President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) travels this Tuesday (14) to Santo Amaro, in Recôncavo Baiano, to relaunch Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV). Created in 2009, the program financed the construction of around 5.7 million homes, but was closed in 2020, during the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
Bolsonaro replaces the MCMV with the so-called Casa Verde Amarela, which never had the budget to enable the construction of so many homes. The Bolsonaro government program also reduced access to housing for the poorest and also eliminated the participation of social movements in the execution of the program.
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According to Camila D’Ottaviano, researcher at the Observatório das Metrópoles and professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), the focus on low income and the participation of social entities in the MCMV were its most positive characteristics. According to her, families with incomes of up to R$ 1,800 per month were able to obtain government subsidies of up to 95% to buy a property.
This, according to her, really managed to make low-income people able to buy their own regularized property. “This did not exist in previous programs, it did not exist at the time of the BNH (National Housing Bank).”
D’Ottaviano also explained that the federal government managed, through the MCMV, to establish partnerships with housing movements so that they themselves could provide solutions for housing their members. “It was a subprogram, of a smaller scale, but which contracted around 72,000 units out of more than 5 million in total,” he explained.
waiting for improvements
Fabricio Leal de Oliveira, professor at the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Ippur/UFRJ), also considers the two points pointed out by D’Ottaviano as essential for the MCMV and welcomes its relaunch . He does, however, have reservations.
“It is important for the government to resume investment in popular housing in a country that has a housing deficit of around 6 million homes,” he said. “But MCMV has to change.”
“It is necessary to resume the budget for popular housing”, charges Boulos
According to him, many MCMV houses were built in the most remote regions of the big cities, still without public services, such as health, education and public transport.
“It doesn’t make sense for the federal government to finance the ‘peripheralization’ of the city. You cannot have a sustainable discourse and keep producing a city where the poor live farther and farther away”, he said.
Leal recalled that housing projects financed by the program had construction problems. They also ended up dominated by criminal groups as they were isolated in remote areas.
For Leal, the new MCMV has to take these security issues into account. You also need to think about the fact that many beneficiaries of the program’s condominiums cannot afford water and electricity bills – which they usually didn’t pay when they lived in slums, for example. They’re going to need some help.
Removals in Rio
Giselle Tanaka, who is also a professor at Ippur/UFRJ, also sees the MCMV as “extremely relevant”, with “immense benefits”.
According to her, however, in Rio de Janeiro, mainly, the program ended up being used for forced removals of residents from areas for works for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. cariocas. In the 12 host cities of the Cup, there were around 200,000, she said.
With a trip to the Northeast, Lula uses the pre-Carnival week to resume and inaugurate works across the country
“City halls had the ability to remove people from the most valued areas to take them to peripheral areas. But these areas could be urbanized, where people had a much better housing condition “, she said. ” Social problems increased for those who already had a consolidated life. “
D’Ottaviano said that social movements have given the new government a series of notes for the MCMV to be improved. She believes that, due to the movements’ mobilization and organizational capacity, requests tend to be contemplated.
Editing: Rodrigo Durão Coelho
