Urban Upgrading in Latin America and the Caribbean

The proliferation of urban slums is due
in large part to obsolete regulatory, legal and
institutional frameworks at the local level governing land
use, development standards, land registration and titling.
These regulations are often exclusionary, insisting on
development norms and standards that are outside the realm
of the poor to pay and subdivision procedures are often over
burdensome, leading to informal land subdivision, thus
excluding the possibility to register titles under such
"illegal" conditions. Likewise, well intentioned
federal or national housing policies that focus on the
provision of complete housing packages (as opposed to
products like sites and services, progressive housing or
demand, rather than supply-side subsidies) often have the
unintended effect of filtering-up to higher income groups,
especially when private mortgage market alternatives are not
available to middle and lower-middle class households.
Reforming these structural problems remains one of the
greatest challenges, but progress is being made in countries
like Brazil, Mexico on both the land and housing sides, and
in Venezuela with regard to land and development standards.