Urban Entrepreneurship in Face of Social Housing Policy: An Analysis of the Brazilian Housing Program "Minha Casa Minha Vida" in Rio de Janeiro State

Abstract

Despite the centrality of housing in urban policies, Brazil would have had only a housing policy as of 1964. Nevertheless, public resources use for this matter only started occurring in 2009 through the Minha Casa Minha Vida program (MCMVP). Its focus was the subsidized construction of new housing using public resources or via less expensive financing rules. At that moment, the federal government's strategy implied a convergence of the social demands with the alternative of facing the 2008 crisis by adopting countercyclical measures, with civil construction playing a prominent role in this dynamic. In order to understand the size of MCMVP, by October 2018, about $115 billion dollars had already been invested in the program, with Rio de Janeiro being the sixth State that received the most resources. In the course of its implementation, the discourse used was that the social housing provision would be justified as a viable alternative that supposedly would dialogue with the various dimensions associated with the right to housing. However, despite the promises of the federal government, MCMVP contributed to the cities’ horizontal growth, as a rule, towards urban centers’ peripheries and poorer areas, a dynamic that has been widely observed in the country since the beginning of the urbanization process intensification. Considering this scenario, the present work aims to analyze the program’s implementation, giving special attention to the State of Rio de Janeiro and its capital, based on data requested to federal government at the end of 2018. Such data include the number of housing units contracted, as well as the amounts involved, and consider both the time variable (per year), as the economic (by income range served by the projects) and territorial (for states, cities, state capitals and planning area of the capital of Rio de Janeiro). In the analytical model developed, in addition to the total amounts invested in the country, only data referring to the 10 most representative states (in number of contracted units and resources spent) were analyzed. With regard to Brazilian municipalities, only the states’ capitals and those above 100 thousand inhabitants were selected - where there is greater demand for housing. These, in turn, were categorized considering whether or not they belonged to a particular metropolitan area. Finally, the analysis of the State capital of Rio de Janeiro was made based on the planning areas defined by the municipal executive. The observation of the MCMVP from this data set has two main objectives. First, to explicit the limits of the social dimension of public housing policy based on its verified results, especially in regard to the promotion of the right to the city. Secondly, to illustrate to what extent the program has helped to intensify the horizontal growth of the capital towards its peripheral and poor regions. Regarding the first, the study indicated that, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, MCMVP was mainly used in response to the removals made under the discourse of the city's preparation for sports mega events (e.g., Olympics and FIFA World Cup), limiting its incidence under pre-existing demand for social housing. On the second, the location of social housing in the west and north of the capital reiterates the assertions that the program would have stimulated the growth of the capital's poor peripheries. However, it was possible to observe some efforts of the municipal executive to limit the incidence of MCMVP, authorizing new housing projects only in regions with some urban infrastructure. The results reaffirm the strength of entrepreneurship against a narrative of social urbanism, i.e. a trap of urban planning which has not yet been possible to pull away in Brazil.