What anti-social housing looks like in Venezuela (10 photos)

Venezuela also has its own local Chertanovo, Shushary or Beryulyovo. Marginal residential areas of many hundreds of thousands, more like anthills, with their own inner world, rules, and peculiarities.





They are, of course, not like our people. But they are also home to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, usually teetering on the poverty line or far below it.

Today I want to show you a few of these residential areas from different Venezuelan cities.

There are two very different options for solving the housing problem for ordinary people: public housing and self-construction from whatever comes to hand in places where people simply build and inhabit on their own, without receiving any permits or approvals from the state.

That is, social housing and anti-social housing.

About a third of the residents of the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, live in just such anti-social housing, favelas.



These are houses of different colors chaotically set up close to each other without any general rules, architectural forms, approvals, permits, registration and everything else.

Such development in South America is quite typical in many countries. It is not controlled by the state in any way and the authorities often cannot influence it at all. Even in terms of law enforcement.

The poorest and most socially vulnerable segments of the population live here. People who have nothing to lose in life and who are ready to cling to absolutely everything and by any means. The laws of the strong and the laws of survival apply here, and the laws established by the state almost do not apply.





If you look further up the social ladder, then next after the favela slums in Venezuela come the so-called multi-story favelas.

Initially, they were not conceived as slums at all, but quite the opposite. High-rise buildings reminiscent of Soviet small-family hostels were built precisely with the goal of gradually changing the appearance of cities and moving away from squalid, unsanitary favelas.

But something went wrong. Apparently, if you build a high-rise building in the middle of a slum and populate it with slum dwellers, then the high-rise building itself immediately turns into a slum.



Each house has its own mini-commune. This is to put it mildly. But in fact, each such house has its own laws and is governed by a mini-gang.

In other words, a management company that no one elected and which cannot be “cancelled.” And which does not deal with housing and communal services issues.





There are also houses that resemble our old Khrushchev buildings.

This is also low-social housing, in which the poorest people live, and which also have their own laws.

In such areas, all apartment windows must have strong bars, and it does not matter what floor the apartment is on, not only on the first and last floors.



It is interesting that not all residential areas and individual apartment buildings in Venezuela are permeated with the spirit of poverty, banditry and marginality.

Here is one such area of social high-rise buildings built on the site of former favelas. True, here houses were not built between the slums, but the entire area was evicted, all chaotic buildings were completely demolished and infrastructure was built from scratch: housing, schools, shops.



Here is another example of social housing. This unusual house with more than 1000 apartments was built on a vacant lot, and then a microdistrict and infrastructure began to develop around it.

People were resettled here for “renovation” from another favela area that was being demolished.



This is what it is like - social and anti-social housing in Venezuela.