99% Invisible - 231- Half a House

Episode Date: October 11, 2016

On the night of February 27th, 2010, a magnitude of 8.8 earthquake hit Constitución, Chile and it was the second biggest that the world had seen in half a century. The quake and the tsunami it produced completely crushed the … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The night of February 27, 2010, Luis Enriquez was getting home from his job at a lumber factory in Constantinio, Chile. Ah, that's from the morning. It was around 3 in the morning. I was watching TV with my wife and a neighbor, and all of a sudden, we started feeling the earth shake. And it was just getting stronger and stronger and stronger to the point that we couldn't stand up.

Producer Sam Greenspan, translating for Luis. Luis was in an earthquake, a bad one. When the shaking finally stopped, he was relieved to see that his wife and their two kids were all fine, but Luis knew they were still in danger. Because in Chile, everyone is taught from childhood that after an earthquake hits, the first thing you do is get to higher ground. Which is what Luis and his family did. They got in their car and they sped to the top of a nearby hill.

From its peak, Luis could look down from the hillside to where the river Maule meant the Pacific Ocean. You could see it happening. You could see it super clearly. You could see the waves coming into the city. The earthquake that Luis is describing was tremendous. a magnitude 8.8, the second biggest at the world had seen in the past 50 years. The Quake and ensuing tsunami completely crushed the seaside town of Constitucione Chile, where Louise lives. By the time it was over, more than 500 people were dead,

and 80% of the city's buildings were ruined. As part of a relief effort, an architecture firm called Elemental was hired to create a master plan of the city's buildings were ruined. As part of a relief effort, an architecture firm called Elemental was hired to create a master plan for the city, which included new housing for people displaced in the disaster. But the structures that Elemental delivered were a radical and somewhat controversial approach

towards housing. They gave people half a house. A picture, a simple two-story home with a pitched roof, They gave people half a house. PICTURE A SIMPLE TWO STORY HOME WITH A PITCHED ROOF A square with a triangle on top, basically how a kid would draw a house. Only in these, there's a wall that runs down the middle, from the peak of the roof, all the way to the ground, splitting the house in half. One side of the house is finished, and the other side. And the other side.

The other side is a completely empty space. There's a roof and an exterior wall, but the rest is just an open void. The architecture firm behind these houses, the Santiago-based Elemental, has made a name for themselves building these half-a-homes, and not just as disaster relief either. Today, Elemental has done about 10 low-income housing projects across Chile, all designed so that the homes would be largely unfinished when the residents moved in. And the response from the architectural community has been immense. In 2016, the firm's founder, Alejandro Arravena, was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the top prize in architecture.

In their jury citation, the Pritzker Architecture Prize said that, quote, Alejandro Arravena epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect, especially in his long-term commitment to tackling the global housing crisis and fighting for a better urban environment for all. This for building disaster victims and other poor people unfinished homes. To understand where these half-built houses came from, you have to understand them as an attempt to solve the problem of global urban migration. Over the past several decades, people the world over have been migrating from the countryside to cities. The draw of the city was creating this problem.

So, the result is squatting. This is George Cotoni, an architect who grew up all around Latin America, mostly in El Salvador. George saw first-hand what happens when a population outgrows its supply of buildings. The housing deficit of San Salvador, the capital, was something about 10,000 units a year and growing. was something about 10,000 units a year and growing. The backlog of people that had no services, no, it was unbelievable. George wanted to help solve this problem, but I was struggling with how to make a house affordable.

In the 1970s, George heard about a new master's program at MIT. A program called Urban Settlement Design in Developing Countries. At MIT, George found a mentor and a professor named John F.C. Turner. So John F.C. Turner, a British urban planner, was spearheading this idea that people can build for themselves. In a 1972 essay called Housing as a Verb, Turner made the case that housing ought not be a static unit that is packaged and just handed over to people.

Rather, housing should be conceived of as an ongoing project wherein residents are co-creators. And from this thesis, Turner helped promote an idea. This idea that was emerging, this sites and services idea. Sites and services, also sometimes called incremental building. It basically means instead of building people completed homes, governments should just build the key parts of a home that people have the hardest time building on their own,

like concrete foundations, insulation, plumbing, electrical wiring. And then get the government to provide services to those sites. Roads, drainage, sores, or pitilotrenes, whatever the case may be. Garbage collection, you've got to route your trucks to this schools. Thus, gradually over time, people start to turn their basic sites into suitable housing, with materials they source themselves on their own terms. What people have to donate of their own is labor, the cost of labor. And the cost of materials to expand. But in the end, they own what they build. It's their investment.

They have the ability. And governments cannot build as well as quickly in a way that makes sense to these households. Since finishing his studies at MIT in the 1970s, George has done these kinds of incremental building projects all over the world, in Latin America, Kenya, Indonesia, and these projects can take different forms. Sometimes it's just giving people a concrete pad with utility hookups. Sometimes it's just giving people a one-room house with a kitchen and bathroom and the expectation that they'll build extra rooms onto it.

It sounds odd, but believe me, it works. These ideas that George Cotoni and his contemporaries at MIT pioneered, that governments can support people building for themselves and then let them own what they build, began to spread through the developing world. And so when the architecture firm Elemental got their first commission to do low income housing in Chile, they took the ideas from incremental housing as points of departure. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't create the idea, actually.

We import that to make something that can be improved by time. This is Juan Ignacio Cereda, one of the principal architects at Elemental. Cereda told me that in 2002, Elemental got a commission to build 100 units of low-income housing in a city in northern Chile called Iquique. And they had to deliver it on a tight budget. $7,500 unit. With only $7,500 allocated per household, the most straightforward and cost-effective way to house all 100 families was to cram everyone

into big block style apartments. When they hear, what about blocks? They said, if you dare to propose a block, we start a hunger strike, because it's the worst thing ever. According to one Ignacio Serra, the community threatened to hunger strike because an apartment block would be extremely limiting.

Sure, they were living in a slum before, but at least they had control over their own space. They could make expansions and adjustments when they wanted to. But with a block style housing project, they'd be confined to a small, static space. Which is worse because you're not able to expand the house. And so what Elmentall came up with were tall, rectangular houses separated by empty space. Each unit was just big enough to meet Chile's minimum standards for low-income housing. And then the residents could, on their own time, however they wanted, expand into the empty space adjacent to their home.

Element Hall spent the early 2000s iterating on this concept, building homes that just met the basic legal requirements for low income housing in Chile, but with room to grow. And then in 2012, after the earthquake in Constitution, Elemental got a commission to help create a new master plan for the city, which included creating a new neighborhood full of incremental buildings. It would be located on one of the tallest hills in the city and would be called Via Verde. Okay, we are on our way up to Via Verde and Constitución. Oh wow, here it is. This is it right here. Wow, it's really big. The same went out to see Via Verde with producer Martina Castro. Yes, we drive around. Yeah. To get to Viva Verde, you drive straight up one of the tallest hills in

Constitution. You pass a traditional looking apartment complex, also built to house people after the 2010 quake. Once you're on top of the hill, you get some just staggering views of the town, the ocean, and the river Maule below. It's like a whole bunch of these little boxes on a hillside. Looking over, that's the river Maule. Viva Verde is made of neat rows of simple two-story houses. Half of each house is identical. Same windows, same color, kind of a farmhouse red.

The other half of each house, though, is completely different. They have different doors, different windows, or pieces of tarp, or windows will go. And in some houses, half the house has nothing there at all. It's just like half the house is missing. And then there are plenty of houses that people built out. When people get their houses, the side that comes pre-built is pretty bare bones. The walls are unpainted sheet rock, and the floors are unfinished concrete and plywood. The kitchen comes with just a sink, no stove, no refrigerator, no cabinets.

The houses are spartan, to say the least, but they are habitable, practical and well insulated. Martina Castro and I spent a couple of days walking around Vio Verde, talking to residents, and it's there that we met Luis and Ríquez, the earthquake survivor we heard from earlier. We're in a radio program in the United States. Can we pass? Yes, we can. When we met him, Luis and his wife were outside,

working on a gravel walkway to their home. Luis invited us in, Martina translates. So when you moved in, what were the most important things that you wanted to do right away? When they moved in, what were the most important things that you wanted to do right away? With help from his wife and his brother who also lives in Viva Verde, the Wies laid concrete on the empty side of the house to make a floor and put up exterior walls and flooring for the second story. None of them had really done construction before, but they had direction from workshops on

building techniques that Elemental helped facilitate. The homes also come with a user manual, with directions for how to expand the house, and expansions can be done with standard-sized building materials. So residents don't have to pay lots of money for a custom cut pieces of lumber. So far, Luis has focused his efforts on just getting the house to be big enough to accommodate his family. And so inside, the walls are still unpainted. The downstairs floors are still just unfinished concrete

and upstairs it's unfinished plywood. Luis knows they've got a long way to go on their home. But he doesn't just see the bare walls and coarse floor. He sees what it all can become. If and when the Enrique's family does have tiling and carpet and paint and baseboard on the walls, it'll be way nicer than anything that they ever could have afforded on their own,

or what they could have normally gotten through state-funded low-income housing programs. And so now, Luis is the owner of a four-bedroom home that keeps out the cold, won't get flooded, and won't fall down in an earthquake. You know, my wife and I, we've had tough lives. So finding out that we were going to be owners of our own house was just incredible. Not everyone I talked to at Viva Verde was enthusiastic about having to build their own home, and some thought elementals contractors

could have done a better job. But for the most part, people there seemed really happy with their homes. Even people who hadn't expanded theirs at all. One resident, a single mom named Camila Hernandez, Rodriguez, hadn't made any additions yet. I can't wait for the new one. Yeah, so of course, you know, one dream.

And you think that you're going to just have everything ready all all at once. And so I wanted to build out the house and everything. But then I just focused on doing small things first because obviously I couldn't do that right away. Most people in Vivaverde are further along with their expansions than Camila. And everyone seems to have some project or another. Some residents have even opted to use their extra space to start businesses, like little stores that sell bread and candy and cell phone minutes.

The feeling I got from residents is that they felt invested in Viva Verde. They like living there and they felt safe. It all kinda made me wonder, why haven't we seen this approach in the US? I don't think this could work in the US. There's a lot of things going on here, which are really innovative,

and there's a lot of things where things go wrong. This is Dr. Jennifer Stoloff, a researcher with the consulting firm, Econometrica. Before that, I was a social science analyst at HUD in the Office of Policy Development and Research for about 14 years. Dr. Stoloff is an expert

at evaluating government programs, particularly those that pertain to housing. She's also an historian of public housing in the US. I told Dr. Stolloff about the V.A. Verde project and send her some pictures, and she says, yeah, it does kind of align with the US ethos of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It is very bootstrappy, it's true.

But it's also very risky. I mean, and I mean in a safety way, not just in a financial way. It is very bootstrappy, it's true, but it's also very risky. I mean, and I mean in a safety way, not just in a financial way. It is both. First off, someone could get hurt building out their house, which means you would have to deal with both a medical and a legal emergency. In the States, you know, there'd be litigation issues, right? I mean, if you were working building your floor or ceiling and you fell down in the states, maybe you would sue the developer.

But for Dr. Stoloff, the biggest hurdle to an incremental building project working in the US isn't a matter of safety or legality. It would be an embarrassment, right? So the United States of America can only build poor people half a house? We'd be ashamed of ourselves. Even though in fact that might end up providing way more people with adequate housing at the end of the day. But we couldn't do it. It's like we'd lose face. Because unlike Chile, the United States does have the money. And perhaps also unlike Chile. We don't like to spend money on poor people. We don't like to spend money on poor people. We think everybody should be able to find their own way out of poverty. And it's just not true, but that is the expectation. And we are not in a scarcity economy, and we could afford to give people an entire house.

But by large, we don't. For the US, it's not a matter of scarcity. It's a matter of values. Elemental, however, has come to see scarcity as a tool. A tool which Juan Ignacio Serra finds vital. I'm sure that in the States, everything have rules and controls, so you don't leave room to all those new things that came up from the letting world.

That obviously comes from disgusting. So if you were doing this project in Constitio Cion and let's just say at the very last minute they go, okay we're going to double your budget. Would you would you then have made everyone full houses? I don't know. That's having to happen. Theoretically, the money wasn't a restraint which you still want to build the way you do. It's a good thing to deliver a whole house, but if you give me the devil the money, I keep the houses at risk, and I improve with all that money, the public space surrounding

the house, that neighborhood. Providing the infrastructure that people can't provide themselves, like parks and libraries and public transit, is at the very root of the sites and services approach. Building half a house might be the best way to make a community whole. 99% invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan with Katie Mingle, Sherefuse, have Kurt Colstead, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me, Roman Mars. Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazda, Delaney Hall, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Austin McCann, Carla Palma, Martina Castro, Dave Humphrey,

Salonpe Bernal, Marcella Espinoza, Ricardo Sugundo Kiero Valdez, Maria Antonieta, Bianchi Diaz, Christian Martinez, and Francesca Moroni. And special thanks to Okikumi, who's chill music. You are listening to right now. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California.

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