A Stitch in Haste

Brazil is undertaking a program to convey private property rights to residents of its shantytowns:

Without title, residents cannot finance home repairs, get credit or mail, or sell their property. They can also be evicted without legal recourse — a real fear in a city where entire slums — known as favelas — have been removed to make way for commercial developments.

Since 2003, 272,000 families nationwide have received titles to property in favelas and another 450,000 families are in the process of getting them, [Minister of Cities Marcio] Almeida said.

"A right to property is like a right to citizenship," he told a ceremony inaugurating the program in a humble white church in the heart of Rocinha.
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Today, about a fifth of Rio de Janeiro's 6 million residents live in the favelas. Many have been there for generations.

So while the United States reinvents property rights downward, less developed countries reinvent them upward. Go figure.

There is of course no difference between the favelas and, say, pharmaceutical research: why invest if you can't reap the rewards? Now these residents can reap the rewards, so they will indeed invest (or sell to those who will invest). And the favelas and their residents will inevitably benefit from that.

Meanwhile, any proposal in, say, New York City to offer property rights to occupants of public housing, to give them an opportunity to invest in and thereby improve their homes, would bring only hysterical laughter (or vitriolic rage) from the so-called "housing activists." Go figure. Indeed, I would not be surprised to see some opposition to the Brazil plan from anti-capitalists on the grounds that the "greedy real estate developers" will simply buy up all the land in the favelas and turn them into condos. Or worse, they would bemoan the end of a "way of life" — even if was a life of poverty and squalor.