Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Petrópolis and the great social reform of the homeless

The song “Barracão” is 70 years old this 2022. Perhaps only the elders remember: it used to sing the “barracão hanging on the hill, asking the city for help at your feet”, “barracão de zinc, poor, unhappy”. It was composed by an army officer and soldier, Luiz Antônio, with Oldemar Magalhães.

The shed is no longer made of zinc. In the newer favelas of São Paulo, it is made of wood. In general, it is made of unplastered masonry, shaky on poor or no foundation, often on the edge of an unstable slope, a filthy stream or a water dam that is supposed to be potable. But there are “regularized” neighborhoods of better houses on the edge of the cliff.

There are stalls too. Many disinherited from decent living now live in tents, several on the streets near Avenida Paulista, which is the limit of a group of very wealthy neighborhoods called “Jardins”. It’s the tenement on the sidewalk.

The poor shacks are diverse, therefore. Commonly, they are at risk of death. In the summers of the 21st century, when there is no drought, there is slaughter as in older summers: Petrópolis, Franco da Rocha, Minas, etc. The houses collapse or are buried, the routine is known, just as the conversation that follows is seasonal, about “risk areas” and the lack of plans, investments or emergency measures, such as sirens.

It’s all true, but it’s also nonsense.

In the city of São Paulo, there are about 175 thousand houses at risk of ruin. The average number of inhabitants per house would be 509 thousand people (there must be more: the poor are forced to live in agglomerations). If the housing problem were reduced to death by burial, it would be necessary to solve the problem of half a million people – but there are still people left on the street, in tenements and other inhumane huts.

The disagreement is in saying that it is “necessary to remove people from the risk area”, as if it were the case of putting people in a PCC van and housing them in a small hotel. Yes, something needs to be done so that fewer people die tomorrow. But the essential problem is the inequality of land use.

The horror that is the Brazilian city, the big one in particular, also resulted from the lack of agrarian reform, when something that deserved that grandiose name made economic and social sense. Now, the problem is urban reform, a vague and technocratic name for the less inequitable distribution of space for housing and transport, to stay in the thick of it.

The poor live poorly and far away in part because much of the central land is a store of value without social use. They spend hours in traffic also because the ground is taken over by private cars. The richest appropriate public investment, using the benefits and increasing the value of their properties, subsidized by the government. Subways, better streets, parks and other amenities, more common in affluent areas, are financed by tax money.

Urban reform means redistributing benefits and, ultimately, dispossession: recovering unequally appropriated public goods and punishing idle property. It is easy to see that serious talk about “risk areas”, “master plans” and “inadequate housing” causes scandal.

Who takes care of the matter? Guilherme Boulos’ MTST, which only exists because of horror, and left-wing urbanists. Almost no politician deals with it. In São Paulo, this conversation can be an electoral death sentence, see the fury over progressive IPTU or bus lanes.

If all went well, it would take decades to fix this horror. Tax, regulation and also the induction of private investment are needed, because the government will not have the money. But it is a higher social priority.