The origins of social housing in Brazil

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the origins of state intervention in the question of social housing in Brazil, especially during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1954). It also examines the repercussions of such intervention in the field of housing design and access to land in São Paulo. It was during this period that the Brazilian state began to intervene both in the process of production and in the market for rented accommodation, abandoning its free market stance of leaving construction, property sales, funding and rents to the convenience of the private sector. It is true that the measures taken were designed, at least ostensibly, to ensure better housing and urban living conditions for the working class, as the official propaganda of the time sought to stress. However, they should be viewed alongside a huge battery of measures taken by Vargas and his followers to regulate the relations between labour and capital and to improve the working conditions of urban wage earners, winning for the dictator the image of «father of the poor». Considering that the different dimensions of the labour law of the period have already been exhaustively analysed, there is every interest in exploring the state housing policy - relatively little researched - which accompanied it. Not least because this was the moment when the state and society took on a share of responsibility for housing as a question of social policy, thereby sowing the seeds of an incipient housing policy in Brazil. In concrete terms, the article examines the repercussions of this policy on housing and house building in São Paulo, at a time when the city was undergoing major urban and economic changes. Although the research takes São Paulo as its point of reference, the processes studies are also valid in general for several other Brazilian cities.