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Areas with more construction coincide with more people in informal settlements

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Areas with more construction coincide with more people in informal settlements

By: César Arroyo Castro

In front of Sharon Urbina’s house, there’s a dirt and sand road. Just a few meters down, the waves of Brasilito Beach roll in and out.

She has heard old stories from grandparents and great-grandparents about what Brasilito was like more than 90 years ago. Stories about how they crossed the estuaries on horseback to go to neighboring towns like Matapalo, about families who owned large properties and about how the Los Ángeles neighborhood, where she lives, was formed.

Around the 70s, several families were pressured by the Municipality of Santa Cruz to vacate their homes because they were within the 50 meters (164 feet) of public zone established in the Maritime Land Zone (Spanish acronym: ZMT) Law, which had just come into force.

“Then the oppression towards the community began, to get out of the public zone and move to other sectors, to other regions, to other towns even,” Sharon remembers. But the community resisted in order to stay on that land next to the beach, which, according to Sharon, was bought by some Arabs who returned.

The town is pejoratively called ‘el precario’ (the squatters village) because when my parents and the people moved in, they made makeshift houses on that land, but no one claimed that land,” Sharon added.

According to the parameters of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Human Settlements (Spanish acronym: MIVAH), this is an informal settlement because it’s still within the ZMT.

The families of fishermen who settled here have seen how, little by little, tourism development has grown around them. To the left, Reserva Conchal sells beachfront lots for millions of dollars. To its right, the Flamingo marina, hotels and mansions crown the hills near the beach.

Sharon’s neighborhood isn’t the only informal settlement close to a tourist destination. In fact, according to the latest Housing Balance and Trends from 2023, one in 10 people in the province live in an informal settlement. A good part of the settlements are also located in highly touristic destinations, such as Cabo Velas of Santa Cruz and Nacascolo of Liberia.

Without secure possession

The National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) defines informal settlements as groups of at least 10 houses that are formed as a result of “land seizures,” organized or not, and that they remain within the same land for a year.

Over time, some of them see improvements in certain conditions such as housing infrastructure and access to services. They aren’t necessarily slum-type housing. Some of them may be houses in good condition but built in a protected area such as on the banks of rivers or in the ZMT, as is the case of the Los Ángeles neighborhood, on Brasilito Beach.

Even if the houses are in good condition and have access to services, if they are in informal settlements, they lack a key element to categorize them as “adequate”: security of possession. According to the United Nations conditions, without this characteristic, their occupants lack legal guarantees over the houses, eviction, harassment and other threats.

In Guanacaste, there are 62 informal settlements identified by MIVAH, and Liberia is the canton in the province with the largest population. In the central district of Liberia alone, they classify 5,547 people as living in such settlements, surpassing districts in San José such as Pavas (5,472).

The second canton at the top of the province’s list is Carrillo, with 2,708 people in 897 houses.

But this phenomenon isn’t something that only happens in central or urban districts. The Housing Balance and Trends report states that in 34 districts of the country, 10% of the population lives in informal settlements.   These districts are located mainly in the Central Region but also in coastal areas, some of them known for their tourism activity such as Nacascolo and Cabo Velas. Sharon’s neighborhood is located in Cabo Velas.

The report highlights that the Pacific areas with the highest concentration of residential construction coincide with the areas with the highest population in informal settlements on that coast.

“How can it be that in cantons of a region where the economic activity around construction has skyrocketed so much, we find informal settlements? This gives us other clues that this housing that is being produced privately is not solving what should be the goal of the housing policy,” remarked the professor from the University of Costa Rica’s School of Architecture, Pablo Acuña.

“In the coastal towns, we’re in danger of extinction and no one protects us. If anything, they want to eliminate us,” said Sharon Urbina, a resident of the Los Ángeles neighborhood in Brasilito

The cost of the coast

Coastal development in the province has offered many people the possibility of being able to live and work, but it isn’t without cost. These possibilities are transferred to the pockets of those who have historically lived in these places or move there to participate in the opportunities offered by the economy.

“The city, regardless of size, is a commodity that is consumed. People need to consume things from the city, but they can’t pay the cost. So they have to go to an informal settlement,” explained the research coordinator for the Balance and Trends report, Franklin Solano.

Sharon has seen that many people have had to leave Brasilito due to the increase in rents and, at the same time, she has noticed a greater increase in the population in the Los Ángeles neighborhood.

“In the last three or four years, it has skyrocketed. People tell me: ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t.’ Prices are $500 a month for a two-room house. There’s a certain overcrowding due to the very makeup of the community. In other words, there are a lot of people; I don’t know where so many people come from,” explained Sharon.

According to the general coordinator of the report, Dania Chavarría, these settlements have a location logic that coincides with the areas with the greatest provision of infrastructure, services, transportation and economic activity.

“They aren’t going to look for a place to settle in an area that’s cut off because it doesn’t work for them. There comes a point where one moves so far away from the center that the cost of transportation again makes it very expensive to live in a certain place. So that’s why informal settlements are close to urban areas,” she explained.

In these urban or tourism areas, the processes of real estate speculation, short-term rentals, the increase in rents and gentrification are beginning to trigger this informality, according to the person in charge of the housing, habitat and territory sector of MIVAH, Manuel Morales.

“It’s important to seek to establish balances so that these phenomena of real estate speculation, of rising prices, don’t end up causing the known effects of gentrification such as the expulsion and segregation of local populations that have traditionally been there or that work in the place and that it suddenly becomes prohibitive for them,” commented Morales.

Francisco Urbina (Sharon's father), in his workshop in the Los Ángeles neighborhood. He’s a carpenter, mason, former scuba diver and one of the founders of the community.

Without clear data or regulatory plans

One of the main challenges to address this problem, according to the Balance report, is the lack of information related to informal settlements. Although MIVAH has a database with the location, estimated population and characteristics of the settlements, that information isn’t enough to understand the real dimension.

Since the last census, in 2011, MIVAH has had to work with projections, and continues to do so, because the census that was due to be updated in 2022 failed statistically. It only achieved 61% coverage of the country. That’s why they are making agreements with municipalities such as Liberia to update the geospatial and demographic data of informal settlements such as Martina Bustos. In addition, they support local governments so that they can include mechanisms in their regulatory plans.

“We insist so much on the subject of regulatory plans in terms of zoning, height density, that they in some way shape the construction that is being developed a little and also protect some spaces within the cantons,” explained Morales.

Once the cantons have regulatory plans, there is greater flexibility to improve the habitat of some of these informal settlements through Law 4.240 on Urban Planning, said Morales.

In addition, it enables them to implement ideas from other countries, such as requesting that large developments make improvements to local infrastructure or housing in exchange for certain benefits, for example.

“These are mechanisms that are applied everywhere. They are very common and very useful to tell developers ‘well, you can give them a little more rights, building height, licenses or rights to develop certain projects in certain areas in exchange for generating some quotas for affordable housing or community services, public space, infrastructure improvements,” Morales described.

More stories:


Guanacaste: A tourist’s paradise with empty houses


Social housing: absent in Guanacaste’s tourist resorts

This article is part of the special series “Guanacaste: Between tourism and the roof,” which includes four reports on the right of access to housing in the province. These articles address the issue from three perspectives: vacant houses, which are mainly used for short-term rentals and second homes; the growth of informal settlements, a result of the housing deficit facing the region; and the decrease in housing bonuses, caused by the increase in the cost of land due to real estate speculation, with a feature also in the Nosara newsletter.
Journalists: César Arroyo Castro, José Pablo Román Barzuna, Noelia Esquivel Solano
Editor: Noelia Esquivel Solano
Graphics: Carolina Corrales
Photography: César Arroyo Castro
Translation: Arianna Hernández, Debbie Bruylant and Jana Saldana

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