The Political Economy of Low-Income Housing: New Evidence from Urban Colombia

Abstract

In recent years, research into low-income housing in Latin American cities has come to be dominated by what one might call the 'structural' approach.1 Structuralist authors, usually but not exclusively of Marxian background, are primarily concerned with the 'political economy' of housing; that is to say, with the links which exist between housing and the structure of state and society. The debate over the political economy of low-income housing in Latin America has focused almost exclusively on the ideological implications of low-income home ownership, on 'self help', squatting, 'site-and-service' schemes, and so on (Pradilla 1976; Burgess 1978; Murillo and Ungar 1979; Molina 1979). So great has been the emphasis on home ownership that one might be led to conclude that other forms of tenure play an insignificant role in housing the Latin American urban poor. But this is not so. The proportion of rented dwellings in the ten cities listed in Table 1 varies between 30.7 per cent and 52.5 per cent. Yet despite its obvious importance, little information exists on renting among the urban poor in Latin America. What little work exists is dominated by studies of rental tenements and tenement life, and by the pejorative attitudes toward renting engendered by authors such as Lewis (1961) and Turner (1968). No attempt has been made to explore the wider social, economic and ideological implications of low-income renting. In this paper I shall explore some of the major aspects of the political economy of rental housing, mostly using data from Bucaramanga in North-East Colombia, a city in which I conducted fieldwork during most of 1979.2 Because comparable information does not exist for other Latin American cities, one must be circumspect in drawing conclusions. The paper is divided into three sections. Section One provides a brief summary of the major theoretical approaches to the study of housing tenure. In the next two sections, these theories are used to interpret the evidence from Bucaramanga. Section Two introduces the city and explains why renting is playing an increasingly important role in housing Bucaramanga's low-income population, even when this development is apparently 'dysfunctional' to the long-term interests of the Colombian state.