Rio shantytown residents to receive titles to land

RIO DE JANEIRO – The home Jose Nazare Braga built in the Rocinha shantytown is his life’s work, an investment that grew from a shack to a three-story building over 30 years. A restaurant and a paper-goods store on the ground floor provide income, and his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren live above.

The red-brick building is Braga’s nest egg, his retirement home and an inheritance for his large family. But for decades, the property wasn’t formally his, and he lived in fear of losing it all.

Now local officials and human rights groups are working to give legal title to tens of thousands of people like Braga, a process that increases their wealth and gives them greater access to credit, as well as peace of mind.

“I did this for my family, for my children,” said the 70-year-old about obtaining the title to his property. For years he relied on a piece of paper given by the residents’ association as his proof of ownership, and worried it wouldn’t hold up in court if he was challenged.

“Now this is safe, secure,” Braga said, sitting in his tiny, neat living room decorated with pictures of his family. “No one takes it away from us.”

The programs so far are just beginning to tackle a widespread problem: A third of the people in Rio state, nearly 5 million people, don’t have title to their homes, an uncertainty shared by most of the approximately 1 billion people living in slums globally. Similar efforts are under way in many nations, where formalizing land tenure can give millions a secure hold on what is often a family’s most valuable asset.

Homeowners have quickly discovered that their land can be used as collateral for loans and that property with a title fetches a higher price in the formal real estate market.

But there’s also a downside. As the value of land goes up, it undermines the role of slums as the only well-located affordable housing available to low-income families in a city of booming real estate prices.

Land titling is one of an array of programs that have brought utilities, sewage connections and other benefits to Rio’s slums in recent years. A push to control violence before the 2016 Olympics has seen permanent police posts installed in some of the favelas once controlled by the drug trade.

Thanks to such improvements, communities that began as informal settlements are starting to feel more like the city that surrounds them.

Giving families official title to their land is the key element in this transition, said Luiz Claudio Vieira, who manages the land titling program at the state’s Institute of Land and Cartography.

A state law approved earlier this year allows the land agency to register property formally owned by the state as a donation to the family occupying it, doing away with legal and bureaucratic hurdles. Using the law, the state of Rio will regularize about 10,000 properties this year and about 37,000 over the next four years.