There is a subtle bias introduced into the study of housing in Latin America, because the implicit and explicit standards of judgment derive from the experience of middle-class styles of life. Middle-class North Americans live in spacious houses with good plumbing, heating, and lighting. They expect nothing less for Latin Americans. Both North American advisors and the middle-class técnicos in Latin American bureaucracies measure the “housing gap” by the failure of the poor to acquire the sanitation, services, and elbow room which few in Latin America can afford. Illuminating investigations by John Turner of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies represent one of the few cases in which a scholar has transcended his culture-bound approach. Turner is a leading advocate of self-help housing. It is indicative of the general quality of the monograph under consideration that its author is unfamiliar with—or at least fails to cite— the work of Turner.
Sean M. Elliott maintains that an International Home Loan Bank financed by American savings and loan associations should be established to make “massive housing investment throughout the developing areas” (p. 194). One cannot reject the feeling that such a plan, however it might benefit Latin Americans, is designed mainly to provide a growing use for American capital during periods (such as the past several years) during which the housing construction industry is in the doldrums. Elliott’s presentation of a lengthy and apparently irrelevant table on the growth of American savings and loan associations suggests to this reviewer that his central concern may be with American investors rather than with Latin America’s ill-housed.
Whatever the author’s personal brief, he seems not to have accepted the fundamental fact that even with the best intentions of foreign financiers, the poor of Latin America cannot aspire to housing in the style of the U. S. middle classes. For that reason foreign assistance in this field based on “sound economic principles” will be useful only to the few in Latin America. Continued mobilization of personal effort in housing construction probably offers the best solution for Latin America’s housing problem.
There is little to recommend this book to the readers of HAHR. Perhaps it will be of some use in the Federal Home Loan Bank Board where Elliott is director of the Office of International Home Finance.
