National Day of Housing: Brazil has 11.4 million persons living in slums
August 21, 2017 09h00 AM | Last Updated: September 04, 2017 09h21 AM
Glens, invasions, stilt houses, communities, slums... Several are the names used throughout Brazil to designate the disorderly occupations that spread out in the Brazilian cities. A number of governmental initiatives have been adopted to solve this social problem, like the National Housing Bank - BNH, created by the military regime on August 21, 1964 and, more recently, the My Home My Life program, launched in 2009 during the Lula administration and maintained by the Dilma Rousseff administration. Although extinct, the creation of the BNH 53 years ago originated the National Day of Housing, which emphasizes the importance of the right to housing.
According to the IBGE´s 2010 Census, about 11.4 million persons were living in slums, and about 12.2% of them (or 1.4 million) were in Rio de Janeiro. Considering only the population of this city, about 22.2% of the residents, or nearly one in five, were living in slums. Still in 2010, however, Belém was the Brazilian capital with the highest proportion of persons living in disorderly occupations: 54.5%, or more than half the population. Salvador (33.1%), São Luís (23.0%), Recife (22.9%) and Rio de Janeiro (22.2%) came next.
As it goes to every household in Brazil, the IBGE census has detailed information on slums – which are named subnormal agglomerates. Nevertheless, this operation is carried out once every ten years. The National Household Sample Survey - PNAD has annual information on basic sanitation and adequacy of dwellings. The detailing of these data reaches the level of the 27 Brazilian states.
According to PNAD 2015, about 72.5% of the urban households counted on the three basic sanitation services: connection to sewage systems, waste collection and piped water. This means that nearly 18.7 million urban households did not count on at least one of the three services.
According to PNAD, the regional distribution of the sanitation services is quite unequal. Only 23.6% of the urban households counted on the three services in the North Region, while this percentage hit 93.1% in the Southeast. Amapá (3.7%), Piauí (11.9%) and Rondônia (13.2%) were the three Brazilian states with the lowest proportions of urban households accessing the three basic sanitation services. São Paulo (94.8%), the Federal District (90.4%) and Minas Gerais (89.7%) were on the opposite side.
Text: Luiz Bello
Image: Patrick Marins / Wikipedia
