Two decades after being initiated by Salvador Jorge Blanco, the country's most ambitious housing project fell into the hands of Hipólito Mejía, who ended it with hundreds of empty apartments, and just as many recovered through a military operation
SANTO DOMINGO. – When Hipólito Mejía appointed engineer Juan Antonio Vargas Monción as director of the National Housing Institute in August 2000, he inherited a case that had already been open for eighteen years: Invivienda Santo Domingo, conceived in 1982 under the presidency of Salvador Jorge Blanco as the largest housing project ever undertaken by the Dominican State, had survived intact through four changes of government without any of them managing to bring it to a definitive close.
Balaguer delivered only three phases in his ten years in office; Fernández, between 1996 and 2000, added 2,000 more apartments, but time was not enough for him either.
It was Vargas Monción, as Fanny Sánchez Pujols recounts in a letter to the editor published in 2020, written in response to an earlier article by José Lois Malkún on the same subject, who finally put an end to the work of Invivienda Santo Domingo, although the closure was far from being a clean victory.
The letter itself specifies that the engineer left 429 units unfinished, explaining the reason with a terse sentence: because they were already occupied. Families who had moved into unfinished apartments, many of them displaced by Hurricane Georges in 1998, turned the irregularity into a fait accompli that no administration wanted or was able to completely reverse.
The illegal occupation was not resolved solely through inaction. The newspaper El Nacional documented that, during Mejía's administration, the authorities mounted an operation to recover 700 apartments through a surprise deployment of Dominican Air Force personnel, followed by the installation of a permanent detachment to prevent those evicted from returning to the site.
Many of those families ended up relocated to the El Tamarindo sector and other areas of Santo Domingo East, in an episode that reveals the extent to which Invivienda's management had ceased to be an exclusively housing issue and had also become a public order problem.
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Years later, Vargas Monción himself offered testimony that illuminates another dimension of the problem. In answering questions for Diario Libre, the engineer acknowledged that the allocation of Dominican state housing then lacked, as it still lacks, a standardized procedure, which left the distribution of units subject to strong political interference.
Although he claimed to have used community groups and churches as an alternative selection mechanism, he readily admitted that party affiliation also influenced the final beneficiaries, with a rhetorical question that functions almost as a confession: it would be a lie to deny that people from the party benefited, when the alternative would have been to leave them out.
The pattern of projects started and then stalled was not limited to Jorge Blanco's legacy. The National Inventory of Stalled Public Construction Projects, compiled by Participación Ciudadana, with records up to August 2004, documents at least two housing projects that Mejía's own government started but failed to complete within his four-year term.
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The Gautier project, in San Pedro de Macorís, began in 2000 with 150 planned homes, of which only 54 were built before being halted in 2004. On the side of the National Institute of Aid and Housing, INAVI, the Ramón Paulino street project, in Valverde, with 200 planned units, suffered a similar fate: it started in 2000 and was stopped in 2003.
That last piece of information is relevant because it contradicts any interpretation that attributes Invivienda's stagnation solely to the burden of an inheritance accumulated over eighteen years. When Mejía's own government inaugurated new projects, using its own resources and without the baggage of previous administrations, it ended up reproducing the exact same outcome: half-built homes, missed deadlines, and families waiting.
Neither the elaborate institutional architecture described at the beginning of this part of the series, nor the accountability speech of February 2002, managed to reverse a trend that seems to transcend any particular official or party.
When Mejía handed over power to Leonel Fernández in August 2004, Invivienda remained, in the Dominican collective memory, synonymous with broken promises. This next installment concludes the four-year period with an assessment of that: what Fernández inherited in his second term, and whether he finally managed to break the cycle that four consecutive administrations had failed to end.
Sources: “History of a Great Housing Program,” published in El Nuevo Diario (June 12, 2020) and in Acento (June 8, 2023). | El Nacional, “Invivienda Among Squatters, Filth, Crime, and Drugs.” | Diario Libre, “The Political Weight in Housing Allocation” (Mariela Mejía, December 13, 2021). | Listín Diario, “Each Government Has Its Own 'Playbook' for Reducing the Housing Deficit” (February 5, 2021). | Participación Ciudadana, “National Inventory of Stalled Public Construction Projects” (Ginell Castillo, author; data collected up to August 2004).
Social Housing Series in the Dominican Republic.
