Brazil: New Houses for Solano Trindade I Novas

Support to build houses for families affected by COVID-19 pandemic!

In 2019, inhabitants of the Solano Trindade squat – located in Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and organized by the National Movement for Housing Struggle (MNLM) – with technical assistance from research groups of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro began the renovation works on one of the existing buildings (abandoned for over 20 years). These renovation aimed at building 12 new houses for families living in precarious conditions in the region.

The project foresaw sustainable construction techniques, such as the ecological bricks (BTC) and a sanitation system based on Evapotranspiration Basins, which promote not only other ways of thinking about the relationship between social housing and the environment, but also provide a training and education process for dwellers, students and technicians involved.

This construction was possible from the budget of a Parliamentary Amendment (by federal deputy Chico Alencar, approved in 2017 for the project: “Education and the City: The collective construction of a popular neighborhood” to be implemented by UFRJ through the José Bonifácio University Foundation) and the objective was that they could be completed in 2020.
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Netherlands: The current housing crisis and the repression of squatting

The vacancy crunch: The current housing crisis in the Netherlands and the repression of squatting

Recently, an opportunity to discuss the current housing crisis in the Netherlands was wasted. The government published a report evaluating a law realised in October 2010 which both criminalised squatting and suggested a few paltry measures to combat building vacancy (see “From Convicting to Condoning: Evaluation of the Squatting and Vacancy Act” [Dutch]). The report received a few mentions in the media but was accompanied by no real analysis. Whilst the Minister for Safety and Justice writes in a letter to Parliament that “this assessment does not require policy changes,” a careful look at the statistics produced by the report instead indicates that much more could be done (see “Presentation of report evaluating the Squatting and Vacancy Act” [Dutch]). The number of people needing to be housed is increasing, and the best way to solve this problem is to liberate the empty building stock, putting it back into use through both legislative measures and squatting.
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