Here is another exciting intern experience in Bolivia.
So I’ve been here for almost four months now (!!!), I spend the bulk of my time thinking, reading, writing, and talking about housing issues in La Paz, and I haven’t really told you anything about them. The first couple of months of my internship were devoted to research to support my boss’s report on women and housing in Latin America to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. It was a good introduction to the issues I guess, but it was a huge amount of not very efficiently assigned work and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Now most of my time is spent on my second major project, a diagnostic of the situation of women and housing in the municipality of La Paz, and I love it. It involves reviewing statistics, primary and secondary sources, as well as running focus groups with women in each of the macrodistricts of the city; the past few weeks have been extremely busy with the focus groups but it has been great, and I’m actually starting to feel like I know what I’m talking about!
So here’s the deal with housing in La Paz… Sorry if some of the language is a bit awkward by the way, I normally write about this stuff in Spanish so I’m not very familiar with some of the English terms or phrases.
One problem is land: there isn’t enough. La Paz is a valley, so the boundaries of the city are limited. People can go live in El Alto, but the climate is colder and there are fewer economic/job opportunities; in general the access to basic services is worse as well. El Alto is now more populous than La Paz, but many La Paz dwellers do not like the idea of moving to El Alto. Thus, La Paz has become extremely densely populated, and people live on unsafe land.
Houses houses everywhere…
It is estimated that about 70 percent of the land in the city is not fit for construction. (No, not a typo.) Some of that land could be made safe for construction with various technical interventions that I don’t understand, and some of it cannot. However, in very few cases have those interventions happened, and people live pretty much everywhere. Also, between 80 and 85 percent of the housing solutions constructed each year in La Paz are self-constructed (is that a word?) by the population. They often do not benefit from any technical assistance, and are totally unaware of building norms.
I’m no architect, but this does not seem ideal
Illegally built, obviously
This means that the risks of landslides and other natural disasters are huge; these tend to happen during the rainy season. The risks are already high because of the nature of the land, but are made worse by dense population, inadequate sanitation connections that basically dump dirty water down hills (eroding the very land that the houses are built on), and constructions that violate building norms (like five-story houses where only two stories are permitted). I have been told that approximately 400 dwellings are destroyed by landslides and other disasters in La Paz each year. Last February there was a “mega-landslide” that destroyed over 1500 houses.
The white tubes are the sewage system (click on the picture to see a bigger version)
Many-storied buildings
All of this used to be houses more or less like the above picture (site of mega-landslide, mostly cleaned up by now)
People still live in the next house over
Why do people build their houses on this land? Partially because they aren’t properly informed of the risks, partially because that is what they can afford, and partially because there isn’t much else available. The fact that so much housing in La Paz is self-constructed is a testament to the resourcefulness of the population, but more support is needed from the city to make sure that families are living in adequate conditions.
Insufficient access to basic public services is another problem. Many homes do not have access to potable water or sanitation facilities. (Access to electricity tends to be a bit better.) This leads to solutions like the makeshift sewage systems pictured above, and the laundry facilities pictured below, in one of La Paz’s over 300 rivers (the term river is used pretty loosely…). I could go on and on about the ways in which the lack of services disproportionately affects women, but suffice it to say that women remain almost entirely responsible for household chores in most cases, whether or not they work outside the home as well, and most cannot afford help. (We had permission to visit and take pictures at the site below.)
Laundry
Roads are also a problem; this is a total disaster during the rainy season
Clearly unsafe, especially at night with no light
Speaking of work, women are often economically dependent on their husbands, who prefer that they stay home to take care of the house and the family; when they do work, they receive lower salaries and are more likely to be in the informal economy. There is open discrimination against women in the formal workplace; employers are reluctant to hire women because of their childrearing responsibilities, and once a woman is past the age of 30, it is even harder to get hired because employers essentially advertise for cute young chicks. The lack of stable employment and documentation like pay slips means that it is literally impossible for women to get any kind of financing to pay for a house (or anything else).
There are so many other things that I could write about, like the lack of legal property titles (especially among women), overcrowding, insufficient public transport, crime and insecurity, the challenges of renting instead of owning, the individual stories of the women I’ve talked to… but I think I’ll have to leave it at this for now!
By: Kristen McNeill, Rooftops Canada past intern, Bolivia
