The real estate boom in the metropolis of Sao Paulo: the advance of the formal market on the outskirts and the new mapping of socio-spatial segregation

Author(s)

Letícia Moreira Sígolo

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU/SBI)
• Defense date: 2014-08-01

Examining board members

Erminia Terezinha Menon Maricato; Carolina Maria Pozzi de Castro; Jeroen Johannes Klink; Silvia Maria Schor; Helena Maria Menna Barreto Silva

• Advisor: Erminia Terezinha Menon Maricato

Abstract

This thesis aims at contributing to the investigation of the recent dynamics of reproduction of capital in residential real estate in the country, from the analysis of the real estate boom that took hold the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo in the second half of the 2000s. This production, characterized by territorial expansion of the formal housing market on the consolidated peripheries, as well as by the expansion of the attended demand, incorporating middle and lower-middle income segments, resulted in the insertion of new regions in the formal real estate dynamics. This process, carried out by large developers, led to an intensification of competition for urbanized land in these new frontiers, which has limited the available space for the social housing production, as for the informal market activities, leaving to the lowest income population, few áreas still ruled out by the formal housing market, more distant and precarious, and even environmentally fragile, in a redefinition of the mapping of socio-spatial segregation in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo. This movement had strong participation of the State, both in constructing a propitious regulatory framework for the real estate sector\'s activities, reducing the risks of private agents, as in the injection of public and semi-public resources to ensure their continued expansion, by keeping the demand heated by the housing finance resumption and the provision of subsidies, which have largely supported the recent explosion in housing prices. In this context, municipal administrations of various political-ideological hues were mobilized around the imperative of growth, associated at real estate valuation, defining it as one of the main objectives of urban policies. That flared-up a \"war of urban parameters\" between the municipalities, aiming at the attraction of real estate capital, through the permissiveness in occupation and in constructive densification of the urban land, reducing the possibilities of integrated actions in the metropolitan scale, which is fundamental to facing the current urban problems. (AU)