez’s family also suffered a foreclosure. Speaking in Spanish, with English translation, she addressed the crowd at the subway station, explaining that in 2009, her husband lost his job and consequently the family was unable to make house payments. They lost their East Oakland home.

They applied to Fannie Mae through the Bank of America, which serviced the loan, for a modification. But after submitting a series of documents, which the bank would lose time and again, Fannie Mae ultimately turned down the requested modification.

So they began working directly with the Bank of America for a modification, but after a few weeks got a notice that the home was sold to Fannie Mae. Both the Bank of America and Assemblymember Sandre Swanson tried to get Fannie Mae to rescind the sale, but it refused, Ramirez said.

Ramirez explained that Occupy Oakland and the housing organisations plan to occupy a vacant home near the West Oakland station owned by Fannie Mae. "We’re here to reoccupy Fannie Mae homes until they give us our home back," she said.

In both the Ramirez and Newsome cases, the need to modify the terms of a loan came as a result of a period of unemployment.

"What has fueled the foreclosures in the last year and a half or so, has been the massive unemployment," said Robbie Clark of Causa Justa, co-author of the "Rebuilding Neighborhoods" report.

The unemployment rate for people of colour in Oakland is significant: in 2010, African American unemployment in Oakland was 19.6 percent and Latino unemployment was 15.2 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Chanting "ain’t no power but the power of the people and the power of the people don’t stop," the group of around 100 people left the subway station and marched three blocks to an unoccupied, foreclosed home owned by Fannie Mae. Activists decorated the home with placards such as "Give Back the Deed/Regresen El Titulo" and "welcome home." They plan to turn the 121 year-old building into a center for classes on tenants’ and homeowners’ rights – in fact they had workshops scheduled for late afternoon. And they also said they would use the property for low-income housing.

On Saturday in San Francisco, homeowner and tenants rights activists took to the streets with marches in four communities coming together downtown to target the banks they blame for foreclosures. About 100 people rallied in the heavily-Latino Mission District.

Tenants spoke about how they were being pushed out by "Ellis Act evictions," that is landlords who evict tenants when they quit the landlord business. These landlords can circumvent rent control and profit by turning their apartment buildings into condominiums.

"My entire family (grandparents, aunts, cousins) has lived together for more than 27 years," Brenda Medina tearfully told the gathering in the Mission. "With rents being so high, we might be forced to move outside San Francisco," and they may have to break up the mutually dependent family unit of several generations.

Wednesday morning at 2:18 a.m., the Occupy San Francisco communications team sent out a message saying the San Francisco encampment was being raided by police.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Economic Crisis, Featured, Politics, United States, Unrest Tagged With: , ,

ARGENTINA: Needs Outstrip Efforts to Build Affordable Housing

August 15, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 12, 2011 (IPS) – The Argentine economy has grown steadily since 2003, and hundreds of thousands of social housing units have been built. Nevertheless, the protests and conflicts that periodically break out make it clear that the solutions have failed to keep up with the need for affordable housing

The Federal Planning Ministry reports that 617,660 housing units have been built nationwide since 2003, another 223,434 are under construction, and work is about to start on more than 22,000 additional units, benefiting a total of nearly four million people, 10 percent of the population of 40 million.

Nevertheless, demand has outstripped supply. The deficit is not only of housing, but of basic services like piped water, sanitation, heating and cooking gas, and rainwater drainage systems.

"Housing is being built, but it’s not sufficient to keep up with demographic changes," Dan Adaszko, an expert on housing issues at the Catholic University of Argentina’s Observatory on Social Debt, told IPS.

Adaszko is the author of a study on "Housing conditions and access to goods and services in Argentina 2010", recently published by the Observatory, which points out that the country’s high rates of economic growth have failed to guarantee access to decent housing.

The study says 20.5 percent of households have problems like overcrowding, lack of basic services, poor physical conditions of housing and lack of maintenance, or the fact that the family does not own the land, or the housing unit itself.

The problem is structural in nature, Adaszko said. Ten years ago, when the population stood at 36 million, the percentage of inadequate housing units was basically the same as today. In other words, the gap between supply and demand has not shrunk with time.

The report says some three million housing units are needed, to cover demand.

It also says there are other "irrefutable indicators" of the lag in making basic services available, and that there has only been "slight improvement" on that front in the last decade.

The study reports that nationwide, 12.4 percent of urban households lack piped water, 34.6 percent have no sewage services, 32.3 percent lack rainwater drainage systems, and 26.8 percent have no piped gas, used for heating and cooking.

Besides these challenges, many poor households face other problems such as exposure to polluting industries and open air dumps.

"The housing deficit is not the only aspect that has to be taken into account, when analysing a country’s housing problems," the report underlines.

In this South American country, where 92 percent of the population is urban, the persistent deficit of housing and basic services is "unacceptable," Adaszko said.

The report adds that, although public spending on affordable housing was resumed in 2002, "the deficit remains high."

But "a broader, larger-scale programme is needed to compensate for four decades of failure to address the housing problem, which is concentrated in the outskirts of Buenos Aires and the poor provinces in the north of the country," Adaszko said.

It is in the country’s poorest areas where serious social conflicts have broken out when squatters on land and in unfinished buildings have been forcibly evicted.

Two people were killed in November when the police in the northern province of Formosa evicted a group of indigenous people laying claim to their ancestral land.

And in December, a wave of land occupations, protests and police crackdowns broke out in Greater Buenos Aires, leading to the death of two protesters.

But the most serious incident happened two weeks ago in the northwest province of Jujuy, where some 700 families were living in camps on 15 hectares of land owned by the Ledesma sugar company outside the town of Libertador General San Martín.

The families were brutally forced to leave the premises by the police, who set fire to their belongings and caused the deaths of four people and injured 67 others.

As a result of the incident, the provincial legislature urgently expropriated 40 hectares of the vast properties owned by Ledesma.

But the wave of land occupations and camps set up by people without any housing options had already spread to eight other areas in Jujuy, highlighting the serious deficit in housing in that province. One of the settlements was set up by the wives of police officers.

"The deficit is concentrated in the provinces of northern Argentina and in the metropolitan area of the city of Buenos Aires, where sewage services, water, gas and paved roads are also needed," said Adaszko. "It is not enough to just build housing; what is needed is comprehensive urban development."

The regular outbreaks of unrest show that, even during a time of high economic growth and with a national government that puts a priority on public works and social housing, it is hard for construction efforts to keep up with need.

From 2003 to 2008, Argentina’s economy grew at an average of 8.5 percent per year. And despite the impact of the global economic crisis, the national economy even managed to grow in 2009 – 0.9 percent, compared to -1.9 percent for Latin America as a whole, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Growth for 2011 is forecast by the government at eight percent.

The late centre-left president Néstor Kirchner took office in 2003, and his wife Cristina Fernández became president in late 2007.

Adaszko said some provinces, like Córdoba, Mendoza and San Luis, have come up with different political solutions. In San Luis, for example, the provincial government has provided new housing units in exchange for token monthly payments.

But in other provinces, a number of structural factors come together, such as heavy concentration of land ownership, deep-rooted poverty, and overall lack of development. In Jujuy, for instance, one of the country’s poorest provinces, land is mainly in the hands of large agribusiness companies, likes Ledesma.

"In some districts, you find officials who say they have the money to build, but no land to build on," he said.

Publicly owned land is often located far from cities, and thus from workplaces, schools, health centres, transportation and urban infrastructure.

"Sometimes the solution is to push through a law on expropriation" of idle land, said Adaszko, who added that there should be a move from a housing policy to an urban development policy, which would guarantee not only the right to housing but to all basic urban services.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Economic Policy, Human Rights, Latin America, Report Tagged With: ,

BRAZIL: More Community Input Needed in Relocation of Favelas

July 5, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Clarinha Glock *

PORTO ALEGRE, Jul 5, 2011 (Tierramérica) – José Luiz Ferreira, 60, was born poor and is still poor, but was able to get an education. Known as Seu Luiz (Mr. Luiz) in Vila Nova Chocolatão, the Porto Alegre neighborhood where he lives, he earns a meager living by giving English classes. And he sees eagles where everyone else sees chickens.

"Once upon a time, a scientist went on trip and came across a chicken coop with a bunch of baby eagles inside pecking corn like chickens. So he said to the owner, ‘Those aren’t chickens, they’re eagles.’ And the owner said, ‘No, they’re chickens, see for yourself.’ He opened the door to the coop but the birds just kept pecking. But the scientist stole one of them. And many months later, he took it to a really high place and let it go, and the chicken started to fly, and turned into an eagle," recounted Seu Luiz.

His tale is a loose retelling of a story from the book "The Eagle and the Chicken" by Brazilian theologian and writer Leonardo Boff, one of the leading figures of Liberation Theology, a progressive current in the Latin American Catholic Church.

"Here (in the neighborhood), everyone has been an eagle for many years, but they treat them like chickens. And if nobody says anything to them, they will continue acting like chickens," he said.

The eviction of the 732 residents of Vila Chocolatão, a favela or shantytown in the centre of Porto Alegre, became a landmark event in the city: for the first time ever, lawyers and geographers intervened in a forced relocation in order to ensure that potential problems were prevented or solved, based on the right to housing.

The result was the suspension of the resettlement until an agreement was signed with the federal public prosecutor’s office, which plans to construct a building for its own use on the site formerly occupied by Vila Chocolatão. The land in question is the property of the Federal Regional Court.

"Just because they live in decent housing doesn’t mean that they will have access to work, health care and education. A basic principle is that it is prohibited to set people back, and where they lived before they were able to earn a living," Alexandre Gavronski, the regional prosecutor for Citizens’ Rights at the prosecutor’s office told Tierramérica.

Vila Nova Chocolatão – literally, the new Vila Chocolatão – is far from the city centre, and unlike its precursor, it is not surrounded by garbage. It has solidly built houses, sewers, electricity and running water. Employment is guaranteed for 60 people per shift at a waste separation facility donated by a private company; the inhabitants of the former favela made a living by collecting recyclable waste.

It would all be perfect if it didn’t violate the law, which not only requires that evictees be given a roof over their heads, but also the possibility of rebuilding their lives with work, health care, education and a minimum level of comfort.

The original Vila Chocolatão sat on the property of the Federal Regional Court for 25 years. It was overcrowded and living conditions were precarious and unhygienic; it was also struck by fire on several occasions. But two thirds of its inhabitants earned incomes equivalent to a minimum salary of around 342 dollars.

"The new neighborhood is infinitely better," Humberto Goulart, director of the Porto Alegre Municipal Department of Housing, told Tierramérica a week before the relocation.

"The daycare centre (not completed at the time) is modern, there is enrollment space for all the children in the local schools, the health care facilities can respond to the new demand, and the waste separation facility is the most modern in Brazil," he maintained. "Some people have complained just to make trouble."

The criticisms, spearheaded by the Association of Brazilian Geographers and the University Legal Aid Service of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, had stressed the limited participation of the inhabitants in the relocation plan, a violation of the city bylaws.

They also pointed out that the number of new homes was not sufficient to house all of the families, obliging the city government to guarantee that it would pay rent in another area for a portion of the inhabitants.

Criticisms were also leveled at the recycling facility, which is not large enough to provide employment for all of the people who used to earn a living collecting and recycling waste, and at the inadequate census conducted of the neighborhood’s families, which led to the construction of houses only suitable for small households.

"It wasn’t what I expected," said Teresinha Margarete do Rosário, who spoke with Tierramérica in May, a week after the relocation, at the waste separation facility. She had only managed to find enrollment space for one of her six children at the nearest school.

But Antônio Lázaro da Silva de Oliveira, a construction worker, was happy with the move. "Life is totally different here. My three daughters are in school. But there is one thing: after nine o’clock at night, nobody leaves the house. I’m going to talk with the people to do something about making the neighborhood safer," he commented to Tierramérica.

It took Marta Suzana Pinheiro Siqueira and her husband an entire year to build their home in the old neighborhood, but they had no choice but to accept their eviction. A month after the move, they are still waiting for the authorities to remedy the lack of space in their new home for their four children, aged 11 to 17, by moving them to a third location.

Although the Vila Chocolatão eviction is not linked to the preparations for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, all resettlements and urban reforms in Brazil today are ultimately connected to this purpose.

"Everything is connected to the World Cup, because it’s a way of making resources available," Raquel Rolnik, an architect, urban planner and United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, told Tierramérica.

Rolnik has received reports of forced evictions and relocations in different parts of the country in which people’s rights have been allegedly been trampled. One of these complaints was about Vila Chocolatão.

In December, Rolnik approached the Brazilian government to alert them to the allegations related to the construction of infrastructure for the World Cup. The lack of response led her to make the matter public through a press release.

In May, the head of the Special Secretariat for Human Rights of the Office of the President, Maria do Rosário Nunes, told Tierramérica in a telephone interview that the government had created a working group with members from the secretariat and a number of ministries to assess the resettlement plans of the local governments implicated in the allegations.

These plans are currently being evaluated, and federal authorities will continue to visit each place involved, said a source at the secretariat.

The mayor of Porto Alegre, José Fortunatti, claimed to be surprised by the complaints, and insisted that all rights were respected in the case of Vila Nova Chocolatão.

"If violations are repeated, there could be penalties," Rolnik told Tierramérica.

At the time of publication, the Municipal Chamber of Río de Janeiro had just approved the creation of an inquiry commission to investigate reports of human rights violations related to construction works for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.

These works are one of three major national projects that are currently affecting the residents of favelas in this country of 190 million people. The other two are the Growth Acceleration Programme and a plan known as Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life), explained geographer Lucimar Siqueira.

The solutions offered provide shelter and assistance for evictees, she noted. But they do not guarantee that eagles will be able to fly.

* Clarinha Glock is an IPS contributor. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Human Rights, Latin America, Poverty, Report, Social Justice Tagged With: , ,

Real Estate Boom as Displaced Pakistanis Seek Housing

June 26, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Jun 25, 2011 (IPS) – Real estate prices have shot up in areas adjacent to the tribal districts of northwest Pakistan where violence continues to displace local residents.

The prices of homes as well as rentals have risen as families from some parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have fled the violence and scrambled for housing in places like Peshawar, the capital of neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

"The ongoing military operations against the Taliban in six of the seven agencies in the FATA have forced thousands of families to sell their properties at throwaway prices and buy homes in safer places," Wakil Durrani, president of the Peshawar Property Dealers Association, told IPS. Those who cannot afford to buy opt to rent houses, he said.

A majority of the 25,000 housing units in upscale Hayatabad Township in Peshawar have either been leased or purchased by people from the violence-hit zones of the FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The same is true for slum areas where poor families from the troubled areas have found sanctuary from the wrath of the Taliban and the Pakistani army.

Before 2007, a 1,300-sq ft house in Hayatabad was available for a monthly rent of 70 dollars; now it goes for 250. "The house owners prefer to offer their houses for rent to displaced people from the FATA because they pay more," Durrani said.

Similarly, the same size home can be bought now for 70,000 dollars, up from only 30,000 before 2007.

Rahim Shah, a transporter from South Waziristan Agency who had been residing in Peshawar since 2005, said his family shuttled between South Waziristan and Peshawar since the military operation began in his native town. "Then, I sold all my property and bought a house in Peshawar for my family’s safety," Shah told IPS.

Taliban forces have been holed up in the FATA since the U.S. launched a campaign against them in 2001, forcing them out of Afghanistan and into sanctuaries in the sprawling FATA, crossing over the long and porous Pakistan-Afghan border. The FATA is composed of seven "agencies" or tribal units spread out over 47,000 sq km with a population of five million.

Dental surgeon Akbar Ali from Mohmand Agency took up residence in Peshawar to escape the violence. Nearly half of the 790,000 population of Mohmand, which has been facing military action since 2009, have become permanently displaced.

"The situation there is very bad and those who could afford to buy or rent houses in safer places have left, while the poor stay there because they have no choice," said Ali, who now lives in Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Mohmand Agency.

According to the Disaster Management Authority of FATA, some one million people have been living outside their hometowns due to the fighting between the Taliban and the army. "They were sandwiched (between opposing forces) and desperate to get to safer places," DMA official Irfan Ali told IPS. Ali said residents who have been living in their ancestral villages were concerned about the safety and future of their children.

"We sold precious agricultural land in Swat and bought three houses in Peshawar," said Waheedullah Shah of Swat, where the army launched a full-scale operation against militants in 2007. Swat is one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province adjoining the FATA.

Military operations in Swat have ended but militants are still active there, Shah said. "Still, we visit our relatives in Swat on festive occasions, but the conditions there are not good to live in," he concluded.

Poor families from the FATA are forced to stay in dilapidated houses for which they pay exorbitant rent. "We got a two-room mud house for 54 dollars a month that’s not even fit for animals," said Abdul Latif, a daily wage earner from Bajaur Agency, who now resides in the Afghan Colony in Peshawar.

About 200,000 displaced people from Bajaur Agency, a hub of militants, have been facing housing problems because of the skyrocketing rent.

The demand for housing has primarily benefited real estate businesses and property owners in the Tank and Dera Ismail Khan districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which are closest to South Waziristan Agency.

"The local landowners have been building housing units to be offered for higher rents to displaced people who come in droves. The affluent classes from Waziristan are migrating to urban areas while the poor seek shelter in rural parts," Sufaid Khan, a property dealer in Tank district, told IPS by telephone.

The real estate boom has affected even people buying plots of land in cemeteries in Tank despite the centuries-old tradition of burying the dead in their hometowns.

"My children used to weep and had to endure sleepless nights from the deafening gun and artillery fires which compelled us to say goodbye to a sprawling mud and brick home where our forefathers had lived," said 50-year-old Muhammad Tahir.

He had a thriving flour shop in Angoor Adda, a locality of South Waziristan’s headquarters Wana, and still regrets moving away. But he was helpless in the face of his family’s insistence that they settle in adjacent Dera Ismail Khan.

Populations from the tribal areas currently undergoing military operations have sought houses in safer districts in nearby KP province so they could be close to their relatives. For instance, the family of Hasan Jan from Khyber Agency lives in Canal Town in adjacent Peshawar.

"We can easily attend weddings and funerals in our native village which is just a stone’s throw from here," he said. "We visit our relatives who live in militancy-plagued Tirah Tehsil of Khyber Agency." (

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Asia, Conflict, Development, Featured, Human Rights, Social Issues Tagged With: , , , ,

VENEZUELA: Ambitious Promises of Affordable Housing

June 23, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jun 23, 2011 (IPS) – "I want my own roof over my head, my own home. I don’t want to live in a curtained-off cubicle surrounded by masses of people," says Elena Díaz, who does ironing for a living and lives in a temporary shelter in the centre of the Venezuelan capital.

Since torrential rains and flooding left 134,000 people homeless in November 2010, the longstanding deficit of affordable housing has become more visible in Venezuela, where people who lost their homes have taken refuge in all sorts of places, squatting in buildings, and holding street protests demanding solutions.

In response, the government has passed new laws and announced ambitious plans to tackle the problem.

Díaz, a 37-year-old mother of three, used to live in Alta Vista, a neighbourhood in west Caracas. Now she is in a temporary shelter in the car park of a shopping mall that the government took over for the purpose just days before its inauguration. Here families have food, water, electricity, and health care, and have been offered flats that are being built.

"But they tell me the flat assigned to me might be in La Guaira (on the Caribbean coast, 30 km to the north), and when a group of women here went to see the place, they showed them a vacant lot that doesn’t even belong to the government yet," Díaz told IPS.

Thousands of families like hers were taken to improvised shelters in squares, schools (which have now been vacated), hotels, warehouses, military barracks, government ministries and other state institutions, including facilities belonging to the Venezuelan presidency.

For instance the Casa Amarilla, the Foreign Ministry headquarters opposite the central Plaza Bolívar in Caracas, sent filing cabinets off to a warehouse and improvised cubicles to shelter a group of families. Every morning the families, towels in hand, formed a queue outside a nearby hotel to take their showers.

In the last 10 years Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has launched a score of social programmes, referred to as "missions", including food, health, education and employment plans. Now he has created a special plan to tackle the housing emergency, called the Great Housing Mission.

"In the next six years, the government, the people, members of the business community who wish to participate, together with allied countries, will build two million housing units," said Chávez at the launch of the new mission. "This is my commitment, and I will personally vouch for it. The tragedy we have experienced due to the heavy rains in recent months compels and presses us to do this."

The immediate goal is to build 150,000 housing units in 2011 and 200,000 in 2012, when Chávez will again be a candidate for reelection to the presidency for the term 2013-2019.

Chávez’s opponents are critical of the promise, pointing out that in the 11 years of his presidency the government built 325,000 housing units, and questioning how six times that number will be built in half the time, when production of cement and steel bars has fallen.

According to the state National Institute of Statistics, the population of Venezuela stands at 29 million people, over 90 percent of whom live in urban areas. They are distributed in 6.5 million households, of which 26 percent are still living in poverty in spite of the decline of the poverty rate by 23 percentage points since 1999.

The housing deficit is 1.8 million, and another 750,000 homes are in need of urgent repairs.

Latin America as a whole continues to experience a severe housing deficit, according to studies by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in spite of high levels of urbanisation (76 percent) and of home ownership (73 percent) among the region’s 540 million people.

According to the IDB, 26 million housing units in the region are sub-standard; 128 million people live in shanty towns; and 28 million new housing units are urgently needed to reduce overcrowding and improve appalling living conditions.

To arrive at a better estimate of Venezuela’s housing problem, the Housing Mission is carrying out a census of families needing homes in one-third of the country’s 24 states, and 1.3 million applicants have already registered, according to the authorities.

"I applied, hoping to win this lottery. So did my mother and one of my sisters," said 27-year-old Boris González, who drives a motorbike taxi and lives with his wife, two children, mother, two sisters and a nephew in a two-room shack in Las Mayas, a shanty town in southwest Caracas.

Provea, a human rights organisation that is often critical of government policies, applauded the Housing Mission "because it is based on recognition of the limitations of past efforts, and is deploying legal and financial resources to satisfy the fundamental human right to housing," as its coordinator, Marino Alvarado, told IPS.

Opposition politicians, in contrast, regard the census and the handover of a few thousand housing units as an attempt by the Housing Mission to create the illusion that work is in progress to solve the problem, while raising hopes among the needy that they might be lucky enough to be given their own home.

Marco Negrón, a former dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Central University, told IPS that "with the construction industry dismantled, only compulsive liars could promise to build in the next two years nearly 100,000 more housing units than have been built in the last two six-year terms.

"The new Housing Mission lacks the minimum amount of planning for housing and new cities; instead it consists of senseless promises and random expropriations of buildings, warehouses and car parks, and scale models (of proposed housing units), plenty of scale models," Negroni said.

Chávez has asked his supporters to report vacant or under-utilised lots where the government could build housing. At the same time the authorities have taken over agribusiness company warehouses, old or unfinished buildings, parks and gardens, and car parks next to shops or residential buildings.

With special powers granted by Congress, the government has decreed laws authorising the urgent occupation of plots of land or buildings that it classifies as idle or under-utilised, as well as other laws to protect tenants, stipulating that they may not be evicted if they have nowhere else to live.

In the new climate in Caracas and other cities, groups of families in need of housing are squatting in buildings or houses that are under construction or have been abandoned, and are camping out in parking lots, shops, parks and even evangelical churches.

People in established neighbourhoods, meanwhile, have more and more frequently organised to block what they call "invasions," and the police have had to take action to quell outbreaks of violence.

Díaz says she does not participate in the occupations. "They have warned us that if we carry out invasions or street protests, we will lose our chance of being allocated a house some day. But this country is too rich for us to spend our whole lives without ever sleeping under a roof of our own," she said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Featured, Latin America, Politics Tagged With: ,

Foreclosure Mess Reveals Longstanding Problems

November 1, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, Georgia, Oct 31, 2010 (IPS) – The discovery of apparent massive fraud in mortgage and foreclosure documents has called into question millions of pending foreclosures in the U.S. Several banks have enacted partial or complete moratoriums until the issues can be resolved.

Yet activists and experts who have been dealing with the foreclosure industry for years say this is a longstanding problem that’s only recently come to national attention.

"There are hundreds of cases around the country where judges have chastised lenders for all kinds of errors. Until now it’s been anecdotal, as if there are a few bad apples," Kathleen Day of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), a homeowner advocacy group, told IPS.

"These moratoriums and the misbehaviour that led to them are only the most recent and the most visible symptoms of a chronically sick industry," Professor Katherine Porter of the University of Iowa School of Law told a U.S. Senate panel earlier this month.

Porter authored a study in 2007 showing that 40 percent of mortgage companies’ paperwork in bankruptcy cases did not even include a copy of the note.

Bill Brennan, a legal aid lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, has argued about paperwork errors for years while helping homeowners and consumers litigate cases.

He has also seen paperwork errors in credit card company lawsuits against individual consumers. The debts are often sold to a collection agency, which sues while providing little or no evidence to the courts of how the debt was accrued, because very few consumers actually go to court to dispute the cases.

Brennan said most of the focus in the current foreclosure paperwork scandal has been on 23 states with a judicial process for foreclosures.

"In these states, there’s a short-cut process, a motion for summary judgment, banks like to use to dispose of the cases quickly. They have to file an affidavit. The idea is many homeowners won’t reply to that. Many of the affidavits have been signed by robo-signers," Brennan said.

Robo-signers are individuals whose names are used to sign literally thousands of documents per month.

The current scandal started on Sep. 20, when a representative of GMAC Mortgage, the nation’s fourth largest lender, admitted in a court case in the state of Maine that he had signed off on 10,000 pieces of foreclosure paperwork a month without reading them. GMAC halted evictions and the resale of repossessed homes in the 23 judicial foreclosure states.

Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, posted a video on his website showing several documents with very different signatures for the same name, suggesting some individuals were not even signing their own documents.

The problem of robo-signing could have serious legal implications, both civil and criminal, Brennan said, noting it is illegal to sign a document attesting that everything in a document is true and correct when in reality one does not know whether it is true or correct. "It’s criminal perjury. People can go to prison for this stuff," he said.

Questions also emerged about the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS), a database created by a private firm to record digitised mortgage titles. MERS would transfer titles on people’s homes between banks and trusts using Excel spreadsheets instead of by banks endorsing the notes.

Sixty million properties in the U.S. are recorded in the name of MERS, including 97 percent of the loans made between 2005 and 2008.

On Sep. 24, Reps. Grayson, Barney Frank and Corrine Brown wrote to Fannie Mae questioning its use of so-called foreclosure mills. The state of Florida opened an investigation into three law firms that had allegedly fabricated thousands of documents and the state of California asked GMAC to halt foreclosures there as well.

Four days later, JP Morgan Chase announced it would halt 56,000 foreclosures. Bank of America soon followed suit, saying it would stop foreclosures in 23 states, and eventually expanding the directive to all states.

However, after about two weeks Bank of America said it would re-start foreclosures after reviewing the problems.

"We’re sceptical" of Bank America’s recent reversal, Day told IPS. "Wells Fargo said everything was great, and it turns out they had problems in tens of thousands of documents. All evidence suggests a pervasive, systemic problem."

"They [the banks] seem to think they can correct the problem by redoing some paperwork," economist Ellen Brown wrote in an article. "But if the holdings in recent court decisions are upheld, it will not be just a question of hiring extra staff to clean up some files. For all those mortgages filed in the name of MERS, say these courts, the chain of title has been irretrievably broken."

Prof. Porter, in her testimony, cited a variety of problems: "Some paperwork is missing, evidenced by increasing use of lost note affidavits to try to remedy past mistakes. Some transfers of loans simply did not occur or were not properly conducted. The proliferation of assignments in blank. The widespread use of MERS. Confusion about location of physical paper for these loans."

Brennan has found that in Georgia, while there is technically a judicial process for foreclosures, the majority of borrowers sign away their right to legal recourse when entering the loan. Still there are problems with the ways the foreclosures are done and some possibilities for remedying them, which also apply in the 27 non-judicial foreclosure states.

"The mortgage in most states is made up of a promissory note and a deed to secure debt," Brennan explained. Banks usually sell mortgages to another bank, then another bank, then another.

"They mainly transfer the deed to secure debt. And those transfers are being signed by robo-signers. They’re supposed to assign the note as well, there’s been a lot of controversy over ‘Show me the note,’" Brennan said. The legal recourse could come through an equity pleading or a bankruptcy filing.

According to CRL, about two million families are currently facing foreclosure proceedings and about three million more are just weeks away from that point.

CRL estimates that in a few years, the total number of foreclosures in the current economic crisis could reach 13 million, and that communities of colour will lose about $360 billion worth of wealth.

Brennan believes while all of this gets sorted out in the courts and other forums, "President [Barack] Obama needs to have a moratorium on all foreclosures, and they need to be aggressively doing loan modifications."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Economic Policy, Featured, Inequality, Justice, United States Tagged With:

SOUTH AFRICA: Neglected Johannesburg Neighbourhood Rises Again

October 29, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Chris Stein

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 29, 2010 (IPS) – A month after property developer Alex Montwedi bought a 42-unit high-rise apartment building in Johannesburg’s Berea neighbourhood, he found himself chased out of the building by his own tenants.

Though he held the deed to the building, a group of de facto landlords calling themselves the "Saint Luck Committee" controlled the building. Their scheme was simple: overcrowd the building with tenants – many of them undocumented migrants grateful for any accomodation – and collect the rent themselves.

Unable to verify the identities of the occupants before he bought the building, Montwedi – who asked that his real name not be used due to threats he has received – tried to get the tenants to sign new leases after he took ownership in October 2008.

Violence ensued. The building manager was threatened and fled the premises. Another employee who ventured into the building was assaulted. When his unarmed security guards eventually had to abandon the building in fear of their lives, Montwedi realized he was the owner of a hijacked building.

"If you buy a building you can’t know if the criminals are already there or not," said Montwedi.

After 18 months, he got a court order allowing him to evict all the tenants in the building. During the eviction, he discovered the extent of the overcrowding: 8 to 10 people in a bachelor flat, or more than 330 people in a building that should have housed about 100.

"I’m selling the building," Montwedi said. "It was a traumatic experience."

Montwedi’s story is emblematic of Berea and other parts of Johannesburg’s inner-city core. With rows of high-rise flats, including the cylindrical 56-storey Ponte City Apartments, Berea dominates its part of Johannesburg’s skyline, but along Abel Road, the district’s tree-lined main thoroughfare, apartment blocks with broken windows and barbed wire fences rise above pockmarked sidewalks. Commerce thrives wherever it can; on one block, a gutted house has been transformed into a makeshift fruit stand.

Between 35 and 45 percent of the approximately 1,200 neglected, abandoned or hijacked buildings in the city lie in Berea and neighbouring Hillbrow, according to Shaun O’Shea, manager of communications for the City of Johannesburg. O’Shea estimates at least 30 percent of these have been hijacked.

Our place

Nine precisely demarcated blocks between Park Lane, Olivia Road and Catherine and Lily Avenues are different. Designated a City Improvement District (CID), this tract of Berea sports guard towers at intersections, high-rise complexes with fresh coats of paint and sidewalks regularly swept free of litter. Since the inception of the CID in 2007, this cluster of buildings has become a model that may be adopted elsewhere in Johannesburg’s troubled inner city.

Called Legae la Rona, or "our place" in Sotho, property owners here each pay a monthly levy that funds additional services in the district, while keeping the city abreast of missing manhole covers, broken streetlights and other issues with public works, said Bryan Miller owner of Ithemba Property Trust, which owns six apartment complexes in the district.

Though it varies, Miller said the current levy per flat is about four dollars, which is either paid by the owner or passed directly on to the tenants as part of their rent. There are many similar improvement districts in South Africa’s cities, but Legae la Rona is Johannesburg’s first official effort in a residential neighborhood, according to Miller.

Seeing the difference between the Legae la Rona and the rest of Berea is as easy as glancing across Lily Avenue, the CID’s eastern boundary. Within sight of the Manhattan’s gilded doors and stern barred access gate is a building called Hillandale, where plastic shopping bags cover broken windows and the ornate sign out front is slowly turning green from water damage.

Crime and grime

An under-allocation of resources and mistakes in city planning are to blame for the lack of service delivery in Berea, town planning and urban consultant Dr Tanya Zack said.

Beginning in the 1980s, upper and middle-class whites left Berea for the suburbs as poorer blacks left overcrowded townships for the vacant flats. The influx was so intense that the new accommodation became overcrowded and many building owners gave up trying to manage the influx, neglecting the buildings instead, according to Zack.

She says some of these buildings became home to illegal drinking establishments or havens for drug dealers, which, combined with Berea’s crowding and an overwhelmed police force, led to a spike in crime, Zack said.

"Police inadequacy provides protection [for crime]," Zack said. "One of the most prominent crimes is [building hijacking] which succeeds in the absence of adequate law enforcement and where there aren’t alternative places for people to live."

Though Legae la Rona is only about kilometre from a police station, Sandy Barnes chief executive of property management company Jozi Housing, said crime dropped only after the CID introduced private security on the streets.

When he first moved in to Preston Place in 2005, Gabriel Moeng said he couldn’t walk the neighborhood at night without being mugged.

"Now I don’t know what happened," Moeng said. "You can walk safely, you can use your cell phone. I don’t know anyone who’s been mugged in the past two years."

Rania Fakhoury, a Lebanese immigrant, said she feels safe inside her apartment in the Metropolitan, but not when she is in the small market she owns directly across Alexandra Street from the apartment building, where she hands customers cartons of cigarettes and slips for cell phone airtime through an enclosure of black metal bars.

"I was robbed three times [by] armed robbers," Fakhoury said, adding that she has not been robbed since she put up the enclosure. Though security guards patrol the street outside her shop, she said they didn’t come during the robbery because though the robbers were armed, the guards were not.

The CID is only a partial solution to reviving inner city neighbourhoods. With rent on a one-bedroom apartment running to about $285 a month, Zack said Legae la Rona doesn’t answer the need for affordable housing that drives crowding and building hijacking in places like Berea.

"Legae la Rona… has come a long way," Zack said. "They’re incredibly good and revitalized. But it may not be in Legae la Rona’s power to create a stable neighborhood."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Poverty, Report, Social Issues Tagged With: ,

BRAZIL: Eviction from Rio’s Slums Echoes Dark Past

May 11, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Fabiana Frayssinet* – Tierramérica

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 11  (IPS)  – The longstanding debate between eviction or upgrading of Rio’s ”favelas” or slums has gathered new force as this one-time capital of Brazil still shows the hillside scars left by rain-induced landslides in early April.

Controversy surrounds the plan for compulsory evacuation of at-risk zones, designed to prevent tragedies like those resulting from the early April storms: 256 people dead and thousands left homeless in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro, according to official figures.

The decree from the mayor’s office of Rio do Janeiro, Brazil’s capital until 1960, calls for the evacuation of the residents of the densely populated neighbourhoods located in areas subject to landslides or flooding. The relocation is to take place even against their will and, if necessary, could involve the security forces.

The ”Morar Seguro” (Live Safely) plan is, according to Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes, ”the end of demagogy,” but Mario Brum, a historian specialising in favelas, sees it as ”the reappearance of the phantom of the darkest periods of our history.”

Brum points out that favela removals reached a peak during the 1964-1985 dictatorship, when 175,000 people were forcibly relocated.

In a Tierramérica interview, the historian noted that this practice ”became a policy of the State” in the 1960s through the first half of the 1970s, giving rise to several housing projects, like Cidade de Deus (City of God), which director Fernando Meirelles made famous in the film of the same name.

The plan to move the favelas to those housing units was abandoned because the people it was supposed to benefit could not afford the new living expenses or the cost of transportation. Many ended up returning to their precarious homes, Brum said.

”The deluge that hit in early April has forced us to reflect,” said the historian in an article published on the website of the Brazilian Institute of Social Analysis and Research (IBASE for it Portuguese initials).

In his essay titled ”Rio and the Favelas: the Future and Citizenry After the Flood,” Brum wonders, ”Will all the inequality have been washed away by the water or landslides?” or reinforced in a city that ”has not yet finished counting her dead?”

Sociologist Paulo Magalhães also believes the plan put forth by Mayor Paes fails to resolve the deep-seated urban problems.

”The principal structural cause is income inequality in Brazilian society,” linked to a lack of housing policy for the poorest sectors from a neglectful government, Magalhães told Tierramérica.

The expert criticises the ”penalisation” of the poor, as if they were responsible for their own tragedy. He also underscores the fact that nobody is mad enough to want to stay in a place where one’s life is at risk, as was evident in the ”lack of resistance” to the evacuation.

Leaders of social movements also challenge the city government’s failure to consult the people to be affected by the relocation.

”The government comes with this package of solutions for people who are still suffering from the tragedy and have not been able to reorganise their lives,” said Mónica Francisco, a community leader in the Morro do Borel favela.

Nobody asks them where they would like to be moved or whether, for example, there might be transportation problems with the new locations, said Francisco, a university student in the social sciences.

But the more difficult problem to resolve, she told Tierramérica, is what turns out to be a sort of emotional exile for the people relocated to other neighbourhoods, forced to ”abandon their roots” and the ”proximity of their affective relationships.”

The evacuation plan initially covers some 4,000 families from eight favelas, according to Mayor Paes’s plan, who explained that the decision was made after detailed technical studies were conducted. However, the favela leaders charge that the studies are insufficient.

In Morro dos Prazeres, one of the eight favelas that Paes mentioned, the Civil Defence of Rio de Janeiro state identified 946 houses to be vacated, but the Neighbourhood Association countered that just 100 were in the area of the landslides.

A cruel symbol of the housing deficit there was the image of an elderly man wandering among the rubble where firefighters continued to search for victims of the landslides into mid-April.

Carlos Minc, who served as the national environment minister until the end of March, stated what for many does not seem so obvious: ”Nobody lives in a favela if they have a choice.”

One of the solutions is to improve the mid-sized cities of Rio de Janeiro state to staunch the influx of people into the metropolitan area, proposed Minc, state deputy for Rio and incumbent candidate in the October elections, representing the leftist Workers’ Party (PT-Partido dos Trabalhadores), of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Minc told Tierramérica that he is confident of the approval of a law that earmarks 10 percent of the houses included in the government’s general construction plans for people residing in at-risk zones.

One of the difficulties is the lack of infrastructure and services in the areas to which the former favela residents are relocated.

Another mistake of previous programmes was to build housing ”far from the dynamic areas of the economy,” explained sociologist Magalhães.

As such, the state environment secretary Marilene Ramos noted that one of the ”Live Safely” programme points is an investment of one billion reais (about 540 million dollars).

”One of the problems to resolve in the possible areas of relocation is the lack of infrastructure, like potable water, sewers and roads,” the official told Tierramérica.

The new programme would put those systems into place before building the homes, she promised.

But Magalhães suggested additional solutions, like expropriating some 10,000 unoccupied housing units found in downtown Rio de Janeiro alone.

In that respect, he said, major events like the 2016 Olympic Games to be held in Rio de Janeiro should serve to revitalise some central areas and to build housing units that can later be passed on to the city’s poorest families.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Featured, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America Tagged With: ,
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