Jobs and Housing: Alternative Developments in the Venezuelan Guayana

Abstract

The appraisal of development projects is often complicated by the fact that they rarely occur in isolation. In Latin America, the effectiveness of public housing programs and the reactions of the people involved are, as a rule, bound up with the whole complex of heterogeneous developments we call “urbanization.” And when public housing reaches the villages, it typically goes hand in hand with agrarian reform. This is generally the case in Venezuela, where large public housing schemes have been in operation since 1958.Consequently it is difficult to disentangle and then evaluate the impact of industrialization per se from social infrastructure development in the towns, or agrarian reform per se from social infrastructure development in the villages. The Guayana region of Venezuela is one of the few areas where a production-oriented project and a social welfare project have operated discretely, but within a uniform socioeconomic context.