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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
[2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_31#/media/Archivo:Villam...
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?
The low economic areas grow very fast due to an influx of more poor people, but they don't develop much over time. If anything they tend to degrade due to extremely poor service delivery etc.
There are people living 12 to a room on the first floor of my apartment block, probably 24 to an apartment. In Shanghai good construction jobs have dorms on site, bad ones they sleep on the floor or on the street in summer. I have a reasonable idea of what poverty looks like in middle income countries.
> And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to.
No, it doesn’t. It constrains their choices, all of which may be terrible but it doesn’t force them to. They’re where they are because either they or their parents moved to the city because the city was better. Making building densely illegal forces them to live far from where they work. People choose some combination of price, density and location. Removing choices rarely makes people more free.
> It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them.
If the cities are that bad why don’t they move to the country? Unskilled agricultural labour doesn’t pay much but starvation is not common in Latin America outside Venezuela.
> They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos.
And if planning laws made building densely illegal they’d still live there but there’d be no prospect of moving closer to where they work. Sprawl would have been legislated in place of density. The middle class would have nice places to live where there could have been housing for those less fortunate.
> 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.
If there is demand it will be supplied or it won’t. If it’s not supplied the people who don’t get it will be those with least resources. If 100,000 people demand housing and there’s only legal housing for 50,000 the other half will go unhoused or live somewhere illegally. Restricting supply will not change this.
How can not building housing possibly help the poor? How can building less housing possibly help the poor? How can forcing people to live far from where they want to live help them?
Can you give a couple of examples of the towns that have such legislation and low housing prices, despite having strong demand to live there?
But then, if the land was so much more expensive in the city, people would just move to the outskirts where land is so much cheaper. Land is always going to be more valuable in the middle of a city so it makes sense to make best use of it.
What you suggest is a recipe for urban sprawl.
I would use something like this for sure in other countries, like London.
Instead of having to go into town every day, go in Monday and come out Friday.