ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one of the federal flagship initiatives of the Worker’s Party Administrations until 2015 (i.e. the social housing program My House, My Life (MHML). After outlining its main guidelines, the chapter reviews the critiques in terms of its mismatch between production targets and housing deficit for the “poorest of the poor” (i.e. Target Group 1) and the contradictions of its project-driven, market-enabling approach of delivering social housing through credit, which would hollow out cities’ efforts toward participatory land-use planning aimed at the delivery of well-located, affordable social housing. Moreover, the chapter provides a comparative study on MHML in cities located in the industrial heartland of metropolitan São Paulo. Our findings indicate that these cities implemented redistributive land-use planning and created special interest zones, which actually facilitated the provision of serviced, well-located housing for Target Group 1 through MHML. However, cities’ lack of leverage over booming land markets stimulated the hollowing out of MHML itself, whereby developers set prices outside the range of the more affluent target groups and allocated units to middle-class buyers. We conclude with recommendations for research on the design of social housing subsidies in scenarios marked by increasing entanglements between real estate and finance.
