Horacio Rodríguez Larreta Presents Housing Plan to Restore Middle-Class Homeownership Dream

The candidate for president of Juntos Por el Cambio, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, presented a housing plan with some central axes. In Infopico Radio 99.9 we spoke with Iván Kerr, former Secretary of Housing of the Nation and currently coordinator of the Housing and Habitat plan of the Pensar Foundation, about the plan presented that claims to “give back to the middle class the dream of having their own home.”

“We are in the worst moment of access to housing in the last 30 yearsthe cause is the very high inflation that Argentina suffers from the elimination of mortgage credit, which is the tool that the entire world uses to access their first home: we have zero access to these credits,” Kerr reiterated, and all the pressure “was for the rents with a lousy law”.

“Horacio proposes that we have to recover that basic tool that made the dream of owning a home possible and that can be done by stabilizing the macroeconomic variables and creating a compensating fund so that mortgage loan installments are adjusted by salary: what people can afford,” Kerr continued.

“On the other hand, in Argentina, all real estate developments were made largely with well trusts, that way one buys cheaper; but there is a curiosity: the credit cannot go to the well, it has to go on the finished house. Many countries have already advanced in this and make mortgage loans on the promise of sale or on the mortgage of a future good; then people can agree to start paying for their home from the well, which allows them to buy cheaper and that allows a real estate development that does not exist in Argentina”, explained Iván Kerr and advanced that “within the package of laws for the first 100 days, Horacio proposes these two issues: the creation of a mortgage from the well and the creation of a compensating fund so that mortgage loans are adjusted for salary“.

Another great leg “of this project is working with the urban development of the municipalities. Today in Argentina, of the 2,300 municipalities, very few have an orderly territorial planning to meet the demand. We must work on state land, make it available, change the tender, have urban plans that allow us to anticipate the problem. From the 2010 census to the 2022 census, 50% of the houses that grew were informal, there was neither the presence of social housing from the State, nor houses built by private companies: people managed as best they could”. We must speed up the provincial property records, digitize them, the cadastres must be accessible, we have to make the procedures more flexible, modernize the systems”.

The coordinator of the housing plan explained that “this plan is a housing policy tool for segments of the middle class, who clearly have to be able to pay some installments, many of those families today pay rent. It does not serve the lowest sectors, where attention is provided by other types of programs” “We are going to go back to the experience that we had in the city government (of Buenos Aires) during all these years and that we also developed in ProCreAr in Mauricio Macri’s management of the system by points, in accordance with vulnerability: people will be chosen according to the system that certifies that the one with the most need is the first to be chosen and not by lottery, which guarantees transparency, but does not equality”.

“We are thinking about everything and budgeting for the executions of houses that currently exist, because these works must be finished. But then you have to put macroeconomics in order, you can’t spend more than what you have because it generates a fiscal deficit and translates into inflation, which is the main tax on poverty,” said Kerr, noting that “Horacio proposes mortgage credit as the main dynamizing tool so that the Argentine family can return to dreaming of their own home”.