Recovering Urban Homes Project

Following the inauguration of the new room at the Concordia Foundation's centre we travelled to La Boca to learn about the Hábitat para la Humanidad Argentina Recovering Homes Project.

There are 87,000 homeless families in Buenos Aires and 100,000 properties that are uninhabited or under utilised.

This statistic has led Hábitat para la Humanidad Argentina to design a project which intends to grant access for low income families to their own housing, by acquiring these unused or under utilised properties through donations and then renovating/rebuilding them.

Hábitat para la Humanidad Argentina has recently bought a building in La Boca in order to get this project off the ground. With a studio-construction company already chosen to manage the project, the only step left is to demolish the existing building and start construction of the new one. This will provide rented accommodation and it would appear that Hábitat para la Humanidad Argentina may be pioneering social housing provision of this type in Buenos Aires. I was surprised that this was the case being so used to the existence of Housing Associations in England and in Scotland.

We saw the exhibition on Boarding Houses in La Boca with pictures, information and the recreation of a 'typical' squatter or informal rental room.

You can help the work that Hábitat para la Humanidad are doing in Argentina by Just Giving.