Author: Joaquim Falcão

Source: Folha de S. Paulo, 28/09/2008

EVERY COUNTRY recognizes the right of every citizen to have a shelter, a house, a stable and legal dwelling differently and sometimes through tortuous paths.

In the United States, for example, the $ 700 billion that the Bush administration will spend to tackle the mortgage market crisis will turn a private market bond - the mortgage bond - into a state bond. Indirectly, the debtor will receive a kind of “home voucher” to be paid by the taxpayer.
In Brazil, we have also been devious in the universalization of property rights for housing. Without individual property, society is not a nation, but a camp, Celso Furtado would say. Our democratic rule of law is planted in quicksand.

The numbers speak for themselves.
According to IBGE, almost 100% of the cities with a population of more than 500 thousand inhabitants and 80% of the cities between 100 thousand and 500 thousand inhabitants have irregular settlements. In these cities there will be elections. But few candidates have proposals for this structural problem in our economy.

Probably between 20% and 30% of the urban population lives in these settlements. In the last Demographic Census, there were about 26% of the population in more than 12 million irregular dwellings. The Ministry of Cities indicates that, from 2004 to 2006, the housing deficit for all income groups increased by almost 10%.
The quicksand is such that the “Observador Brasil 2008”, by Ipsos, indicates that the Brazilian spends twice as much on cigarettes as on real estate financing! In the capitals there is no lack of properties, there is a lack of properties for popular housing.
What sustains this quicksand is, on the one hand, the impossibility for the State to control the expansion of collective housing illegality. We live in a “para-rule of law”, in which the absence of the State is not an imperfection of the system, but an amortizing condition. It allows precarious balance.

On the other hand, a series of subtle and creative “by passes” - cats and dogs - allows citizens to use anonymous land, public and private services without paying taxes without being disturbed. Which has an economic explanation: housing illegality is the only cost compatible with the ephemeral income of about 50% of Brazilian workers in the informal market. Faces of the same coin: informal employment and illegality of property.

In 1930, the work card was the document of citizenship, noted Wanderley G. dos Santos. In the 21st century, the deed of the property should confirm citizenship. It still doesn't. How to implement legal certainty and a culture of respect for contracts if the two most important contracts of citizenship - the work and the deed of home ownership - still do not regulate most social relations?

Not without time, the challenge of universalizing property rights for housing begins to enter the electoral agenda. But in a tortuous way: due to the palpable correlation between “urban depropriety”, the result of the absence of the State and the market, and the control of urban areas by the traffic and militias. Urban deprivation is the primary cause of the vast majority of diseases in Brazilian capitals.
Violence, including - and above all.

Candidates' proposals are necessary but insufficient. Some propose to control collective illegality in the favelas: to contain expansion and to prohibit verticalization. Like?
With walls? With troops? Without offering a housing alternative? Others propose to revitalize decaying urban centers, ask the federal government for resources to regularize land tenure or expand the rental allowance.

But the fact is that no city has a box and no candidate has a complete project to tackle the problem in all its dimensions concurrently. Nor does this market interest the construction industry. The consequences will continue to fall, in fire, in the hands of the elected mayor.

The myth that the mayor can do little to universalize property rights hangs over candidates. In fact, urban regularization is a painful exercise in bureaucratic patience. New laws, complementing the current ones, compatible with plural social needs and which already exist in advanced societies are the competence of the National Congress.

But multiple strategies, from fiscal incentives to the construction and financing of popular houses, reducing the bureaucracy of regularization - as does the Ministry of Cities - mobilization in Congress and in international, federal and state bodies, public and private, are possible for mayors. . The precondition is that candidates prioritize the universalization of property rights for housing. For it is in the elections that the country becomes aware and faces its main problems.

JOAQUIM FALCÃO, 65, master in law from Harvard University (USA) and doctor in education from the University of Geneva (Switzerland), is director of the FGV-RJ School of Law and a member of the National Council of Justice.

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