By María Eva Koutsovitis and Jonatan Baldiviezo
Observatorio del Derecho a la Ciudad
12 June 2022
This month in Argentina, new provisional results from the 2022 National Census of Population, Households and Housing were announced, referring to Indicators of the housing conditions of occupied private homes.
Among the data provided at the national level, the following was reported about inhabited private dwellings:
84.4% have access to water for drinking and cooking from the public network.
62.6% have the toilet drain to public network (sewer).
54.4% use mains gas or electricity for cooking.
65.5% live in their own home.
With regard to the City of Buenos Aires, it was reported that of the private dwellings occupied:
98.2% have access to drinking and cooking water from the public network.
99.2% have the toilet drain to public network (sewer).
94% use mains gas or electricity for cooking.
52.9% is own home.
The communes with fewest owner-occupied were Comuna 1 (41.7%), Comuna 2 (46.9%), Comuna 3 (42.2%) and Comuna 14 (48.6%). The communes with the highest percentage were Comuna 8 (62.4%) and Comuna 11 (61%).
Only the census shows this health care infrastructure
A first worrying fact, due to the lack of correlation with reality, is that which is related to access to drinking water for homes in the city: the results indicate that 98% have public water and 99% drain their sewage effluents into the network.
This data is not compatible with the fact that 450,000 people in Buenos Aires live in poor neighborhoods or slums and do not have formal access to drinking water. That is, they have access by means of precarious hoses or they receive water by means of tanker trucks. This data also makes invisible that 140,000 inhabitants of the city of Buenos Aires store water in buckets and bins every day.
The deficit of internal infrastructure, for example, in the popular neighborhood called 21-24 is so deep that 10% of households do not even have a tap.
Another important fact to analyze is the question of whether you use mains gas or electricity for cooking. This is an indicator of the structural inequality in the city. While in Comuna 14, in the neighborhood of Palermo, practically 100% of residents cook with mains gas or electricity, in commune No. 8, Soldati, Lugano and Villa Riachuelo, 1 in 3 inhabitants indicated that they must use gas in a carafe to be able to cook.
The Century of Tenancy (or tenantisation?)
The problem of access to a good and the exercise of a right can be approached from two different perspectives. The first focuses on access to sufficient goods to have an adequate quality of life or, in other words, for the enjoyment of the minimum items required for the respect of human rights (food, education, health, housing, etc.). This perspective corresponds to the analysis of whether a person exceeds the indicators of poverty, that is, if the person overcomes the lack of access to the goods that we democratically define as necessary for a dignified life. With regard to the right to housing, we usually speak of the housing deficit when a household does not overcome these minimum standards.
The second perspective is relational, because it starts from a comparative analysis on how and in what quantity and quality different sectors of the population have access to goods and can exercise their rights; it is a look at the Equality/Inequality axis. With regard to the right to housing, for this view it is not enough to guarantee access to adequate housing but also to consider the diversity of housing quality, surface area or legal security (occupied, rented, owned, etc.) to which families have access.
From this second perspective, a social and economic process of great relevance is taking place in the main cities of the country. We are referring to the formation of a new urban social class division due to the increase in the number of tenant households. Real estate is increasingly concentrated in a minority sector of individuals or companies, while the population that has no alternative but to rent or occupy land to guarantee their access to housing increases.
We are experiencing an increasingly growing fracture between owners and non-owners (tenant households, possessors, homeless) over time.
For example the 2001 census suggested that in the City of Buenos Aires, the percentage of tenant families was 22% (227,545 households). The 2010 census indicated 30% (343,443). That is, between 2001-2010, without the total population of the city increasing significantly, tenant households increased by 115,898.
The Directorate of Statistics and Census of the City reports that, according to the Annual Household Survey carried out, by 2022, 36.1% of households in the city are tenants and 12.7% other types of occupants. In 2003, owners reached 64.4%, in 2013 56.8% and in 2022 51.2%. According to the Permanent Household Survey (INDEC) the percentage of tenants rose to 38% in the city, that is, approximately 437,000 households. The number could be reaching 40% in the city considering that situations of extreme housing vulnerability (tenants, slums) are not fully included in the census.
In Argentina, the proportion of tenant households increased from 11% in 2001 to 16% in the 2010 census) and to 18.7% in 2018 (National Household Expenditure Survey 2017 - 2018 /INDEC).
A direct correlation is noticeable: fewer owning households and more renting and non-owning households. Since 2020, every ten years there is an increase of approximately 10% in renting households in the city and 4% nationwide. This process is not in the public debate nor does it appear as a concern of the community, which really calls our attention.
The data from this second report of the 2022 Census confirm this evolution.
At the national level, 65.5 per cent of households are owner-occupants. In the 2010 census, the proportion of owner-owned households was 72.9%. While in 2001 it had been 74.9%. A decline of almost ten percentage points in two decades.
In the City of Buenos Aires, the 2022 census determined that 52.9% are homes owned by their inhabitants. In 2001, 69% of homes were owned by their inhabitants.
In the world there were great social tensions, revolutions and wars to determine the ownership of the means of production and agrarian land. Within capitalism this situation was consolidated by means of the classic division between owners of the means of production (entrepreneurs-employers) and workers in a relationship of dependency (employees).
As in a mirror, we are experiencing how this logic of accumulation by dispossession is being transferred to the "means of reproduction" of life such as housing in urban areas, and how gradually and silently a new social division is consolidated, that of the owners and that of the non-owners.
According to a report on the Situation of Tenant Households in the AMBA [Buenos Aires Metropolitan area], more than 63% of tenant households are in debt and 62% who took on debt, used the money to pay the rent. Rent payments take an increasingly large portion of monthly income. While in 2001, 24% of households spent more than half of their income on rent, in 2022 that proportion increased to 32%. 62% claim to have changed housing one or more times in the last 5 years which demonstrates they live in housing instability.
The housing crisis is dramatic. From the failure of a massive system of mortgage loans for access to housing with which we used to live 40 years ago we are now reaching a context where access and maintenance of a rental is almost a heroic task due to the retraction of supply, the increase in prices due to inflation and the dollarization of prices. With the onset of the dictatorship in Argentina, real estate began to be offered and sold in dollars, the first being the most sumptuous properties. This dollarization of the real estate market is consolidating in the rental market, too. Now, it has also started in the high-end rental market, from platforms for tourist rentals to permanent residential rentals for families.
This is another way to universalize the indebtedness of the population. Tenant families to whom the system does not grant any alternative to access home ownership become debtors until the last month of their lives. Can we consider that the human right to adequate housing is guaranteed just by transforming the persons into perpetual debtors? Being a debtor to have access to a right implies in practice not really being the holder of a right.
The pending democratization
In the first report of the 2022 census, it was detailed that in the country there were 17,780,210 private homes and 25,501 collective homes, and 46,440,703 inhabitants. Every 2.57 inhabitants there would be one dwelling, one dwelling for every household in the country. In 1991, in the dwelling -to-household ratio, there was one dwelling for every 3.6 persons. In 2001 it was every 3.1 people and in 2010 it was every 2.89.
In 1991: 8,515,441 dwellings and 30,785,593 inhabitants.
In 2001: 11,677,152 dwellings and 36,260,130 inhabitants.
In 2010: 13,835,751 homes and 40,117,096 inhabitants.
In 2022: 17,780,210 homes and 46,440,703 inhabitants.
At the national level, from 1991 to 2001 the number of dwellings grew by 37% while the population, by 17%. From 2001 to 2010: housing grew by 18% and the population by 10%. While from 2010 to 2022 the population grew by 15 percent – that is 6 million inhabitants --, the number of homes grew by 28%: there are 4 million new homes.
In the City of Buenos Aires there are 1,640,710 dwellings (1,638,761 individuals and 1,946 collective dwellings). This implies that in the city there is 1 private dwelling for every 1.88 inhabitants.
In Comuna 8 there is 1 dwelling for every 2.87 inhabitants.
In Comuna 4 there is 1 dwelling for every 2.25 inhabitants.
In Comuna 2 there is 1 dwelling for every 1.43 inhabitants.
In Comuna 14 there is 1 dwelling for every 1.6 inhabitants.
This indicator shows the inequality of current housing supply in relation to the population between the north and the south of the city. It should also be considered that in the southern communes 4 and 8 most of the villas and popular neighborhoods are located.
The total population of the 1947 Census for the City of Buenos Aires was 2,982,580 inhabitants. Now there are 138,032 more inhabitants (3,120,612 according to the 2022 census). In the city, housing from 1991 to 2022 grew by 68%, while the population in the same period grew by 8%. In that time permits were granted to build 154 million square meters. It is estimated that around 75 million square meters were actually built. This, in an equal distribution, would have implied granting a house of 543 square meters to each inhabitant.
As this obviously has not happened (since in the city 1 out of 6 persons suffers from housing deficit, 400 thousand people live in popular neighborhoods and slums and almost 40% have to rent their homes), in a linear thought it could be said that buildings are built for people not to live in.
In the last 12 years the population grew by 230,461 inhabitants. Between the first quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2021 (after that, this information was discontinued) 10 million square meters (10,206,635) were actually built.
The results of the Census corroborate that the growth of construction is not being oriented to mitigate the housing crisis nor to return to the path of transforming urban areas into a society of owners.
We must not give up the struggle for property. We cannot be truly citizens if the city does not literally belong to us. Property is not alien to the Right to the City, Participatory Democracy and the sovereignty of the people. We are facing a dystopia and in order to avoid it comes true, we must start from the fact that the debt is with non-owner households.
This article originally appeared in El Cohete A La Luna as "Adiós a la Sociedad de Propietarios"