Explore Key Concepts
Why Do We Need a Law for Self-Management?
The Problem
Brazil’s housing deficit affects nearly 8 million households, with a particularly harsh impact on low-income families. Housing is a constitutional right and important for health, education, and economic mobility. Yet the housing crisis is only growing, thanks in part to the increasing commodification of housing and the failure of the government to provide its citizens with their constitutionally guaranteed right to housing.
Click here to learn more about Brazil’s housing deficit and why it happens.
The Solutions
Promote Autogestão and Lei da Autogestão
Autogestão is the collective design, production, and self-management of high-quality, beautiful, and affordable housing by and for residents. It is a proven, scalable solution: in the approximately 100,000 units developed so far, autogestão has produced bigger, higher-quality, more affordable housing for lowest-income populations. Autogestão can scale up further and address Brazil’s housing crisis but needs the passage of stable legislation at the national level to establish permanent programmatic and financial support for self-managed housing.
Enable Opportunities for Collective Property Models in the Bill
Like self-management, collective property is an important tool for providing high-quality, permanently affordable housing for those who need it most. Because it holds property outside of the speculative market, collective property uniquely enables perpetual housing affordability and security for low-income households. It can also act as a low-risk means to build wealth for the pursuit of other opportunities. Enabling collective property in the bill does not mean that all self-management housing must be collective property; rather, it gives entities the option to do so, as well as legitimizes the legal arrangements.
Click here to learn more about what collective property means and why it matters.