The title of this work is misleading. Based on field research, the text deals only with low-rent and “self-help” housing in three capitals: Mexico, Santiago de Chile, and Caracas. This comparative, in-depth perspective, however, achieves the title’s implied goal, in that the three cities studied have made distinctive responses to the problem of the shortage of low-cost housing.
The study’s general objective is to show how misguided government policies have ruined the rental market by controlling rents and protecting tenants at the expense of owners. Nevertheless, the author sees renting (or sharing, as he encountered it in Chile) as the most feasible solution, given that even “self-help” housing is getting to be too expensive and that the most convenient locations have been underutilized by one- and two-story houses. Even in the consolidated settlements, the present housing could be expanded for rental purposes if a more propitious environment existed for renting as opposed to buying.
The study analyzes the differing circumstances—political, economic, or geographic—that affect the development of “self-help” housing in each of the three cities, and presents the results of surveys conducted in different types of lower-class housing areas. Although it is clear why the particular survey areas were chosen, it is not clear how the persons interviewed in those settlements were selected, or what kind of distortion was introduced by interviewing approximately equal numbers of owners and tenants when the reader is given to understand that ownership is the norm, not tenancy. Nor is it specified whether the landlords were a group apart or simply some of the owners who also rented.
But these are minor details in what was undoubtedly an extensive undertaking, with its concomitant difficulties of organizing and coordinating three separate local survey teams. Two of those teams have published separate individual studies, which permit a fuller presentation of the data collected and the incorporation of other data that did not fit into the parameters of this study.
In all, this is a fascinating book, and I suspect that it will be considered a real find by history students of the twenty-first century who try to recreate the past. It will stand as testimony to one of the most disheartening problems of our times: the lack of a place to call home.
