By Kristie Robinson

In February 2007, a fire in Buenos Aires’ worst shantytown highlighted the problems of housing in the capital. A year on, despite government pledges, little has been done to improve the living situation of the country’s most poor and vulnerable, and the housing deficit is bigger than ever.

During the early hours of 8th February 2007, a fire ravaged Villa Cartón, a shantytown built under a motorway flyover in the neighbourhood of Villa Soldati, in the south of the capital. Despite nearly 400 families’ homes being destroyed, no one was seriously injured, although 170 people were treated for the early symptoms of asphyxia, minor cuts and light burns.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Whilst the fire did not destroy the entire villa, the government decided to bulldoze the remaining houses and re-locate all of the shanty dwellers, saying nobody should live in such conditions.

Then-mayor, Jorge Telerman, said at the time: “The fire has exposed our worst problems to us. People are living in undignified conditions… there are limits that should not be passed.”

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Construction work soon began on temporary accommodation, and the families were moved to giant emergency tents in Parque Roca as an interim measure whilst the building was underway. It was emphasised that these prefabs were to be a temporary measure, to last for a maximum of six months, and permanent houses would be built.

Some residents at the time were cynical of the pledges, as the decision to relocate the inhabitants of the cardboard shanty had been made before the fire, but it no timetable had been set in stone. One resident, Silvia, said her family had been waiting for a new home for months, and there was only movement after the fire destroyed her home.

Mirta, another resident, echoed Silvia’s fears, adding “the government will build us temporary homes then forget about us,” pointing out the victims of two smaller fires in 2006 were still waiting for the houses promised to them by the government.

Unfortunately it seems both Silvia and Mirta’s predictions have come true.

Returning to meet the former Villa Cartón residents now, it is difficult to say if the temporary housing they are living in is better or worse than the higgledy-piggledy shantytown they used to call home. The rows of pre-fabricated houses look stark in the bright summer light, and inside the houses are hot. Some residents have cut windows out of the sides of the homes to create a bit more air, but only the ones on the ends of the rows have that advantage. The corrugated roofs keep the heat in during the summer, making for stagnant motionless air, but keep do not work the same way in the winter, which they say is far colder and worse, with the homes remaining freezing.

Most of the homes consist of a single room, and in some cases two or three families share this space. The bathrooms are located outside, and whilst basic they seem good enough, until one of the residents, Mabel tells me there has been no running water for five months. It stopped working one day, she says, and despite numerous pleas to the government to come and fix the problem, nobody ever came.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Work has started on the permanent homes, but the residents are cynical about how long it will take for them to be ready – after all, the prefabs were supposed to be a short-term solution, and most of the families have been living there for almost a year.

“We have been abandoned. They say the homes will be ready in six months, but everything is supposed to be done in six months. We were only supposed to be here six months. We think it will be more likely to be two years – work has barely begun on the new homes,” says Lydia, who is currently sharing her home with two other family, making for 12 people under one roof, with no room for privacy.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Mabel echoes her thoughts, adding that the location of the community is a big issue for most of the residents – they are now on the far side of Parque Roca, next to the Riachuelo river, on the very edge of the capital. The prefabs are out of sight, and, the residents believe, very much out of mind. The situation also makes it difficult for those who work – not many buses go by the community, and the ones that do are not regular and don’t run on weekends.

Safety is also big worry for the residents, as the rows of prefabs are isolated behind the park – when the buses aren’t running they take shortcuts through the park but there are many stories of people being threatened on their way home, and tales of rapes and killings that have taken place there, although not to any of the residents. Going out at night is not much of an option, they explain, as getting home is difficult and dangerous.

The last government intervention was in August, just two months after Telerman’s re-election campaign ended in defeat to Mauricio Macri.

And the promises of the previous government have not been kept, and Telerman’s ‘battle against marginalisation’, an ambitious 18-month plan to remove all of the capital’s shantytowns, has been all but forgotten.

Some may call the idea of eradicating the city’s problems in 18 short months ludicrous – after all, problems that have been around for over 100 years will not disappear overnight.

Just after the fire at Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

A history of overcrowding

Buenos Aires has a long history of housing problems. In fact 100 years before the fire in Villa Cartón made the problems hit the headlines, albeit briefly, was the only ever Tenants’ Strike in the history of Argentina.

Back in 1907, the same problems existed in the city: the impossibility for vast sectors of the population to access dignified housing, the high cost of renting, and scarce public policies aimed at supporting or defending the rights of those who didn’t own their own homes.

The problems of 100 years ago and today have similar roots – mass migration to the capital, although a century ago this was in the form of immigration from Europe. Between 1870 and 1930, six million foreigners arrived in Argentina.

These new arrivals came with high hopes of being able to find land to cultivate, but by the turn of the century the prices had gone up due to the production and export of meat and cereal, and the majority of the land was owned by few, generally in the form of large industrial farms.

So the immigrants ended up living in the large cities, mostly Buenos Aires, and working in manual jobs. The cities, however, were not prepared for this influx of people, and the lack of living space soon became a problem.

‘Conventillos’, large houses on one or two floors, with many rooms, mostly measuring 4×4m around a central patio, quickly became a solution. Single rooms would be rented out to an entire family, and the family would sleep, eat and do everything in that one room. The bathroom would be shared, although according to the 1904 census, 22% of the conventillos didn’t have any sort of sanitation or a bathroom.

A prefab home for the former residents
of Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Despite these appalling conditions, the census showed that 10% of the capital’s population lived in conventillos, and the rooms were much sought after. As a result, the owners were able to enforce strict house rules, inspecting the properties at any moment, with the smallest infraction leading to eviction. The tenants had little option but to put up with the rules, as housing was expensive and scarce.

Until August 1907, that is, when the municipal government announced that taxes would increase in 1908. As a result, landlords immediately raised rent in anticipation of these extra overheads. The residents of one conventillo in Barracas decided it was too much to demand more rent for such dire living conditions, and refused to pay their rent, declaring a strike and handing over a document demanding certain conditions be met before they would start paying again, including the suspension of three months deposit, lower rent and better sanitation. The momentum quickly caught on, spreading across the country. In Buenos Aires alone, some 120,000 people participated, around 10% of the city’s population.

The landlords refused to back down and so did the tenants, and the standoff intensified, culminating in the death of a 15-year-old boy at the end of October in a confrontation between the strikers and police. Around 15,000 people joined in his funeral procession across the capital, and again the police responded violently. The government brought in a residency law, deporting the ‘anarchistic’ ringleaders.

Towards the end of November, the movement died down, with each conventillo coming to its own arrangement. In many cases the demands were met by the owners, whilst in others the tenants were left on the street.

Same today?

Wind the clock forward a hundred years and what has changed?

As shown in the case of the residents of Villa Cartón, there is still a huge housing deficit, affecting the poorest people. Migration to the cities continues, either from the countryside across Argentina, or from other South American countries, notably Paraguay and Bolivia. The Argentines coming from the countryside are generally of indigenous or criollo descent, and in some cases have been evicted from their land with little or no compensation to make way for farming. The immigrants from Argentina’s northern neighbours also make up a large proportion of the current residents of many of the main city’s shantytowns.

Prefab houses for the former residents of Villa Cartón. Photo By: Kate Stanworth

Arguably, residents have gone from conventillos to shantytowns, and in a way their situation has worsened as now they have less power – before the withholding of rent would be a trump card they could use to make changes happen. As nobody pays rent to live in a shanty, the most poor and vulnerable are very much dependent on policy changes for improvements to happen. And these are not forthcoming.

In fact, the situation has deteriorated so much that in July 2004 a three-year housing crisis was declared by the Buenos Aires city government. It has been extended and is still in place today.

In October last year, a report on the housing crisis that had been made by the Buenos Aires ombudsman was released. It said: “The number of families who are residing in informal or irregular houses is extensive and growing by the day. In 2002 it is calculated that more than 100,000 people were living in emergency shantytowns, 200,000 are in taken buildings, 70,000 are living in tenement houses, (of which 50% are in an unstable condition for lack of paying the rent), 70,000 are living in lodgings and 120,000 subsidised housing.”

And the problem is growing. In 2006, 19,000 more families were added to the number listed as having housing emergency.

In 2004, the government created a Emergency Housing Fund, to deal with the crisis. Another initiative was PAFSIC, a programme for families who find themselves on the streets, which providing a subsidy of $450 per month over the course of six months, to help them get out of the emergency situation. Critics say this is not a long-term solution, and at the end of the six months, many families have not found a viable housing option and find themselves on the street again. As soon as the six months is up, the families are just added back into the statistics. Others point out that for such a paltry sum, it is nigh on impossible to find a safe place for a family to live.

In essence, there is no serious national housing policy, aimed at making real changes and preventing this cycle. This can be shown by the statistics: the number of people applying for the PAFSIC scheme since it was started in 2006 has risen almost 600%. Many point out that it would be cheaper for the government to build and provide housing than to keep paying subsidies.

And yet whilst the solutions remain far-off, evictions continue – many of them government-backed. According to another report by the city ombudsman on 21st September 2007, an estimated that 2,300 families more would be evicted by the end of the year.

The report states: “The situation of collapse that we are seeing now is the result of years of inefficient policies which have demonstrated a lack of capability to take on and resolve this problem. Essentially, it is the result of a way of looking at this problem as something climatic, an episodic product of a temporary situation.”

Shared dreams

However, one project is stepping up to the challenge. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation set up by women after their children were disappeared during the last dictatorship) have a building project.

This started in Villa 15, based in Mataderos in the west of the capital, in 2006. Since then, 24 homes have been created and another 48 are nearly finished. The momentum has spread, with 500 homes under construction in Piletón, and close to 300 underway close to Parque Roca, as a permanent solution for the residents of Villa Cartón.

The Madres lobby the government into using its money for social housing, and then run the building projects, with people from the shanties themselves working on the construction, under the guidance of experts.

This provides many of the residents with training and a real sense of purpose in constructing their own future, whilst providing a permanent solution to their housing woes.

Photo By: Kate Stanworth

However, the number of families provided with a housing solution via this means is paltry in comparison to the numbers of families still being evicted and living in unstable situations.

Since 1996 there has been talk of the ‘urbanisation’ of shantytowns, and nothing has happened. Telerman’s battle against marginalisation came to nothing, and workers from the Madres grumble that Macri has so far shown even less interest in resolving the housing crisis, currently being tied up in battles with the uniones.

But unless the government is willing to spend some money on improving the situation of the most poor and vulnerable, history may repeat itself again, and in another 100 years time we may well be in the same situation.