
Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum - damian2000
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/inside-caracas-tower-of-david-the-worlds-tallest-slum
======
geoka9
Unfortunately, the story didn't cover the most interesting parts: where the
residents get their electricity from, whether they pay for it, what about
fresh water pipes. Are they treated by the utility companies as any other
customers by taking their money and providing the service in return, or they
have to hook into utilities without paying for them (in that case, why they
are not being cut off).

~~~
zelliot
I had the opportunity to visit two months ago. Amazing place. The residents
pay about $6 per month towards the community fund. Electricity is stolen.
There is no fresh water. All water is walked up.

We got up to the 24 floor and watched them take up some lemonade for some
workers pouring concrete.

~~~
venomsnake
Why is walked up? This seems like major inefficiency. It is very easy to
create a system (the building has elevator shafts after all) with pulleys and
winch-es that could pull up and down the load.

You could jury rig some 40 horse power combustion engine from the auto morgue
(almost free) as a power plant and you need 2 platforms to counter balance
each other. It will not be safe for humans but workable for heavy loads.

~~~
njharman
"Almost" free is not free. Gas is not free. Otherwise unwanted human labor is
free.

~~~
zelliot
Gas is basically free in Venezuela. To fill up a car with 50L/13 gals was 4 or
6 Bolivars, which is about 15-20 cents at the black market exchange rate.

We had a driver for one day and he had to fill up the car. I bought him a can
of Coke which cost twice as much as the tank of gas.

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rafaelm
This tower was on the news two days ago. The police were chasing a commando
group that tried to rob some jewelry stores in Caracas. The chase ended near
this tower and the people that live there started throwing rocks and garbage
at the cops, injuring some of them.

Also this place is used by kidnappers to keep their victims. It's pretty
lawless. There's another tower like this one that was a invaded too. It used
to belong to an insurance company I think. My mother worked right next to it
and said sometimes you could hear gunshots inside.

There's mire than one building like this one in Caracas, but this is the
tallest one.

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NelsonMinar
One of JG Ballards best novels is High-Rise, a sort of Lord of the Flies in an
apartment tower. It's a lovely skewering of the social mores of proper English
people, as well as a musing on the thin veneer of polite society. Only
tangentially related, but it's a good read.
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70256.High_Rise](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70256.High_Rise)

~~~
platz
I read super-cannes from him. It was quirky and definitely interesting.

~~~
petercooper
Ballard is awesome, though most of his real gold is in his short stories (a
rare writer who really got into the format rather than treated it as a side
line). A lot of interesting "ideas" related to science and society get
explored, such as overpopulation, the psychology of insomnia, medical
experiments, etc.

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dhughes
This place is a disaster waiting to happen.

On reddit someone from Caracas posted pictures of a different skyscraper on
fire for days because the fire department didn't have the equipment to fight
it. It was a business building but I can only imagine what would happen to a
building full of families and no water for fire system sprinklers.

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cjfont
This tower draws interest because of its unusual case of being a skyscraper
exclusively inhabited by squatters, but in the end it is really nothing more
than a vertical shantytown, much like the millions that are sprawled out over
the rest of Caracas and in other major South American cities like Rio. I
assume daily life for the unfortunate people living in the tower isn't much
different than the rest of the population living on or below the poverty line.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Well for one they've got a million dollar view.

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morpher
The video is definitely worth watching. However, it feels like its only an
introduction. For a building housing 2500 people, it seemed surprisingly
empty. I can only assume that most of the adults were elsewhere trying to earn
a living. I'd love to see more footage or read more interviews.

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doktrin
This feels like a very surface-area preview. They didn't have too much footage
of the interior, and didn't really have a chance to dive deep on any of the
interior mechanisms of the tower.

For instance, they mention an economy and internal policing - but don't
elaborate on either. Who are authority figures inside the tower? What kind of
ad-hoc governance do the residents have? As another comment mentioned - how
are the basic utilities actually handled?

All of these are unanswered questions, and I would really want to learn more
before I take at face value the 3 interviewed residents statements that
everything is sunshine and roses inside the tower. There's no way they were
going to give _negative_ testimony, after all.

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kalleboo
Another interesting slum-settlement was the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City
in Hong Kong
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City)

~~~
onosendai
You don't find too many details about Kowloon floating around, which is a
shame since it was quite a unique settlement.

The best source of information about it is probably a photo essay called "City
of Darkness" ([http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-
Walled/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-
Walled/dp/1873200137)) which is frequently out of print, but which I _highly_
recommend if you can snag a copy. It's a fascinating historical document in
its own right, and one of the few reliable sources of information about the
walled city, which is why it's referenced so heavily in the Wikipedia article.

~~~
cma
This is the best footage I've seen. It has interviews, commentary, and english
subtitles.

[http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/12/20/video-kowloon-
wal...](http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/12/20/video-kowloon-walled-city-
documentary/)

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brianbreslin
Vice has really been killing it lately with their reporting. This story though
was covered by mainstream press 3-4 years ago.

~~~
vanderZwan
The linked movie was released 1st of August 2013, so if nothing else it's a
recent view into what's going on.

~~~
brianbreslin
Here is the NYTimes coverage from 2011:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/americas/01venezuela...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/americas/01venezuela.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

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jzwinck
I thought this was going to be about the Parque Central East Tower that burned
in 2004
([http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/741](http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/741)).
As far as I know that one still hasn't been fully repaired, but I guess no one
lives in it (yet).

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seivan
Reminds me of Judge Dredd.

~~~
damian2000
Or Raid: Redemption.

~~~
fsckin
This is what I thought of. Incredible stunts.

------
bluedino
The people they interviewed didn't look like they were terribly down on their
luck. One couple just looked like young couple who might have moved in there
because it's trendy, and the older guy looked like he lived there just because
it was cheap. Remodeling the place, watching football on TV...

They really don't seem like the poorer people you could see from the shots
outside the building.

I'd like to see them talking to people who gave the place the reputation it
has. Is there some 'rule' there, like _don 't go above the 20th floor_ to stay
in the 'good' part of the building?

~~~
Theodores
Television sets and clothing is 'empty gifts of capitalism', not necessarily
expensive. Take a look at benefit claimants in the UK - typically they have a
bigger TV than you do and clothes with 'better' branding than you do.

Once you take market rate prices for housing out of the work-bills equation
you find 'empty gifts of capitalism' can be afforded.

I would say that as well as 'cheap' being a reason to live there, there is
also the matter of community. You are probably better able to borrow a cup of
sugar from your neighbours there than if you lived in a gated community.
People are much more likely to know each other's business so there is security
that guns/police/CCTV can't buy.

So long as you don't mind the stairs and fire hazards (which can't be that
much worse than the Twin Towers), all is good.

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Sami_Lehtinen
This is also interesting building, which is (currently?) occupied by slum
people.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_City)

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ChuckMcM
Youtube direct link:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1p9jlQUW0k)

So the Broad Group continues to claim [1] they are going to build their 225
story building in 3 months. (well erect it would be more accurate). One
wonders if this sort of construction would be a better solution than occupying
partially constructed buildings.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City)

~~~
ToothlessJake
It took me a moment to figure out why your comment didn't read right, then it
clicked.

You are wondering if building more towers would be a solution for people, due
to high housing costs, occupying a tower that never finished construction.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sorry yes, there are two economic outcomes, one being an unproductive asset
(the abandoned building, and although one of the tenants mentioned paying
'rent' it was entirely unclear who was collecting the rent and by what right
other than perhaps force majeur) and the other being housing built which is
economically viable to rent 'legally' and thus providing some GDP in the city.

Creating affordable housing allows the capture of that economic activity which
can be used to enhance and support public services supporting people using it.

------
newsmaster
Well I hope the community pulls it off and makes it the most awesome place to
live in Caracas, then go on to become a model solution and case study for
future housing, I hope.

~~~
molmalo
Not likely. Most probably, it will end up being something like the White
Elephant, a squattered building at the edge of Buenos Aires [1][2]. It was
going to be the largest hospital in Latin America, but then after the 1955
coup, the construction stopped, the building was abandoned and it was
squattered. It has become a very dangerous place, and even the police and
gendarmery (an intermediate between police and military) are afraid to enter
there. I have worked for a security company that had to place security cameras
there, and the workers had to be protected by gendarmery officials. While they
were installing the cameras, some bullets where shot from windows. Luckily,
nobody was injured.

[1]
[http://www.oddee.com/contrib_17194.aspx](http://www.oddee.com/contrib_17194.aspx)

[2]
[http://www.argentinaindependent.com/socialissues/urbanlife/r...](http://www.argentinaindependent.com/socialissues/urbanlife/reviving-
a-white-elephant/)

PS: Relevant to the second link, the project "Sueños Compartidos" or "shared
dreams" was closed soon after the article was written, because of a high
profile corruption scandal involving the project.

------
hahame
not as bad as it seems. Gathering of people from different slums to a place
with a roof sums it up.

------
e3pi
Incarcerated in monolithic interstitial dreck, that forlorn inquisitive
youngster in a long empty corridor may grow into a seasoned coder to escape
Caracas' concrete war-zone of dread, and this is why here in the states, the
preterites get free roam bugged `Obama Phones', with 250 minutes/month, as one
of Kieth Alexander's many new worries is that lone savvy `Tuttle' in Brazil,
that drones can't even target, and who later retired as 'Jack Burns', ex-
florist, in a pleasant home and family circle of trust, recently augmented by
a suspicious new pothead son in law, who, unbeknownst to Kieth, Tuttle/Burns
has a back story as a NSA-hated CIA field agent to foment global terror to
justify US surveillance agencies ever escalating budgets and security cleared
retirees' revolving-door golden-parachutes. So the NSA, CIA, and FBI uber-
state independent silos all become a patch-quilt of allied targets.

~~~
10098
lmaowtf

~~~
e3pi
Expensive `joke`, I was billed about 8k _.

_ k: karma

