Between 2004 and 2012, the National Housing Institute went from delivering approximately 1,860 units per year to just 738, before recovering ground towards the end of the period
SANTO DOMINGO. – During the three governments of the democratic and modern era, Joaquín Balaguer, Leonel Fernández in his first term and Hipólito Mejía, the National Housing Institute, INVI, remained the central body of Dominican housing policy, a continuity that continued when Leonel returned to power in August 2004, although there was a drastic slowdown in the rate at which new homes were built.
According to institutional figures compiled by the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development in its Social Indicators System, and systematized years later by the organization Ciudad Alternativa in a study on housing policy from 2000 to 2016, INVI reported, for the entire period 2000-2012, a total of 17,035 new homes, 2,021 rural homes, 4,862 units under the category of "special projects" and 342,466 urban housing improvement interventions.
The distribution of these figures over time reveals a break that coincides almost exactly with the change of government in 2004. Between 2000 and 2004, under Hipólito Mejía, 55% of all new homes built during the years analyzed, 77% of special projects, and 100% of rural projects were concentrated. The rate during those early years was around 1,859 new homes per year.
With Fernández's arrival, that pace was lost. Between 2005 and 2009, INVI averaged just 738 new homes per year, two and a half times less than in the previous five-year period, and the lowest point in the entire series came in 2010, with only 168 units delivered throughout the year.
The recovery would come later, between 2011 and 2012, when the annual average again approached 1,340 homes, already in the final stretch of Fernández's second term.
The profile of the beneficiary families also changed over the years. (External source).
The geographical distribution of this production was also uneven, with more than half of the new housing built during the period (53%) concentrated in the Ozama and Cibao regions, which together comprise 51.4% of the country's population. The Ozama region alone, encompassing the National District and Santo Domingo province, accounted for 39.6% of the national total.
More housing for the upper middle class
The profile of the beneficiary families also changed over the years, according to institutional reports which indicate that, between 2000 and 2004, projects aimed at middle and low income families predominated, while between 2006 and 2009 the proportion of resources directed to middle and high income families grew strongly, reaching 55.5% of the investment executed during 2008.
Only from 2010 onwards did all projects return to focusing exclusively on low-income families, and there is a specific case that illustrates this shift towards higher income profiles: in 2011, Torres El Progreso was inaugurated, on Luperón Avenue at the corner of Anacaona, a complex of 180 apartments of 157.47 square meters, with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a maid's room and two parking spaces.
The investment made by the State through INVI amounted to RD$1,081,907,881.37, as documented at the time by the Ciudad Alternativa Housing and Land Observatory. This figure alone represented 26.5% of the institute's total investment in assets between 2006 and 2010, at a time when typical homes built by INVI measured only 45 square meters and cost around RD$440,000.
It is important to clarify the nuances of this information: the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development and the National Statistics Office use, for the same period, two different methodologies for calculating the housing deficit, with results that do not always coincide with each other, a divergence that the Ciudad Alternativa research itself points out as a persistent obstacle to accurately diagnosing the state of housing in the country.
Nor are there any publicly available statistics for the years prior to 2013 that clearly distinguish how many of these homes were donated and how many were provided through financing, nor is there a precise breakdown of the beneficiary selection criteria for each project. These are documentary gaps that this series prefers to highlight as such, rather than fill with assumptions.
What the available figures do allow us to affirm is that public housing production during these eight years fluctuated much more than is usually acknowledged, with a sharp drop in the first half of the period and a partial recovery towards the end, just as the country was preparing for a new change of government.
Sources: Ciudad Alternativa, “The Marks of Housing Policy: Housing, Human Rights and Taxation in the Dominican Republic, 2000-2016” (Jenny Torres, Rafael Jovine, Jaime Rodríguez and Bartolomé Pujals, Santo Domingo, September 2017), Chapter II. | Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development, Social Indicators System of the Dominican Republic (SISDOM), 2000-2012 series. | Institutional reports of the National Housing Institute (INVI), 2013, 2014 and 2015. | Housing and Land Observatory, Ciudad Alternativa (2011).
History of Social Housing in the Dominican Republic 2004-2012
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