Disasters show the
depth of
Panama’s housing needs
Yes, we can and should notice the corruption angle. Some of the people
whose homes were recently flooded out lost what little they had because
developers created the conditions that led to the flooding of their homes.
These developers in some cases built in flood plains where they should not
have been allowed to build, and in other cases either disrupted the
drainage for whole neighborhoods or in violation of approved plans built
their projects to drain onto neighbors’ property. In these cases those
responsible are mostly powerful people with political connections --- just
the sort of people whom our current attorney general has for nearly a
decade steadfastly refused to touch. It’s a serious problem with our
political culture.
That, however, is the easy problem to identify, and if there is a will to
do so, it can be resolved by the Torrijos administration taking exemplary
action to make those developers pay and to get rid of any inspectors or
other public employees who signed off on the improper practices. (Yes, the
developers could fight forever in the courts, bribe judges and so on. But
the government could also make their continued business operations
impossible if they did that.)
The far more important and difficult issues go right to the heart of
Panama’s housing policies and social dynamics, and pose a tough challenge
to the Torrijos administration in general and Housing Minister Balbina
Herrera in particular.
Panama needs to suppress the phenomenon of land invasions. It’s as simple
and as complicated as that.
Most of the tragedy in Panama City and San Miguelito has to do with
squatters building in flood plains or on steep hillsides where nobody
should build.
When people move into areas like that, it really isn’t possible to install
proper infrastructure. Here it was a drainage problem, but land invasions
almost always create massive problems with roads, sewage, the theft of
utility services, garbage collection, police protection, planning for
public schools and the conservation of natural resources. Whether the
squatters move onto private or public lands, and whatever their personal
characters and intentions, they create a public nuisance.
Let us understand that not all squatters are poor, and that more often
than not the leaders of land invasions are crooks who are selling either
building materials or land that does not belong to them.
Let us also understand that land invasions have been, by default and often
deliberately, the government’s principal housing program for low-income
people. It will not be possible to put an end to invasions without
realistic alternatives.
That alternative must include an orderly urban homesteading program, both
on public properties and on those properties that private owners have
neglected to the point that they have become burdens on the neighbors.
One who starts an ambitious commercial development, digs a big hole, then
walks away when the financing dries up or the expected major tenant pulls
out, leaving a mosquito breeding pond for the government to manage, has no
property rights that ought to be respected. Nor does the person who year
after year annoys the neighbors with an empty lot in which weeds, trash
and pests accumulate.
Owners of properly maintained vacant urban lots ought to be justly
compensated if their land is taken to solve the nation’s housing crisis.
That’s the law and that’s the decent thing to do. However, it would be in
the best interest of both justice and urban planning policy to adopt an
“abuse it and you lose it” approach to the metro area’s privately held
vacant lots.
Orderly urban homesteading is the antithesis of the sprawl that puts tin
shacks at the ever-expanding city edges. It’s not a program to fill in our
city’s gaps with dangerous and unsanitary makeshift slums. It can’t be the
nation’s only housing program, because there are a lot of people who need
housing and can’t be reasonably expected to make the level of improvements
that a good homesteading program should demand. It shouldn’t be a
substitute for an effort to alleviate the rural poverty that sends so many
destitute people to the city in the first place.
However, we do need to suppress land invasions, and we can’t do that
without providing reasonable alternatives for those who know nothing other
than that old but pernicious “solution” to our urban housing problems. The
private initiative and ingenuity that constitute the better side of
squatting need to be channeled into a homesteading program that solves
rather than creates urban problems.
Bear in mind…
The function of science fiction is not always to
predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
Frank Herbert
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home;
but, unlike charity, it should end there.
Clare Booth Luce
When the power of love overcomes the love of
power the world will finally know peace.
Jimi Hendrix
