by Rod Hughes
For the media, it was an irresistible photo opportunity. For the government, it was a prod to get congressmen off the dime to pass two anti-poverty bills.To some humorless Costa Ricans it was just a cheap publicity stunt.
President Oscar Arias’s point man in the government’s plans to alleviate poverty, Housing Minister Fernando spent Tuesday night sleeping over inside a dirt-floored hovel in a San Jose shantytown, after a humble dinner of noodles there. Zumbado noted that some small children are unable to crawl around the house because of unsantiary conditions.
“What do I care when they tell me I’m putting on a show, if a child can crawl a year earlier than if we didn’t do something?” asked the well-heeled minister. “We live separate lives and I don’t think people realize.”
It was not only for the public’s consumption that Zumbado made his gesture. Two bills the president considers important tools against poverty are stalled in the unicameral Legislative Assembly. An estimated 40,000 families live in 400 slums throughout the country, most crammed into nooks in the metropolitan area.
These are divided into two types: Precarios, where squatters invade an area and set up hovels, and tugurios, slums where the people own the land but cannot afford decent housing. They are indistinguishable, clusters of rusty tin and castoff wood shacks that would be uninhabitable were it not for the tropical climate. Still, they are damp and chilly during the rainy season, lacking decent sanitation and, sometimes, running water.
At that, Costa Rica has done more to provide liveable housing than most Latin American nations, administrations vying with each other to grant more land titles and build more publicly-funded homes. The drive began in the administration of President Luis Alberto Monge and continued uninterrupted thereafter. Before this, the country had a severe housing shortage and even middle class rentals were in short supply.
Another sign of growing awareness of the importance of decent housing was the creation of the Housing Ministry. Before this agency, public housing had been provided by INVU, an underfunded agency drowning in a sea of demands it could not hope to meet. Then came Banco de la Vivienda to provide soft loans on long term so the working class could erect humble but adequate concrete block homes on small lots.
(A complete story on Costa Rica’s housing situation will appear Friday, June 1, in The Tico Times, Central America’s leading English-language newspaper.)