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Comment by geoka9 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

Wow, do you have pictures or videos? how do you think, can WE improve their situation, politically, technically and technologically?

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Such sad irony, that a tower build for Banks, that theoretically exist to serve people, now actually and really serves people, directly. Sad, because those banks and the politicians running that government were the cause for their pain.

Unfortunately I hear about a lot of corruption and that it's normality in Brazil from a friend who moved from Norway to Brazil. And I with my idealogical green glasses would not live for long, if I were to protest against the Government for hot-pots like the Rainforest, according to him and other Brazillians.

Yes, lots of photos and videos. We are working on a 15 min story for TV in Australia.

Talking with the Caracas locals (not living in the tower) it is seen as a bit of an embarrassment. The government there has no good solution for housing, so the people took it into their own hands.

Some of the apartments are amazing. $1 million+ views but without proper fitouts or running water.

can you explain the context? my immediate reaction is that this sounds disturbingly like "poverty porn" for tourists (something i started thinking about while watching the original video).

We were filming a story for TV in Australia. It really is an amazing place full of industry.

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.

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

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.

In places like this at the edge of even the developing world, labor is effectively free, the materials you'd need for a block and tackle aren't.

It was possible to pay a motorbike taxi driver to take you up to the top of the car park. That saves about 10 storeys of walking. We did not though as we found lots of interesting shops, factories and people in the first 10 storeys.

Normally in a slum, especially a squat, formal utilities don't exist and you either tap in illegally, or use alternatives...like a generator or stove. Water is brought up in buckets and waste is brought down in same. In this case, I bet they are just tapped in illegally, perhaps through bribes.

"Normally", where?

In the Netherlands (admittedly a place with few slums, if any), it's completely common for squatters to smply sign up and pay for electricity, internet, TV, running water (assuming the squatted building is hooked up to these services already). The services companies don't care who uses the services as long as the bills are paid.

Normally like the vast majority of slums in the world? Most aren't build in areas that were planned out and had infrastructure run so its not like you could call up the water company and have them bill you, there's simply no infrastructure. At least this is my understanding of slums in countries such as Brazil, India and similar where the neighborhood has grown organically.

Ah, but this is a commercial building, just unfinished, in the downtown core. They had to have valid permits, and utility hookups, if they were planning at all to finish the building and rent it to people.

And that's why the Netherlands is still considered "first world"

Let me explain how they do it in Brazil. Someone with a long pole shuts down a switch in the utilities pole. Then climb it and wire their house to it, no meters.

In the USA you just use automotive jumper cables to connect to your neighbors service.

and they call it a "gato" (literally, cat). There's "gato de luz" for electricity, "gato-net" for Internet...

This is what it starts to look like (at least in the slums) http://i.imgur.com/vmjmJmp.jpg

I remember noticing that it was common practice to steal electricity when I was in India about four years ago. I also work with an Indian who backed this up.

I decided to check up on the statistics when I read this comment. It seems like 32% is stolen nationwide, making it the highest world-wide [1], with reports of 42% in New Delhi [2].

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-31/world-s-greatest-po...

[2]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4802248.stm

You are right. Also, they manage to pay for DirecTV service. You would be amazed at the number of satellite TV antennas in all the slums in Caracas.

This is true for most of the slums were most people don't pay for electricity or water. But I had a teacher that worked in Electricidad de Caracas that said that it was a point of honor for residents of these slums to actually get a power meter. She said they saw it as something that set them. Apart from the rest of the residents.

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