No. 13-14 (1987): Housing policies

The Central American region suffers from the age-old problem of poverty. Taking this major problem as part of the phenomenon that studies have lately called "State-Society Relations", the Central American Institute of Public Administration concluded, at the end of 1985, the research study "State, Policies and Critical Poverty in Central America: State, Policies and Critical Poverty in Central America.

The research was conceived to use the housing variable as an indicator of poverty, which allows us to introduce a subject intimately linked to the study of State-society relations: that of public policies. These are ultimately conceived as the adoption of a society with respect to certain problems.

Public policies were studied on the basis of the analysis of a specific problem such as housing. Nevertheless, the aim was to go beyond a micro-analytical approach to the problem and place it in the context of the political project of those who have exercised power; in such a way that the Political Regime is approached and seen as influencing and, in turn, influencing decision-making in general and the development and execution of public policies in particular.

Within this broad spectrum of the problem, we offer this special issue of the Revista Centroamericana with the purpose of putting on the table for discussion different ways to address this issue.

The magnitude of the housing shortage and insufficiency problem is such that, for example, in Costa Rica in 1986, the housing deficit reached 130,000 homes. The inability of the economic structure in the region to produce and finance housing is becoming more acute day by day. Several structural factors converge in this problem, two of which are fundamental: the process of population movements and their spatial distribution - a product of the transformations in the productive structure - and the existence of a total imbalance in the distribution of social income. This last phenomenon determines that a significant sector of the population is outside the housing market due to their meager purchasing power and their inability to save, so that the housing problem becomes one more indicator of their situation of poverty and marginality.