After nine months in a flood victims' shelter, Daviana Padron now lives in a free apartment, works in a cooperative bakery and her kids attend a new school in the Venezuelan city of Caribia.
A new law which aims to combat rent speculation and protect the rights of tenants and small landlords was passed by Venezuela’s National Assembly on Thursday. The law was based on proposals made by the tenants movement.
The Venezuelan government, together with the private sector and international partners, is finding creative solutions to the nation’s housing deficit, including the construction of new, communal-oriented cities.
This morning the Venezuelan government launched its Census 2011, a month long effort to map out the distribution of people and housing conditions across the Caribbean nation.
Communal councils and socialist brigades will take charge of construction work in the state of Falcón as part of the government’s new housing mission, confirmed Minister of Communal Councils and Social Protection (MPCyPS) Isis Ochoa.
In just under three weeks since its launch, nearly half a million families in five states across Venezuela have answered the national government’s call to register for its massive new public housing program which seeks to build two million new homes by the year 2017.
As part of the solution to the country’s serious housing shortage, the Venezuelan government will take over 210,000 square meters of land as a first step to utilising idle land that belonged to collapsed banks of the 1970s and 1990s.
Alongside its push for affordable and just housing for all, the Venezuelan government has re-launched a social program designed to make important and essential household appliances available to the population at a reduced cost.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday used his standing legislative authority to enact three new laws designed, he said, “to dignify” the living conditions of Venezuela’s urban residents. Each law sets out to address the issues relating to forced evictions, ‘residential workers’ (concierges), and the management of urban property rights.
On a national television programme broadcast live on 30 April 2011, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez launched Venezuela’s new housing mission – “La Gran Misión Vivienda”. The mission's goal for this year is to build 150,000 houses, with this figure increasing to 200,000 in 2012 and to 300,000 every year after that until 2017.
