
Tiny flats taking over Latin America - onetimemanytime
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190703-the-tiny-flats-taking-over-latin-america
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neilv
There have been many times, over student, young professional, research staff,
and startup years, that I would've killed for what was effectively a clean,
safe, peaceful, stable hotel room-sized place of my own.

Living in a high cost of living city (where the opportunity is), when you
can't actually afford basic minimum housing, but manage to swing something
anyway, often means a lot of sacrifices of what should be basics. And your
finances are probably still getting strained, despite the sacrifices.

There've been times that converting a van or class B RV, and shifting it to a
new city parking spot every night, seemed safer and more stable than bottom-
end city apartment situations. I sympathize with and admire the Bay Area
dotcom workers who managed to do something like that, in a recent HN post.

That said, we're seeing things here like new micro-apartment developments
being pitched to relatively affluent new grads, at ridiculously high prices
for what you get, with some lifestyle story. That seems more an investment ROI
solution for the developer, not a housing and social justice solution.

~~~
agent008t
It is amazing to me that slums can even exist in a high cost of living city,
where land is so expensive. You would have thought that given how scarce
(expensive) the land is, it would be used most efficiently, with all buildings
tending to be in top-notch condition and everywhere being fairly tidy and
safe.

Basically, if you are the owner of a slum, it seems like it should make
economic sense to sell the land to someone else as the value of the land would
be higher than the value of the slum.

Why is the market not resulting in what I described?

~~~
0815test
Slums are due to insecure property rights, basically. You can't sell the land
if you don't have anything approaching formal title to it, and for the same
reason you aren't going to invest in high-quality housing or amenities. (Note
that "property rights" need not be understood in a conventional sense! Indeed,
long-term leases are far preferable to simple property in land, precisely
because they do get rid of some residual uncertainty and market friction.)

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stevenjohns
The title doesn't seem to match the contents. It seems like "Tiny flats might
take over Sao Paulo" might be more appropriate.

Personally, as someone who owns a property development company in Latin
America, I can't ever see this becoming a major trend. If it is in fact
becoming popular and not a one-off architectural/engineering/artistic effort,
then it's really just exploitation and profit maximization and not something
that is culturally wanted or a consequence of the local economies.

~~~
barry-cotter
If it becomes popular it is a consequence of the local economies. People may
not want these flats but they want them more than the alternative they
declined to get them. Better, for some, to live in a closet in a desirable
area, than in a more spacious apartment two hours travel from where they
actually want to be.

I’ve lived six to a room in Dublin city centre and had my own room in a house
an hour from it and I’d pick the first over the second again if I was single
and budget constrained. Closet apartments/SROs/dorms/flophouses would be
superior again but if building housing is illegal it won’t be built and the
poor will be unable to live in areas reserved for the middle and upper
classes.

~~~
stevenjohns
I don't think it's directly a consequence of the local economies, moreso a
consequence of bad town planning. Heritage town planning use to allow 3m * 15m
houses with no setback. Many better-planned towns eventually introduced more
complex legislation to stop this. In lots of parts of Latin America they
haven't. Today, in many parts of Colombia, you can take a 150m2 block and
build six (!) floors on it provided you have just 10m frontage.

So instead of expanding outwards, the cities just became a lot denser, and
economics forced up the price up of the land because the land potential is so
high.

What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at
least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the
floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands
that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would basically
see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of money. But its
a necessary evil.

The other angle to this is welfare being given based on the area you live in.
Instead of housing support (in the form of tax and utility cost concessions)
being distributed based on someone's personal financial situation, the means-
test is based on the land classification that the property is built on. The
land classification doesn't change whether the house is old or new, or if you
build an apartment block on it. Which basically forces higher density in areas
with better tax and utility cost concessions - aka poorer areas. In Colombia,
this means that buying land in the highest-class areas costs as much - or in
many cases _less_ \- than middle-class areas. This also introduced an almost
caste-like system where people would only hang out from people from their own
classification and would look down on people in lower classifications.

I appreciate shared-housing is a thing in Dublin (it is in Sydney too, and I
have similar feelings to you about it) but the situation in many parts of
Latin America exists for somewhat different reasons.

~~~
barry-cotter
> What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at
> least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the
> floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands
> that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would
> basically see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of
> money. But its a necessary evil.

What you propose is a giant subsidy to middle class life at the expense of
poor people. This would take land that currently houses poor people and make
that illegal. It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a
certain size. This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to
commute to their work from further away.

The housing support system described is particularly stupid but housing
support doesn’t generally help anyway. The money just ends up in property
holder’s or landowners’ pockets, whether in increased land prices or higher
rental prices. The only way to decrease prices is by increasing supply,
whether of land or housing.

~~~
stevenjohns
> What you propose is a giant subsidy to middle class life at the expense of
> poor people.

The "poor" people are extremely poor to the point that you cannot comprehend.
And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the
current system forces them to. It is _impossible_ for them to move out because
of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged
against them. They have _nothing_. These people are already commuting long
distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos. Here[0] is a
photo of one of those places I took back in March so you understand the extent
of it.

The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal
properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly
devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being
the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.

> This would take land that currently houses poor people and make that
> illegal.

Clearly it's not retroactively applied. Town planning and zoning almost never
is.

> It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a certain
> size.

I mean, I guess? But it also forces properties to have back and front yards,
as well as side access, instead of being 100% concrete built wall-to-wall
through to the footpath.

> This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to commute to their
> work from further away.

I'm not sure how it would do anything else _other_ than help poor(er) people
and allow them to start living inside expanding cities rather than living on
the extreme outskirts.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/b2AKhfJ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/b2AKhfJ.jpg)

~~~
jacobolus
Your photo shows a natural stage of development of most rapidly
industrializing places. (Actually, this is the second stage of development for
most neighborhoods, after a first stage consisting of all temporary structures
with no infrastructure or services whatsoever.)

Shanty towns looked just like this in quickly growing American and European
cities 100–150 years ago. And look like this today throughout Africa, South
and Southeast Asia, Latin America, ...

People living in those conditions are _not_ permanently poor and hopeless.
They are upwardly mobile (albeit from a very low baseline, often as rural
peasants forced off their land by lack of rural economic opportunity), with
neighborhoods improving rapidly, and generally quite a dynamic economy.

Come back and take another photo of precisely the same spot in 25 years and
you will see something dramatically different: decently constructed permanent
structures; proper plumbing, electricity, sanitation, roads; real city
services; and in general an integrated normal city neighborhood as the city
keeps pushing outward.

Many of the kids growing up in those shanty-towns today will be small-business
owners, and plenty of their kids will be highly educated white-collar
professionals.

Observers who try to interpret poor neighborhoods with middle class standards
end up so focused on the apparent discomfort involved that they can’t see the
parts that are ingenious, fascinating, hopeful, and rapidly improving.

~~~
molmalo
Maybe it worked that way in some other countries, but in a lot of places in
Latin America, that is not how it works. Most slums just get more crowded,
larger, and managed by thugs (lately, drug dealing foreign cartels are taking
over) over time.

For example, take a look at Villa 31, a slum near Buenos Aires's downtown, in
1935 [1], around the time it first appeared, and now [2]. After almost a
century, the precarious buildings are just getting higher, and more densely
populated. Several attempts where made to relocate the people along the years,
but having a high percentage of the population being illegal immigrants, it
becomes highly unpopular to just give those people a new apartment, while
there's a housing deficit. Lately, there's been more efforts in providing them
a housing solution, because a judicial ruling forced the government to do it.
But even then, there's no sign of the population in the slum being reduced
(probably because they are replaced by newcomers, mostly illegal immigrants,
that need a "first place to live" close to the downtown).

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Villa_De...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Villa_Desocupaci%C3%B3n_%28Villa_31%29%2C_Buenos_Aires%2C_1935.jpg)

[2]
[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_31#/media/Archivo:Villam...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_31#/media/Archivo:Villamiseria5.JPG)

~~~
jacobolus
> _having a high percentage of the population being illegal immigrants, it
> becomes highly unpopular [...]_

Presumably the great-grandchildren of residents from the 1930s are not still
“illegal immigrants”.

> _probably because they are replaced by newcomers_

Oh... so this is not actually the same people living there. Well what happened
to the families who lived in this place 25, 50, or 80 years ago?

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anonymous5133
I think this idea is brilliant and has a lot of potential to disrupt the
traditional western housing model. I think a lot of young people will
definitely be willing to make the trade off of living in a smaller space to
get ahead in life.

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jscholes
> "People sleep in their apartments, but the rest of the building is part of
> their house too,"

This is the definition of renting a bedroom, not an apartment.

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zoomablemind
> "Our products are for middle class people who don’t have access to housing
> and can’t afford to buy,"

That's quite broad definition of middle-class. I could understand the middle-
class buyers, not so much the dwellers.

Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering
such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm.

~~~
richajak
I think this phenomenon is an obvious sign of incompetent government based on
my experience living and traveling in several countries (not in the same sub-
continent mentioned in the article).

An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper
living place, whether it's meant for single guy or a small family. I like the
approach in one country, where all the apartments must fit certain size, e.g.
80sqm for a family with 2 kids. Even, for low-income income families, they
still have to get at least 50sqm, government will subsidize.

~~~
matz1
Its might not be _for you_ but its a proper living space for me.

I would choose to move to smaller than 4x6m apartment, even though I can
easily afford much larger size. Why? simply because I don't need the extra
space. If I can save couple hundred bucks a month then I'm all for it.

The problem is those apartments is not available in my area, no one is
building it. To me its the fault of the incompetence government and its
regulation.

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barry-cotter
How is making certain types of housing illegal just? If people don’t want the
combination of location and price that’s on offer they’ll go empty. If they do
want them depriving them of the choice is unjust.

Build more housing is the better solution, like Tokyo, but better for it to be
possible for a new grad to live in a shoebox in Manhattan if they want to than
not to have the choice at all.

~~~
neilv
For just one aspect... The city here is allowed to, and does, exercise a lot
of control over what can be built, to serve the common good. If the city then
uses that power to allow a developer to squeeze every last drop of money they
can out of new grads (and others) who are desperate, that wouldn't seem very
just stewardship by the city.

~~~
BurningFrog
> _The city here is allowed to, and does, exercise a lot of control over what
> can be built, to serve the common good_

This is, unfortunately, naive.

The city will use its power to serve the interests of those who hold power in
the city, while of course _saying_ it's for the common good.

Typically, those in power _do_ want higher housing prices, and thus promote a
housing shortage.

The only solution is to not give the city that power.

~~~
S4M
> Typically, those in power don't want higher housing prices, and thus promote
> a housing shortage.

I don't get that, wouldn't a housing shortage bring the prices up?

~~~
barry-cotter
Yes, and those with power are a lot more likely than average to own property.
But “those with power” can be a very broad group. Look at California. People
want their property prices to go up so they ban new residential building
unless it’s only affordable by the rich. You get houses on Palo Alto going for
well over ten times the price a similar house would cost in metro areas that
allow more and denser building.

~~~
asveikau
> You get houses on Palo Alto going for well over ten times the price a
> similar house would cost in metro areas that allow more and denser building

Disagree that dense building is the deciding factor in a 10x difference. The
home prices being higher than other metro areas reflects the strength of the
Bay Area job market. There are plenty of markets less expensive than Palo
Alto, some of them allowing more construction and having good jobs, but there
is no metro area in the United States 10x cheaper than Palo Alto with the same
access to a job market of the same caliber.

Example: Seattle is cheaper, builds more and is a tech hub. But it's not 10x
cheaper, maybe within 2x last I checked a long time ago. To get a 10x
difference you need to sacrifice on another metric, and go to a place with a
less booming economy and fewer jobs.

~~~
barry-cotter
If you build dense enough in an area with a hot job market you’ll still get
large differences in house/apartment prices but you won’t get houses costing
100x plus what they do elsewhere. Pal Alto 1950s ranch homes cost a lot more
than the equivalent in Boise.

If you want to see what building dense can do don’t look at Seattle. Look at
New York City. Brooklyn isn’t Manhattan dense but it’s more affordable. But
NYC’s entire metro area is comparatively dense in the US. People commute from
Jersey City in under an hour. If all of NYC was zoned to allow the level of
density you see in Manhattan prices wouldn’t drop as much as you’d naively
expect because there’d be even more economic activity but they’d drop plenty.
Tokyo has increased ~50% in population over the past thirty years and land and
rent prices have been pretty much flat. That’s what allowing dense building
makes possible.

~~~
asveikau
> Pal Alto 1950s ranch homes cost a lot more than the equivalent in Boise.

This is obvious, but it's also obvious that, with respect, few people want to
live in Boise and if they did, and could make Palo Alto money, housing would
become much more expensive.

> Look at New York City.

A very expensive place, not 10x cheaper than Palo Alto and not Boise. Nothing
you said is news to me or refutes the point.

Yes, these differences can be big, and housing policy affects the number. But
you can't say it's the reason a non job center city is cheap, or claim that
the factor is 10x.

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melling
“ In cities such as Buenos Aires, Bogota and Mexico City, commutes can be up
to three hours.”

Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem?

~~~
jeromegv
Buenos Aires has quite good public transit so I was surprised to read that

~~~
rayiner
Public transit based commutes typically are longer. In downtown DC, you can
often bike faster than the subway though downtown because of all the stops.

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WalterBright
With a common area, they aren't unlike many dorms in college.

