When I was in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2019, my program met at the entrance to the Retiro train station. The program leaders had a clear message for the group: Be careful, for Buenos Aires’ largest slum, Villa 31, lay just north of the threshold.
Every city has its own name for slums: The equivalent to Caracas’ rancho is Buenos Aires’ villa miseria, or villa for short. There are more than 1,000 villas within the borders of Buenos Aires proper, altogether housing more than 1.4 million people. Even so, less than 10% of villa residents have running water, and less than 5% have access to the sewer system. More than 40,000 residents live in Villa 31 itself, located near the Rio de la Plata and downtown Buenos Aires.
In 2016, the municipal government of Buenos Aires formed the Department of Social and Urban Integration (SISU) intending to wholly revitalize the slum and integrate it with the rest of Buenos Aires. This would mean making it an official neighborhood instead of an informal slum, expanding public transit networks to include the slum and improving housing quality to broader standards. But residents of Villa 31 soon balked at the plans, arguing that the government had not consulted them, the builders had constructed new dwellings substandardly, and the government truly desired to gentrify the villa, pushing them out of their homes.
Villa 31’s urbanization plans have not yet failed, especially not in the way that the plans for the “January 23” superblocks in Caracas failed. At the same time, though, the way that the government has stumbled through its plans to incorporate Villa 31 into Buenos Aires shows that such political incorporation must center voices from the communities that it purports to help.
Ignoring Community Concerns
In 2016, soon after the SISU came into being, it published the Integral Urban Plan (PUI) detailing the changes it wished to implement in Villa 31. Supported by $170 million in financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, the PUI sought to reintroduce basic infrastructure by improving roads, the water and sanitation system, and access to electricity while building new housing for shanty town residents and giving residents formal title to their land. This project also involved rerouting the Illia highway, which had bisected the community, and turning the former highway into a park à la New York City’s High Line.
However, these ambitious plans resulted in numerous complaints. In particular, those who moved into new apartments in an area within Villa 31 known as “The Container” complained that their new apartments had many deficiencies ranging from frequent blackouts to poorly designed kitchens and deficient sewage systems. And yet, only a handful of families even got to experience new accommodations: By 2018, the government had moved only around 40 families to new housing, despite more than 40,000 residents living in Villa 31 at the time.
Villa 31 residents also complained that the government failed to consult them in urbanization projects. In particular, residents expected that formal integration into Buenos Aires’ sewage and electrical systems would force them to pay for utilities that they could not afford. Similarly, they worried about paying high rents for the substandard government-provided housing. Finally, many residents expressed concern that the new construction built without resident consultation would force them to give up their informal businesses formerly operated out of slum housing. If residents lost the space to operate their businesses, they would lose their livelihoods.
Local press outlets also feared that relocation plans intended to push gentrification in the area. Since Villa 31 is sandwiched between the Rio de la Plata and Buenos Aires’ downtown, the lands that slum residents vacated could fetch a pretty penny at auction. In particular, leftist media outlet Radio Grafica speculated that real estate groups would quickly snap up these “valuable lands” at a low cost, with an end result that those with “economic power would displace the [current] population with low economic means.”
Indeed, a similar concern about misuse of economic power had come to a head a year and a half earlier. In November 2018, the Inter-American Development Bank announced that it would build a new headquarters in Buenos Aires which would take the form of a bridge linking Villa 31 and Recoleta, a fashionable Buenos Aires neighborhood. Afterward, the community reacted with outrage since the government chose to spend money on a project that would benefit an international organization and not the community itself. As one Villa 31 organizing committee put it, the bridge was a slap in the face because it was only a “governmental method of unilaterally advancing without consulting the neighborhood.” The community members would doubtless have chosen to improve infrastructure that actually benefited them, such as installing running water.
Residents directed their anger at the lack of consultation towards the incumbent mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodriguez Larreta. In the 2019 mayoral elections, Larreta lost Villa 31 by more than 30 points in 2019 elections even as he won reelection by a fairly large margin citywide. For context, Larreta only lost Villa 31 by four points in his 2015 election victory. “If you want to understand the electoral result, we would tell Larreta that we don’t want alms here,” said Hector Guanco, a community organizer. “We want to discuss legitimately where we’re going to live.” In short, Larreta’s poor showing within Villa 31 itself showed that ignoring residents’ concerns had electoral and political consequences.
The Impact of the Pandemic
The pandemic has only exacerbated the dissatisfaction of Villa 31 residents towards the city of Buenos Aires. Although slum living presented its own pandemic-related challenges, the slum spent a whole twelve days in May 2020 without running water. “We celebrate the necessary prevention measures that were made regarding the pandemic, but in our neighborhoods, [the lack of water] is making it impossible to follow those norms,” a Villa 31 resident told Infobae. Indeed, Villa 31 was one of the neighborhoods that the pandemic hit hardest in Buenos Aires, with more than seven times the number of cases in Buenos Aires’ next-hardest hit villa.
In particular, the story of Ramona Medina turned public opinion in Villa 31 even further against the government. Medina’s daughter has two rare conditions that render her unable to eat, speak or breathe without oxygen, meaning that Medina’s family urgently needed access to utilities and water. As a result, Medina spoke up about the water shortage in the slum and the government’s delays in relocating the family to more adequate housing. In a cruel twist of fate, however, Medina died of COVID-19 several days after her impassioned protests.
As a local community publication wrote, Medina’s family “intensified their complaint in 2018, when they should have moved. They intensified it even more when social distancing was declared. They intensified it even more when they were left without a drop of water in the faucet. But a response never came, housing never came, water never came. Coronavirus did.” Medina’s death spawned several community protests demanding the government punish those responsible. The fact that the government had ignored Medina’s pleas rankled the community the most; if the government had responded in a timely manner, it would have likely received less community outrage.
After the Medina scandal, the government took another hit when it reduced the budget available for the urbanization project by 2.4 billion pesos ($26.4 million). Of course, the news that the government had also paid consultants millions of dollars to help move residents out further enraged Villa 31 residents, especially while the villa experienced continued water shortages. It appeared to community residents that the government prioritized moving them out of their homes over actually supplying basic necessities. Of course, consulting community residents themselves instead of outside consultants would have resolved many community complaints (and provided fiscal benefits for the government).
The story of Villa 31 in Buenos Aires is not the clear-cut story of Caracas, where urban residents’ political power forced a dictator to leave the country. However, it does send another message: Slum dwellers still can inflict political consequences if governments do not listen to their concerns, whether impacting politicians at the ballot box or governments in the court of public opinion. City governments ignore residents at their own peril.
Image Credit: “Villamiseria4.jpg” by Aleposta is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
