Dignified, affordable housing for working people provided by the government with constitutional guarantees. Leftists in the west should take note.
By Michael Laxer
After decades of a failed, neo-liberal Mexican national housing strategy that has led to 650,000 houses built during the right-wing presidencies of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) being abandoned, the outgoing administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is proposing a radical new approach.
As part of a package of 20 proposed constitutional reforms he sent to the Mexican congress in February, AMLO is suggesting a fundamental shift that would include a massive government affordable housing construction plan, rental units geared to income, the accumulation of rent towards eventual ownership and a guaranteed right to adequate housing.
The initiative would transform INFONAVIT (Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers), the government housing low rate mortgage broker since 1972, into a basically different kind of animal becoming instead a housing builder directly, an important change.
Largely unnoticed, of course, in the western capitalist press, this approach would be wildly better than the literally do-nothing housing “strategy” of the governments of Canada and the US and shows how the admittedly reformist left Morena party is still light years ahead of “social democratic” formations like Canada’s NDP on certain points.
The key points of the new housing program would be:
Scale of Construction:
The government aims to build 500,000 units of public housing in the first year. This represents a substantial effort to address housing needs.
These housing units will be available to citizens who require affordable accommodation.
Rent-Geared-to-Income:
The public housing will follow a “rent-geared-to-income” model. This means that tenants will pay no more than 30% of their salary for rent.
This approach ensures that housing remains affordable and accessible to a wide range of income levels.
Accumulated Rent Towards Ownership:
After renting for 10 years, tenants will have the opportunity to use the accumulated rent payments toward purchasing the housing unit.
This provision encourages long-term stability and empowers renters to eventually become homeowners.
Guaranteed Right to Adequate Housing:
Citizens will be guaranteed the right to adequate, comfortable, and hygienic housing.
This commitment emphasizes the importance of dignified living conditions for all residents.
This final point is important as, according to the newspaper El País, the houses built under previous administrations financed by INFONAVIT “had something in common: they were tiny and fragile, and were located on the peripheries, often in areas without water, electricity and electricity services, hours away from the cities.”
So, in other words, they were substandard from the start.
Dignified, affordable housing for working people provided by the government with constitutional guarantees. Leftists in the west — and especially in the rest of North America — should take note.
Source: https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/looking-at-amlo-s-radical-new-housing-plan-for-mexico