“The global economic structure has failed us,” said Miguel Robles-Durán, architect and professor at The New School in New York and co-founder of the transnational consultancy Urban Front, this Thursday at the forum Fair Housing and Shared Prosperity organized by Espacio Cultural Infonavit, Urban Front and EL PAÍS. Robles-Durán has insisted that it is possible to build structures of government and administration of resources that do not act to the detriment of the most vulnerable: “We have to start with the premise that this global structure has failed us dramatically, and I am referring to the fact that, for example, from 2012 to 2022 real housing prices in advanced economies increased by 39% […] and salaries in the same period have risen by 1.8%, which is absolutely ridiculous,” he said.
The professor at The New School in New York has reviewed his own personal history, and how 20 years ago when he left his native country, Mexico, he considered himself an exile for various reasons. The academic explained that two decades ago he observed in the country an “overly negative” image in how projects that directly impacted people’s lives were being carried out, including the push that was being given to urbanization with very little interest in promoting progressive policies or social and environmental justice.
Since the current president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum took office, but then as head of the capital’s government, Urban Front, the organization that Robles-Durán represents, began to see some changes in the authorities’ willingness to work in other ways. “We have learned a lot since we started working. It has been very exciting to work with this government,” she said.
The architect has also made several demonstrations with updated data on what he considers a serious global crisis in access to housing, from which Mexico is not exempt. For example, in the main cities of the world, more than 40% of tenants spend more than a third of their income to be able to pay for their housing. “One thing is the theoretical structure and another is how to achieve a serious materialization,” he says.
From the learning and experience of Urban Front, the academic has released information that demonstrates the imbalance in this industry, and that it is part of the basic needs of human beings, for example, in the world more than 150 million people live without a home, that is, they do not have a roof over their heads. Something contradictory, he has pointed out, is that there are currently more than 250 million empty houses in the world, and all or most of them are speculative investments. “What are we doing and why do we continue going in that direction?” he asked. In addition, more than 100 million people live in slums.
Robles-Durán has attacked real estate speculation and the power that these types of funds are having and will have in the future of the housing industry. In addition, he has emphasized how the richest in the world have tripled their fortunes, since the Covid pandemic, in 2019, and how this inequality has become latent in the fundamental rights of those who have the least. “There is no doubt, we are experiencing the largest global housing crisis in modern history,” he says.
Among some alternatives to mitigate these situations, Robles-Durán has called for action to reinvent public and community associations that manage to break up the structures of the “real estate cartel,” that is, strengthen the cooperation between citizens, the government and private initiative. In addition, removing housing production from the control of financiers and speculators, and paying urgent attention to climate change, which, he says, will be the reason why more than 250 million people will be displaced from their places of origin in the world by 2050, worsening the current migrant crisis that is being experienced internationally.
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