Social Housing in Brazil: State and Developers at Work

In the early 2000s, a new market emerged in Brazil: the market for large-scale social housing. Through the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program, the Brazilian state promoted and financed large-scale housing for low-income families for the first time. This was only possible by aligning the incentives of state and private actors. In a 2019 article entitled 'An unprecedented alignment: state, finance, construction and housing production in Brazil since the 2000s', Professor Lucia Shimbo describes this process, and in this episode she tells us more about it. We discuss Brazil in the early 2000s, the changes in real estate dynamics, and the positive and negative consequences of the emergence of this new market for low-income homeownership in the country.