ABSTRACT
This chapter links the several dimensions of the complex process of housing production that is carried out by a sector of the population that does not have the solvency to access a dwelling through the market in Latin American and Caribbean cities. The chapter debates the sociopolitical and methodological implications of adopting concepts that, by dint of becoming hegemonic, tend to blur the dynamism of social processes, presenting them as immutable or mechanical. It explains the structural conditions that lead lower-income populations to attain incomplete housing solutions that perpetuate a state of deprivation, and it also highlights the socio-historical context in which they occur and the governmental responses to address them. The chapter indicates that housing precariousness in self-managed settlements is persistent because of exclusionary housing policies and that, in the best of cases, they are only included in a precarious way within programs of property regularization and/or of insufficient physical-environmental sanitation and that it does not lift them out of poverty. The lack of comprehensiveness is a characteristic of the failure of these programs in the Latin American region, but it is extreme in the Caribbean countries, where the absence of the state is evident and actions to improve self-managed settlements have practically remained in the hands of non-governmental organizations.
