La Vivienda Social en Chile y la construcción del espacio urbano en el Santiago del siglo XX

Social housing in Chile during the twentieth century is usually studied from separated sectoral perspectives (social, political, economic, legal and architectural, among others). Instead, this book integrates and links these factors with the historical development of Santiago (the capital of the country). Chapter 1 addresses the prehistory of the housing sector from the mid-nineteenth century, observing the conditions of the immigrants and the working class and the several philanthropic institutions that sheltered the poor. Chapter 2 analyzes the Law of Worker’s Housing (1906), the first comprehensive public attempt to define a system of popular savings. Chapter 3 analyzes two core instruments: the Law of Renting and the Law of Cheap Housing, both from 1925. While the former bill partially controlled the speculative renting market, the latter stimulated the production of affordable housing via public subsidies, tax cuts and savings cooperatives. In the following decade, a Popular Housing Fund would also be created in order to subsidize the low-income sectors. Unfortunately, most poor people were still being excluded because of their insufficient purchasing power.

In the fast-industrializing 1950s, the creation of the National Corporation for Housing (CORVI) and the ambitious National Housing Plan (1959) would be major steps towards shortening the deficit, making more effective the role of the state, defining mechanisms of distribution and producing innovative typologies. In parallel, the recently created private Chamber of Builders would lobby for more tax cuts and public subsidies to private builders. Chapter 7 examines a subsequent public attempt to regulate the market, with the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (MINVU, created in 1965) and its various corporations, namely CORMU, CORHABIT, CORVI (attached to MINVU from then on), among others. While, initially, production by MINVU effectively reduced the deficit, the organization soon reached its own budget limitations and could only provide “site and service” solutions. The subsequent socialist Popular Unit government (1970–1973) would reject this “progressive” scheme, providing instead finished solutions, with initial results that could not have been better: around 100,000 units started in 1971 alone. Nevertheless, subsequent foreign and local economic and political pressures, let alone the Chilean welfare system’s own internal incapacities, reduced production to around 30,000 units for the following two years.

The military dictatorship (1973–1990) converted the national housing system into a scheme that involved individual savings and minimum subsidies granted to households (voucher system). The sociospatial distribution of Santiago was also deeply re-engineered, with social estates being placed only in the cheapest and worst serviced peripheries and many squatter enclaves being eradicated from upper-income areas. MINVU would also be reshaped (its current organic structure comes directly from this reconfiguration) and many of its centralized roles downgraded to regional level management. Chapter 10 focuses on the 1990s. The democratic governments retained the previous neoliberal system but reduced the quantitative deficit and were also innovative in the various instruments of subsidization, management and control of housing delivery. Yet the quantitative success of the 1990s was achieved at the cost of lowering the quality of the dwellings provided, creating a cumulative effect that would be exploited in the harsh crisis of 1997–1998. From then, the state would more actively demand minimum quality levels by the private sector. The book makes clear that, at any rate and despite the many problems still unresolved, Chile at the end of the twentieth century was a country capable of providing relatively decent and affordable shelter for its low-income population.