Nota especial: Guanacaste Ocean View, Nota especial: Guanacaste Ocean View

Social housing: absent in Guanacaste’s tourist resorts

Esta publicación también está disponible en: Español

Social housing: absent in Guanacaste's tourist resorts

This story was originally published in Nosara, a monthly newsletter in which we delve into the stories and news of this community. If you don’t want to miss our next issues, subscribe by clicking here.

By: José P. Román Barzuana

Did you know that in Nosara, between 2019 and 2022, almost eight times more square meters were built for swimming pools than for social housing? Or that, like Tamarindo, in the last six years for every 100 m2 of construction for housing, less than 1% was thanks to government bonds.

The real estate boom in the tourist centers excludes people who are in need of a house, but can’t afford build one, according to an analysis by La Voz de Guanacaste with data from the Federated College of Engineers and Architects of Costa Rica (CFIA) and the Mortgage Housing Bank (Banco Hipotecario de la Vivienda, Banhvi).

Social housing is financed with government subsidies from the Banhvi for families with an income of less than ¢1,863,336 ($3,597), or less than ¢465,834 ($900), for extreme need bonds. The subsidies can be requested to remodel a house, build a house on an existing lot, or to purchase land and build a house. The funding is also available to authorized companies requesting to develop social housing projects.

Between 2018 and 2023 the water consumption of ASADA Playas de Nosara increased by 52%. During 2024 dry season its users suffered daily water cuts of up to 12 hours.

Why in Santa Cecilia of La Cruz, on the Nicaraguan border, 93.3% of the constructed surface area is built by government grants while on the coast of Cuajiniquil, in Santa Cruz, the figure is only 1%?

Real estate speculation, urban growth without regulatory plans and development focused solely on tourism, is causing a social gap on the coast of Guanacaste. That was the conclusion of the media after talking to the General Manager of Banhvi, Dagoberto Hidalgo, the advisor in housing, habitat and territory in the Ministry of Housing and Human Settlements (Mivah), Miguel Morales, and four other professional sources, architects and economists.

Equitable growth between social and private housing is a good sign that inequality is decreasing in a community, according to Hidalgo.

An example contrary to the balance mentioned by Hidalgo is present in the Samara district of Nicoya. In that community, the annual average of private meters built between 2018 and 2023 is 12,590. In the last three years, the construction amount has been above average. The square meters of social housing, conversely, have a downward trend and represent only 3.2% of the housing built in the community.

Dignified housing also helps to reduce gaps, to create opportunities for social ascent (…) Every time a family receives a dignified home, it automatically gains access to basic public services, education, increased security and a better quality of life in general,” Hidalgo states.

The social gaps are naked in the district of Nosara: there the low percentage of social housing exists in a community where 15.5% of the houses are overcrowded and where one of the concerns of the population is the construction of affordable houses so that people can live close to their jobs.

Public housing regulated by the private sector?

The six districts of the province that top the list with the lowest percentage of m2 of social housing construction compared to private housing investment are tourist destinations and beaches. This is what the CFIA numbers reveal.

Tamarindo and Nosara top the list with a 0.8% ratio. These districts are joined by Cuajiniquil and Cabo Velas in Santa Cruz, Nacascolo in Liberia, and Sámara in Nicoya.

The percentage of social investment verges on zero in these places because the price of land is high and because priority has been given to tourist-oriented housing development over the need for affordable housing, Hidalgo of Banhvi admits.

“If we were to survey the area regarding the price of land, we would realize that in many cases it is high and that obviously limits the ability to have access to a social housing solution.”

The bank manager’s assessment is also shared by the coordinator of the latest Balance Sheet and the Housing Sector 2023, Franklin Solano, and the professors of the School of Architecture of the University of Costa Rica (UCR), Dania Chavarría and Pablo Acuña. Nicoya.

“Land acquires characteristics based on demand,” Solano tells. “Housing is a commodity and its price is not governed by the need for housing, but by the market.”

Although market rules apply to the whole country, in tourist places real estate speculation stands in the way of housing subsidies. According to Solano, housing construction in the province is more oriented to short-term rentals or second residences, and not to satisfy the housing needs of the population.

“It is very difficult to develop housing projects of social interest in the center of Tamarindo, or near Tamarindo, given that ordinary grants average ¢9 million in the best of cases, whereas in cases of extreme poverty they can reach up to ¢35 million, depending on the situation. But those are extraordinary,” he explains.

In the opinion of Professor Acuña, housing “is no longer a tool to achieve the right of access, but rather to swiftly and aggressively obtain capital gains, regardless of the presence of communities in the area”.

On the other hand, the six districts of Guanacaste where the percentage of m2 of social investment housing exceeds that of private construction are, in most of those cases, distant from where land is mainly destined for tourism.

For Dania Chavarría, what happens in these districts is the opposite of what happens in coastal tourist communities: the value of the land is accessible and facilitates social housing construction. However, she points out that one problem is that these projects are concentrated in areas where infrastructure, sources of employment and public services are lacking.

“Many of the social housing projects move to rural areas that are less equipped with infrastructure and services. In fact, this has occurred precisely because they are looking for very cheap land, but then the cost of infrastructure and services (necessary for decent housing) is ultimately billed to the system (the State),” explains Chavarría.

The Banhvi manager believes that the difference between these places and the coastal areas is that the land may still be in the hands of the families in the area. This means that the segregation of lots, and obtaining the subsidies, does not depend on the purchase of land.

The report of the State of Nosara suggests the possibility that the inhabitants of the community, contrary to the districts with a higher percentage of investment in social housing, have been selling their land. This makes it impossible for these families to gain easy access to a subsidy.

“One hypothesis could be that local landowners with less financial resources have been selling their properties to large developers or wealthy families. This coincides with the increase of mansions and urban development projects in the area,” the document states.

In addition to the difficulty of building housing in these tourist areas, Costa Rica has sustained a decrease in the budget allocated to social building projects since 2020 due to annual budget cuts to Banhvi. According to an article in Semanario Universidad, the cuts in the last four years total ¢114,971 million, which translates into approximately 11 thousand fewer homes.

Guanacaste doesn’t escape the impact of the cuts: from 2019 to 2023 the number of housing grants awarded in the province decreased by 30% (from 1,329 to 927). In Nosara the reduction reached 75% (from 16 to only four grants), according to data shared with me by the Banhvi.

Should there be proportional growth?

For the Banhvi manager, and for María Bernal, an economist specializing in land use planning, there should be a proportion between social housing and private housing.

Bernal believes it is necessary that families with fewer economic resources also have access to the goods and services that are generally offered in places with more economic development.

Without political will, segregation will follow. You are going to see the rich on one side and the poor on the other. And that brings a lot of problems. For example, in terms of transportation and access to goods and services (…) This means that there will be places where investment will be much higher and located away from where other population groups live who will not have access to the same services”, she explains.

On the other hand, Hidalgo believes that there is a contradiction in the low percentages of social investment in places with high real estate development. According to him, private growth goes hand in hand with the need for labor, and the ideal is for that workforce to have decent housing close to their jobs.

Three possible solutions

In June 2022, the Municipal Housing Law (No. 10.199) came into force in Costa Rica, allowing municipalities to manage and invest in social housing within their territory.

The law allows the use of State land for social housing projects, explained the advisor in the Mivah, Manuel Morales. For him, this way it is possible to create coexistence between populations that build private housing and those who must resort to the social interest.

“There has to be a balance, so that local populations have the right to what we know as the right to the city, let’s call it the right to land, the right to housing and the right to be able to stay in those areas of opportunity that are being generated so that, in effect, all that tourist offer, for example, can also be captured and taken advantage of by local populations,” Morales thinks.

Two other ideas to address the shortage of these rooms are that the State should give subsidies to rent housing and that private real estate developers themselves should finance social housing, according to Dania Chavarría, director of the Graduate School of Architecture, and economist María Bernal.

“Rental subsidies come into the picture, no longer just homeownership. We must offer a variety of housing for a diverse population. The rental subsidy is an interesting opportunity (…) and the government would not have to invest in developing a full unit of housing,” Chavarría says.

Bernal worked in Colombia’s Ministry of Housing, City and Territory, where there is a law that obliges developers in urbanized cities like Medellín to allocate 20% of their investments to social housing. The funds can be invested by the developer itself or sent to a municipal fund earmarked solely for social building projects.

Bernal says that at the beginning developers opposed the initiative, however, after an adjustment, it has been in effect since 2013.

“If we leave the real estate market to govern itself, it will not meet the housing needs of low-income populations. The market does not self-regulate. There will be no builders interested in making social housing a priority,” adds Bernal to explain the spirit of the Colombian standard.

They both believe in the urgency of creating a regulation that ensures orderly investment in social housing and in accordance with the needs of the communities.

“If there is no social and priority housing, two things can happen: either all the local people will move to other areas of the country where they can have access to housing and then there will be no people to work there, or in the worst case they will live in inadequate conditions because they will settle in informal or precarious settlements,” he says.

This text is part of the special “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 vouchers, caused by the increase in the cost of land due to real estate speculation.
Journalists: César Arroyo Castro, José Pablo Román Barzuna y Noelia Esquivel Solano
Editor: Noelia Esquivel Solano
Graphics: Carolina Corrales
Photography: César Arroyo Castro

Comments