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Vertical peripheries and the embodied costs of social housing financialization

Vertical peripheries and the embodied costs of social housing financialization

By Luisa Sotomayor

Hogares Soacha, a VIS development in the southern border of Bogotá's periurban area.
Hogares Soacha, a VIS development in the southern border of Bogotá's periurban area.

Over the last two decades, the Colombian government has developed a national housing policy of low-cost and privately built Social Interest Housing or “VIS” housing (as per its Spanish acronym).  Following the example of the Chilean model, the Colombian policy provides housing subsidies and discounted mortgage rates to the demand, specifically, to households employed in the formal sector with earnings ranging from 1 to 4 minimum wages and some saving capacity to qualify for a mortgage. While the national government maintains tight control over the maximum selling costs of VIS housing units, private developers profit from a guaranteed buyers’ market due to public investment in the allocation of subsidies and a growing interest from investors who can also buy the units without the subsidy. Builders benefit from waived taxes and fees, as well as land management tools that enable large-scale master-planned communities. As developers buy land in the peripheries where it is cheapest and build small the result is vertically built-up, often minimally connected, urban peripheries with few services and amenities. This approach is part of the larger project to transform informally urbanized cities, where most households are tenants, into a middle-class country through homeownership.

Core project team members: (L-R)
Luisa Sotomayor, Lina Brand Correa, Clara Gomez and Brian Waters.
Core project team members: (L-R)
Luisa Sotomayor, Lina Brand Correa, Clara Gomez and Brian Waters
.

Colombia’s VIS policy has succeeded commercially, dramatically boosting the affordable housing supply in just a few years and, therefore, receiving international praise. According to the Colombian Chamber of Construction (CAMACOL 2024), in 2022, 75 percent of all new housing construction in Colombia was VIS housing, and out of the 237,400 housing units sold in the country, 171,828 were VIS. In 2023, there was a decline in VIS housing sales and newly initiated projects due to rising interest rates and changes to the criteria in the allocation of subsidies. However, VIS housing still represented 66 percent of all the housing sold in the country.[i]  

At a time when political and societal sectors in Canada—and elsewhere—cry out for supply-oriented solutions to the global housing affordability crisis, examining the Colombian experience of commoditized affordable housing is more pertinent than ever.[ii] What are these homes like? What are the territorialized and governance effects of this policy and its implications for planning processes? What types of needs are met or hindered by the new units and by collective life in VIS apartments? What do these vertical peripheries tell us about the present and future of urban life in these spaces?

Our three-year SSHRC Insight project, “Vertical Peripheries: Planning and Citizenship in Colombia’s commodified periurban housing towers,” seeks to answer these questions by comparing the implementation of VIS policy in three large metropolitan areas (Bogota, Medellin and Barranquilla) and learning from policy actors and residents themselves through mixed methods. The core project team is led by Luisa Sotomayor (Director of City Institute and EUC faculty) as PI, Lina Brand Correa as Co-PI, doctoral student Clara Gómez (Environmental Studies) as research coordinator and doctoral student Brian Waters (Geography) as quantitative data analyst. Our research partners at Universidad de Los Andes are faculty members Adriana Hurtado-Tarazona (Centre for Development Studies CIDER) and Friederike Fleischer (Anthropology) and research assistants Anyela Moreno and Rafael Gomez at the same institution. In each city, the project liaises with local universities, such as Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla, and their researchers and students as collaborators to this project.

The Vertical Peripheries research team with collaborators and students from Universidad del Atlántico in Soledad, a suburb adjacent Barranquilla.
The Vertical Peripheries research team with collaborators and students from Universidad del Atlántico in Soledad, a suburb adjacent Barranquilla.

Following the quantitative data analysis phase and interviews with the experts, this summer we are conducting fieldwork in selected residential complexes at the urban borders of Bogota (see image 1) and Barranquilla (see image 2). The research sites were chosen to represent the diversity of the VIS units. So far, we have learned from over 80 residents who shared their time, knowledge, and experience. Preliminary findings from this research point to the embodied costs of social housing financialization as individual residents now must “care for debt”[iii] and repair new yet poorly built apartments at the expense of other caring activities. Residents also must mobilize their personal resources and strategies to access limited urban services, infrastructures and opportunities. Sometimes, they file lawsuits to reclaim access to services. In many cases, they enjoy higher security in gated-community-style apartments but suffer the consequences of unsuitable locations and low-quality, very small and culturally and environmentally inadequate dwellings, often unsuitable for the climate.

We recently presented the first findings from this project at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Bogota (June 2024) and the RC21 Congress in Santiago, Chile (July 2024). We hope our research will open a wide discussion on the territorialized and social effects of Colombia’s VIS policy and similar one-sided supply-oriented housing schemes in the region with the hopes of encouraging more adequate and dignified housing for all.


[i] CAMACOL. January 2024. Accessed July 24, 2024. https://camacol.co/prensa/noticias/el-2023-cerro-con-una-caida-del-497-en-las-ventas-de-vivienda-de-interes-social#:~:text=Durante%20el%202023%20se%20vendieron,por%20parte%20de%20los%20hogares

[ii] For a discussion of housing supply-oriented policy in the Canadian context, see: Kipfer, S. and L. Sotomayor (2024) Housing beyond land rent?: A critique of market housing solutionism, Radical Housing Journal, 6(1), pp. 33-61; https://doi.org/10.54825/GQAU9087

[iii] Montgomerie, J., & Tepe-Belfrage, D. (2017). Caring for debts: How the household economy exposes the limits of financialisation. Critical Sociology43(4-5), 653-668.