Homeowners clear land for Habitat houses in La Guardia.

Before the House, the Land
Bolivian affiliates seek ways to work with families for whom the security of owning property sometimes seems a faraway notion

By Shala Carlson

On the banks of Santa Cruz’s sluggish Pirai River, in an area officially designated as a nature preserve, 30 squatter families have made their homes in lean-tos and huts composed of discarded plastic advertisement banners, small tree branches bound together with rope, braided palm fronds, and stitched-together rice bags.

These families build their lives on land that is not theirs because they cannot afford to pay increasing rents or purchase precious property. The dirt floors of these houses are swept, flowers and plants in plastic buckets lined up along the unsteady walls. The men work at the nearby river packing sand into trucks, sand that will be used to make bricks to build houses — but not for them.

Santa Cruz is known as the engine that drives Bolivia, a center for the poor country’s struggling business and industry. Population growth is estimated to be 7 percent annually. As the city grows, available land gets harder to come by and ever more expensive. Families all along the economic spectrum find themselves struggling to acquire this crucial foundation on which homeownership depends. And so, in addition to new construction with families that already own land, Habitat Santa Cruz is looking for ways to help other families with this all-important first step.

Indeed, affiliates across Bolivia — including rural locations like the Maria Auxiliadora and Parotani communities outside metropolitan Cochabamba — have introduced help with land purchase, titling and documentation as the first phase of home ownership. As with so many locations throughout the developing world, land ownership here can be a complex tangle of bureaucratic requirements, issues and policies in transition, and sometimes unclear chains of possession. Habitat representatives and future homeowners navigate the complicated situation hand in hand.

Teresa Jare has lived in the Pirai River squatter community for 11 years. Her family used to live in the Bolivian countryside, working on a farm. Santa Cruz held more promise for her five children, she says, a better future than the subsistence farming she had always known. “I came,” she explains, “to have a better life here."

Instead, the family fought to make ends meet from the very beginning and wound up living in the Pirai River community without basic services in a series of shelters they constructed themselves. Residents must carry in potable water or use the rainwater that pools at the preserve’s entrance. The seasonal swarms of mosquitoes cause health problems, and the Jare family’s makeshift structures are drafty and cold. “Our bodies get used to it,” says Teresa, who works as a caregiver for an elderly resident in a nearby neighborhood. What they don’t get used to, she says, is the constant fear that the government will ask them to leave at any moment.

Staff members from Habitat Santa Cruz have been visiting the Pirai community for a year, meeting the families and assessing their individual situations. Habitat hopes to raise enough funds to extend small credits to some of them toward the purchase of land elsewhere in the metro area. “They simply can’t afford the current model of $4,000 or more,” says Habitat’s Lizbeth Moscoso Bolivar. “We can’t give them a problem; we need to give them a solution. So we are beginning to talk about creating a strategy for working with these families.”


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