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The national government called for a tender to buy private land, in which it will make 50,000 lots with services, destined for the popular sectors. “In Argentina we do not have a problem of lack of land, but a problem of distribution and territorial classification. That is what we want to change with these urban land generation policies. If the State does not implement access policies of this type, it is impossible for a low-income family to buy land. This brings as a consequence the serious problems of overcrowding that exist in popular neighborhoods,” Fernanda Miño, Secretary of Socio-Urban Integration, told Página/12..
This is the first tender that has been made to private parties since the creation of the Secretariat, which already has similar projects that are more advanced in fiscal lands. The purchase will be financed with the Socio-Urban Integration Fund, which received 15 percent of the Contribution to Great Fortunes and to which 9 percent of the PAIS dollar tax is also destined.
“Planning urbanization is anticipating the taking of land and its subsequent problems, such as the existence of neighborhoods that settled in unsuitable areas, for example flooded. In this sense, the creation of lots with services is part of the constitutional right to housing. With it, many of the infrastructure deficiencies suffered in popular neighborhoods can be avoided, where once the area is built irregularly, it is more difficult to reach water, sewage or paving services, “said Miño. He explained that Although the tender is for the entire country, the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires is the one that concentrates the largest number of families without access to urban land.
The purchase targets both vacant land and urbanizations that have been left unfinished. A recent experience in Mendoza illustrates the case. “Senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti presented us with the situation of a subdivision in the town of Las Heras that had been started by a cooperative and was left unfinished due to lack of funds. The cooperative, made up of residents of a popular neighborhood who organized to develop adjoining land, had only managed to demarcate the streets and some entrances to the sewer system. We were able to provide the financing to reactivate that subdivision and provide it with services, which was completed in six months. 119 batches were made and delivered last week. That is why we believe that if we work at a good pace, in a year we could deliver the first batches of this tender.”
To acquire a lot, it will be necessary to register in a single registry of applicants that will be created by the secretariat, which will work in the orbit of the Ministry of Social Development. Its owner, Juan Zabaleta, will publicly present the program in the coming days.
In Argentina there was a real estate market for popular subdivisions that disarmed the dictatorship. The researcher Maria Cristina Cravino told in a report carried out by this newspaper that “since the 1930s, both the city of Buenos Aires and the province carried out popular lots. Rural land was converted into urban land and real estate agencies divided it up and sold it in fixed installments without interest. Over the years, governments have taken some measures to regulate this type of access to land. For example, during the first Peronist governments, subdivisions of flood-prone areas were prohibited.”
The dictatorship effectively closed this market by issuing decree 8912, an urban planning law that raised standards and forced real estate companies to offer lots with services. “That was a milestone that ended the cycle of popular subdivisions and caused real estate developers to turn to a new modality, contemplated in the law: that of the countries. In addition, socio-economic policies, in parallel, generated a impoverishment of the popular sectors, due to the fall in real wages and deindustrialization, as well as the introduction of indexing mechanisms for the entire economy, including rents. As a result, the popular classes ceased to be a solvent sector to buy urban land.”
However, some of the memory of those subdivisions remained in the social organization, which incorporated the delimitation of blocks, the layout of streets, the reservation of spaces for common use and the organization of the neighbors to request the arrival of services.
The Socio-Urban Integration Secretariat was created at the impulse of the social movements that today make up the UTEP, which carried out a census of popular neighborhoods and in 2018 managed to pass a law that obliges the State to urbanize them. Among its lines of intervention is the urbanization of more than four thousand neighborhoods already registered, to which services do not reach — the secretariat made it a priority to provide them with drinking water networks. A second line of work is the My Piece program, which grants subsidies for making repairs or improvements to homes in popular neighborhoods.