Athayde Motta, Programme Manager at Oxfam in Recife (Brazil) reports on an exciting movement in Brazilian cities turning abandoned buildings into homes.

Can you remember the joy of finally getting your own house? I have just met some people, previously homeless, now holding the keys to their new apartments and their happiness is infectious!

Oxfam in Brazil has been working for years with local organizations to turn public buildings not being used for any other purpose into social housing. And just last month our efforts finally began to pay off. The first ever publicly-owned vacant building was officially handed over for sale to the Programme Crédito Solidário (Credit in Solidarity). The building - in downtown Porto Alegre, Brazil’s southernmost capital city - will receive public resources to be retrofitted and give 42 families new homes.

Each apartment will be sold by the Programme for R$25.000 (around £8,200), interest-free and in a 20-year mortgage. The building will then be self-managed by a cooperative formed by some of the homeless and poor people who had previously occupied the building during the 2005 World Social Forum. Before that, the building had been vacant for 10 years.

Vacant building at Prestes Maia Street, Sao Paulo

This has been the standard strategy of social housing movements in Brazil: empty buildings and land plots are occupied under the premise that they are not fulfilling their social function, as stated in the 1988 Constitution. Then, the occupants do what they can to either build or reform whichever structure is in place in order to establish evidence of residency, which can be argued in their favour in case eviction notices are issued by civil courts.

Oxfam has been supporting this movement through local partners to help poor people get safe housing in areas that already have the infrastructure. An unprecedented deal has been struck with the federal government: eight public buildings (some occupied, some not) will be turned over and sold to the Ministry of Cities to be retrofitted for social-housing.

As well as these buildings, there are 25 others listed for the same purposes, which will be decided soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Tags: brazil, social housing

This entry was posted by Athayde Motta on September 15th, 2009 at 11:56 am and is filed under General, News Blog, You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.