The rise (and fall?) of a state land bank

Abstract

Land markets in most poor cities do not work very effectively and contribute to making social housing unaffordable. One once popular response was to set up a public land bank. In truth, few such banks were terribly successful and, with the onset of neo-liberalism, the approach fell out of fashion. However, one government recently established a state land bank in an attempt to slow the growth of illegal settlement and to improve housing conditions for the poor. Bogotá's efforts have had some measure of success although the agency could never achieve the ambitious goals set for it. The paper describes the different approaches of the agency over the last decade, the problems that it has faced and what it has managed to achieve. Today, the agency no longer buys land and prefers to work in association with private landowners; in effect, Bogotá no longer has a state land bank. However, what it does have is an interesting set of tools with which to confront land speculation and to discourage owners from holding on to serviced land. Whether this set of tools will be able to confront the perennial problem of providing land for affordable social housing remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Bogotá provides many lessons for governments in poorer cities about how and why they should take measures to improve the working of the land market.