Translator: Larissa Fernandes Reviewer: Claudia Sander
I'm not an architect.
Many people say, "He works with housing,"
but I'm not an architect, I didn't graduate in this area.
But, nevertheless,
I've become very actively involved
with the theme of housing in the past few years.
And this is a very interesting theme
because, along with nutrition and clothing,
maybe housing represents all of our most primitive needs.
However, what has recently delighted me
is how much housing is more than a basic primitive need.
How much it's more than shelter and physical safety.
I've become delighted with how much housing
has an extremely important psychological role,
of psychological sheltering and safety, really.
And how much a house can be a steppingstone
for human and psychic development and for social transformation.
This is what I want to talk about with you today.
Although I didn't go to college,
and I'm not in the housing and architecture field,
around 2009 I became involved in the context
of a slum urbanization program,
in a slum in the East Zone of São Paulo.
The project itself I was involved
had nothing to do with housing.
The challenge that was given to us was,
"Look, these slums just went through an urbanization process,
and we want to prepare the community to receive these new spaces,
these new parks, etc.
So the idea is that your actions help the residents occupying these new spaces."
We recruited our best team to do a very tough job,
but, it was really difficult to do.
The schools, the parks, the streets, they were all beautiful,
but we started to realize
that people's houses were unstructured.
So it was very difficult for people to go from this lack of structure,
from this refuge of their own space,
and for us to ask them to embrace this new external space,
that wasn't there before.
This generated a series of understandings and learnings.
For me, who had never seen or understood slums urbanization
and had my own ideas of what that process was really like,
the first shock I had was that the urbanization process
which is an initiative with a huge investment -
this project, in particular,
was the biggest slum urbanization program in the state of São Paulo,
which is the richest state of Brazil.
It was a truckload of money being invested,
to improve the streets and all,
but all the actions and resources
are invested "outside the doors" of the houses, as I like to say,
in basic sanitation, parks, school.
Now, inside the houses, the conditions remain the same.
Houses were still unsanitary, humid, unventilated,
and with inadequate bathrooms.
It's obvious that a few houses are removed in this process,
but most of them are still there.
So, people's domestic problems are still unresolved.
Besides that, another thing that was clear to me,
knowing the housing context and an urbanization program,
and this experience showed me,
is that the main focus
of the housing action plans in the country
is on the construction of new homes.
Looking at Brazil today,
there is a housing deficit of 6 million homes.
We need to build 6 million new homes in order to solve this problem.
But, we have yet another problem,
which is twice as big, called qualitative deficit,
which are the existing homes, that are inadequate:
12 million homes.
And if we take the main public programs,
like "My house, My Life", for example
- which is fantastic, and I don't want to undervalue the program -
they are focused solely on construction.
If we take the main actions of private initiatives,
also related to these government actions,
the focus is on construction.
If we take a big part of the social organizations that work with habitation,
housing movements, etc., the focus is on construction.
And the problem which is twice as big isn't addressed by practically anyone.
So this experience, in the urbanization context
of that slum we were working on,
made me realize that there was a huge gap,
and there is a huge gap in Brazil,
which are these 12 million homes,
these 40 million Brazilians who already own a home,
but who live in completely inadequate conditions,
and who have no access to pass this point,
to skip this phase, to improve their lives.
So when this project was over, me and two friends who were working
in this initiative, we were intrigued.
We said, "There seems to be a gap here,
that no one is addressing.
And if no one else is involved, maybe we can get into it."
We were already reading Yunus.
When Yunus's book lands on anyone's hand,
it just doesn't leave you, does it?
That's the trouble with Yunus' book,
you read it and say, "Shoot, now I have to do something."
After reading it and getting that feeling that now we have to do something,
we said, "OK, let's do something, but how?"
I had never done anything like construction work, renovation, etc.
But, we were certain that we would only be able to build something
with the help of those living with the problem.
So we partnered up with an NGO that we knew,
which was at another slum, in the South Zone of São Paulo,
on the other side of the city.
And we told them,
"This is our idea, we saw this problem,
we know the issues of renovation and housing conditions improvement
aren't addressed in the best way possible.
We would like to talk with people who are living this problem,
with those who want to fix this situation, to see if we can build a solution."
They said, "Great! Let's gather a group of residents who would like to renovate
and create a discussion group."
We spent six months listening to these people.
Right on the first day,
we had the luck to understand
what may be the renovation mantra.
They say you don't finish renovating, you give it up.
I see a lot of you people going like this!
You've done some renovations, right?
(Laughter)
So we started to understand the renovation process
there, in the slum context.
And even though renovation is a mess for everyone, there it's worse.
It involves all these extra costs of poverty.
The way that any person who has credit
or is in another economic condition does renovation is:
you take out a loan, buy the materials, hire contractors and deliver.
With the slum residents it was different:
this month there's some money left over,
so they buy one or two packs of cement.
Then they stock it.
They spend another month working, there's some more money left over,
they buy another pack of cement.
Except that the first one got wet, was rained on, it's lost.
Then they have to buy another to replace the first one.
From the view of construction itself,
you should hire a local mason,
but the best mason in the slum is working for large construction companies,
which leads to that one guy, who does everything, but nothing right.
So you have a terrible construction work.
The other option is to do the weekend shift.
You call your friends and say, "Hey, let's have some beer,
and get some work done."
You have a beer,
lay the first brick row and it's great.
You have a second beer,
you lay the second row, and by the fourth or fifth beer, the wall is like this.
So from the quality point of view, it's also not a great option.
What we started seeing was that the renovation done there
wasn't very efficient.
And they told us
that there were four main problems in doing renovations in the slums,
which are: first, access to credit loans.
The slums tend to be located in non-regulated areas.
That is, your home isn't registered, it's not a formal property.
And banks, in order to finance renovation, constrution, anything,
they need that registration, as an insurance.
So, in that context, no chance.
Secondly, I don't know if you can read it, is technical assistance.
All professionals from architecture and the housing field
that study and offer services to help us,
common citizens, to build and renovate,
are not targeting this public.
Either you have a traditional architecture office,
and only work with rich folk,
or you have the NGOs, the organizations for technical support,
but, again, they are technical branches of the housing movements,
that focus on construction.
From the renovation point of view, there's practically nothing.
And it's like that for everything, right?
We saw this scenario in this six-month process of listening
and when it was over, we said,
"Well, let's see what's on the market, and see if we can make a bridge,
if we can make a link so we can make more efficient renovation."
So we went to the banks,
from the big commercial Brazilian banks all the way to the small ones,
microloans and all else.
We went to the banks, presented everything and actually heard the following from one,
"There is a lack of literature in order for us to give loans for renovation."
I said, "Well let me introduce you to my writer friends here,
who knows, maybe we can set a new trend."
A "no" scenario. This all repeated itself.
Until we came to the conclusion that either we did nothing,
because of all of these noes, or we had to do something.
And this "something" should involve everything.
We would have to be the bank, the architect, the qualified labor,
we would have to provide the material,
and deliver everything.
In the middle of this process, these six months of listening,
a very sad and symbolic fact, to all of us, happened.
Mrs. Idelci, who is this lady,
was part of this group.
She was different from our profile,
she worked for a multinational company,
she worked with cleaning there, officially registered,
with money in her account and everything, she wanted renovation, she needed help.
This talk was during the second semester, from June until December,
and in November, Mrs. Idelci died.
This was a big shock for us.
Because she was very dear to us.
We had our meetings in front of her house.
Mrs. Idelci died because of continuous cycles of pneumonia that she had.
And her doctor had already said,
"Mrs. Idelci, this house in which you live, there are no windows,
the walls are full of mold,
you won't be able to cure your pneumonia.
Either you move out, do something about it, or you won't heal."
She didn't heal,
and she died.
The story of Mrs. Idelci
made us realize that habitation
isn't just a matter of housing and shelter.
It's a matter of public health.
Houses are indirectly killing people.
When we realized this, we said, "Okay, what renovation are we doing?
We have to address health,
we just realized that we have a health issue.
It's not housing stricto sensu."
We went to the health and housing literature, of which there is very little.
And we saw, in this medical literature that focused on housing,
that the main diseases related to housing
that most impacted the health of the residents are the following:
bathroom, excessive humidity, ventilation and wall coating.
When we saw this, we said, "We know what to do:
bathroom kit, antihumidity kit, ventilation kit and wall coating kit,
to address the cause directly."
At this point we already had the products and the model,
which is this model of delivering everything,
loans, technical assistance and everything else.
With that in mind, we started operating with two models of loan.
One is the subsidized renovation, in which the more vulnerable families,
who receive a monthly salary of up to 1.5 minimum wages,
receive an aid and only pay for 30 percent of the value of the renovation costs.
And the other model, in which the resident pays 100 percent of the cost in 15 months,
in portions that fit their budget.
In this first year of operation, the first of the "Programa Vivenda",
we did 104 renovation works.
It was our big product test.
And constructions, like this bathroom,
that turned into this.
Kitchens like this one,
that turned into this.
(Applause)
Thank you.
And rooms like this one, with all that humidity,
that turned into this.
We had a series of experiences in the first year.
The idea now is to launch a second phase,
in which we would like to test other things,
now that we have all this experience, we want to test our sales model.
And as soon as that's ready, the third phase is to scale that up
to the entire country, have a program's office in every slum
so we can expand this work we have done.
But, maybe one of our greatest experiences
happened during our first renovation, which was a bathroom.
Ana's bathroom was very bad.
Its floor was made of dirt,
there was no sanitation linked to the system,
the water that ran down made a hole, there were bugs, worms...
Her bathroom was really bad.
She told us some stories that happen a lot, like,
"I never had my son's birthday party here at home,
because I was embarrassed to invite his friends,
because I didn't have a bathroom where people could pee."
So we started to see the indirect impacts
of an inadequate bathroom in people's lives and development.
But, Ana's bathroom turned out beautiful,
became clean, it was better than mine.
And everybody who sees it says, "Wow, what about that bathroom..."
Of course we did our best to turn it into a gem.
And when we got there...
We went to Ana's house the day after the renovation,
early in the morning, to see how her first night turned out
with her new bathroom, beautiful and all.
And when we got there, Ana said,
"You have no idea the problem you created me."
We said, "Shoot, what is it, Ana, is there some technical issue?"
She said, "No, here's the thing.
Before, my kids were afraid to go to the bathroom
because it was dark, had bugs and everything.
It was a darn fight to get them to go.
Yesterday, it was a big fight to get them out of there.
Imagine how much my water bill is going to be after this bathroom."
But, that wasn't the most interesting.
When we were on our way to Ana's house to make this visit,
Ana was sweeping the road, the alley in front of her house.
We had never seen Ana sweep that alley.
An alley in the slums tends to be a very dirty thing,
with a lot of dog poop...
And when we saw that, we were surprised.
We looked at each other and asked, "What's going on here?"
"Ana, what's going on?"
She looked at us and said "What? I'm sweeping the alley. What's going on?"
"We can see your sweeping the alley,
but we've never seen you do that, what happened?"
She said, "Ah, now that I have such a clean bathroom,
you think I'm letting someone step in this dirt and mess up my bathroom?"
(Applause)
That was something to us.
We then remembered that slums urbanization project,
in which we had to come up with a series of strategies
to make people embrace the public spaces.
Contrary to what happened here, where it was a natural, organic process.
It wasn't what we imagined.
And we saw how transformative
a house renovation is to a person's life.
How much a renovation renovates,
not only the home, but the entire chain of relationships that are there:
of the home, of people with homes, of the person with themselves,
of the people with their environment, with their neighbors, with the alley.
Renovating a home, changing a life,
is changing a community, at its limit.
It was evident to us that, in an individual level
as well as in a community level, at a communitary development work,
true renovation, the real change, doesn't come from the outside.
It comes from within.
Thank you.
(Applause)