Eight years after Leonel Fernández returned to power, the country saw a slight improvement in the quality of its existing housing, but the number of homes yet to be built continued to grow
SANTO DOMINGO – The 2010 National Population and Housing Census, conducted in October of that year, captured a snapshot of the country on the cusp of a change in government. Compared to the previous census of 2002, it allows for an assessment of what happened to Dominican housing during the two consecutive terms of Leonel Fernández documented in this series.
According to the calculation methodology developed by the National Statistics Office together with the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre, and applied equally to both censuses, the country's housing stock increased from 2,181,149 to 2,662,862 occupied private dwellings between 2002 and 2010. Of that total, dwellings without any type of deficit, either qualitative or quantitative, rose from 23.35% to 31.21%, a relative improvement of almost eight percentage points.
The qualitative dimension of the deficit, that is, existing homes with recoverable deficiencies in materials or basic services, increased in absolute terms, from 1,239,497 to 1,333,548 homes, although it lost relative weight within the total housing stock.
The quantitative dimension, on the other hand, the number of homes that still needed to be built to solve overcrowding and the gathering of family units that share the same roof, grew more sharply, from 689,812 to 865,829 homes, an increase of 176,017 units in eight years, equivalent to about 22,000 additional homes of deficit per year.
This last piece of data is particularly revealing when compared with the production figures of the National Housing Institute itself, already documented in this series. At its peak during this period, the institute delivered between 1,300 and 1,900 new homes per year.
The quantitative deficit, meanwhile, was growing at a rate of approximately 22,000 units per year. Public production, even combined with private construction, was not enough to reverse this trend.
The decline was not uniform across the country. Research by Ciudad Alternativa, cross-referencing census data with national poverty maps, found that internal overcrowding—the presence of more than one family unit within the same dwelling—decreased in seven of the ten poorest provinces, but increased in eight of the ten least poor, including Santo Domingo, Santiago, La Vega, and the National District.
The most plausible explanation, according to the same source, is internal migration to urban areas with a greater supply of jobs.
In May 2012, Danilo Medina, also of the Dominican Liberation Party, was elected president and took office on August 16 of that year. In terms of housing, he inherited an institute with reduced production capacity compared to that of 2000-2004, a development bank that no longer exclusively financed housing, a recently approved but still unimplemented trust law, and a housing deficit that, according to his predecessor's own census, continued to grow faster than the State could build.
With that assessment, the eight-year arc documented in this installment of the series comes to a close. The next stage, under the administration of Danilo Medina, will pick up precisely the thread of Law 189-11 and the birth of Ciudad Juan Bosch, the project that would transform that law, until then unfulfilled, into the largest social housing program undertaken in the country.
Sources: National Statistics Office (ONE), “The Housing Deficit in the Dominican Republic: Updated Overview of Housing Requirements, 2010” (Research Division, with technical assistance from CELADE, April 2014), with data from the VIII Population and Housing Census of 2002 and the IX Census of 2010. | Ciudad Alternativa, “The Marks of Housing Policy: Housing, Human Rights and Taxation in the Dominican Republic, 2000-2016” (Santo Domingo, September 2017), Chapter II, section 2.2.
History of Social Housing in the Dominican Republic 2004-2012.
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