Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Caracas Mayor Juan Barreto presents plans to build 30,000 houses in the city over the next two years

Caracas Daily Journal (Vincent Bevins): Juan Barreto, mayor of Caracas, has presented plans to build thirty thousand houses in the city over the next two years.

Caracas, like the rest of the country, is experiencing a major housing shortage.
He made the announcement during the ceremony in which he handed over 48 newly constructed apartments to its residents in Sol de Avila.

The apartments there were accompanied by a pre-school, sporting facilities, and the house of popular power. Similar plans were promised for 30,000 new houses.

This is an election year and Barreto has been spending heavily this week, including on a series of cultural activities for the week of "Anti-Imperialist Caracas."

Also announced was that the mayor's office program which replaces barrio shacks with "dignified housing" would be redoubled this year. According to official statistics it has benefited 2,500 families so far.

Like Libertador Mayor Freddy Bernal, Barreto has also announced he will continue to transfer resources to the communal councils for autonomous projects.

1 comment:

  1. Todo el poder a los consejos.
    And every new socialist community under construction should have one too, coming out the other side of this process.

    Certainly the first order of socialist business -- besides assuring food security by any means necessary -- is to get the people of Venezuela out of their chronic housing insecurity, where so many live in these "rancho" hovels and barrios slums/ghettos thanx to decades of past capitalist neglect and social theft.

    However I hope that long before Venezuela is filled up with thousands of tract developments which ape 1950's U.S. suburban sprawl (that's the classic, canonical image of "prosperity", right?), popular plans are developed instead, with society-wide input to make better use of new living space thru the construction of something perhaps more along the lines of what the Caracas alcadía is attempting to accomplish here (fotos would be nice. Lots of fotos). And at this higher density too. Those wonderful little PetroCasa "viviendas" being built outside Caracas, in their nice rows looking for all the world like little stucco villas, are a fine start in pulling the citizenry out of capitalist squalor. But giving everybody a "piece of the Rock", California ranch-style, can only be a crash program of the shortest duration -- if it's really socialism which is being built here.

    And so here is a fine project-in-the-making opportunity: to be led/initiated by the likes of e.g. design graduates of the bolivarian universities, et al. -- and anyone and everyone interested in designing/experimenting with exciting new socialist communities and concepts. And this process should very much be controlled, ultimately, as far as each particular project is concerned, at the consejo level when all is said and done: because that's where the people do live after all -- and where the results will be seen, and where people will have to live with them.

    And then there certainly should be a program for recycling the material of these hundreds of thousands of PetroCasa viviendas, once they have outlived their immediate usefulness.

    Let's not get stuck in the 1950s and `60s, with that obsessive and psychotically-selfish concept of prosperity and success. Time to begin thinking about moving on from Socialism 1.0 to Socialism 2.0. And beyond.

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