Two laws signed in 2004 and 2006 redesigned the state apparatus that supported housing policy, just as Leonel Fernández was returning to the presidency
SANTO DOMINGO – When Leonel Fernández assumed the presidency for the second time in August 2004, he inherited a housing institutional apparatus largely built during the previous eight years. This series has already documented the decrees issued by Hipólito Mejía, which placed the National Housing Institute (INVI) at the head of the sector and the National Housing Bank (BNV) as its natural financial partner.
But that design began to change as early as 2004, when the National Congress approved Law 6-04, which transformed the National Housing Bank into the National Housing and Production Development Bank.
This was not just a name change, as the new entity expanded its scope to include financing productive activities in general, beyond housing, becoming what banking jargon calls a second-tier institution, that is, a bank that lends to other banks and not directly to the public.
Years later, in 2015, Law 126-15 would complete that transition by turning the entity into the current Development and Export Bank, Bandex, now without any reference to housing in its name.
Two years later, on December 28, 2006, Congress passed another pair of laws that reorganized the State's planning brain: Law 496-06 created the State Secretariat of Economy, Planning and Development, replacing the former Technical Secretariat of the Presidency, and Law 498-06, passed on the same day, established the National System of Planning and Public Investment.
That secretariat, renamed Ministry with the constitutional reform of 2010, is today the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the same institution that, years later, would develop its own methodology to calculate the country's housing deficit.
The result of these two movements, one financial and the other planning-related, left housing policy without the dedicated development bank it had had for much of the twentieth century, although the National Housing Institute continued to operate as the main executor of the State's housing projects, as documented by Ciudad Alternativa in its research on the period, but without its exclusive financial partner to multiply its resources through long-term loans.
Ciudad Alternativa's research, in reviewing the legal framework in force until 2012, describes the situation with a phrase that summarizes the phenomenon well: throughout the period after the reform, housing policy remained characterized by institutional dispersion and the absence of a clearly defined housing finance system.
The void left by the BNV's restructuring was not filled by any other entity until 2011, when a new law would attempt to resolve it through a different route, that of private trusts, which this series will address in a later installment.
Sources: Law No. 6-04 (2004), which transforms the National Housing Bank into the National Housing and Production Development Bank. | Law No. 126-15 (2015), which creates the Development and Export Bank of the Dominican Republic (Bandex). | Law No. 496-06 and Law No. 498-06, both of December 28, 2006. | Ciudad Alternativa, “The Marks of Housing Policy: Housing, Human Rights and Taxation in the Dominican Republic, 2000-2016” (Santo Domingo, September 2017), Chapter I, section on the compendium of the current regulatory framework.
History of Social Housing in the Dominican Republic 2004-2012.
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