http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/chavezs-socialist-housing-communes/
January 24, 2012, 8:14 am Free Homes, Gracias Chávez By FRANCISCO TORO ReutersHugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, during a ceremony at the Socialist Ciudad Caribia outside Caracas on December 30, 2011. CARACAS, Venezuela — Cacique Tiuna, the Socialist housing commune being built here shows just how the government is planning to leverage housing to its advantage ahead of the presidential election in October. Over a thousand families have been settled in apartments over the last few months – for many, it’s the first time living outside a self-built shack in a shantytown. The housing project is something of a flagship for President Hugo Chávez’s plans to resettle the more than 120,000 people who lost their shanties to flooding in 2010. Construction on 22 such housing developments began in 2011, with 4 more being started this year, as part of a sprawling building program at the center of Chávez’s re-election plans. The apartments are basic but comfortable: 775 square feet, with two or three bedrooms, concrete floors, a washing machine, and a stove, a refrigerator and a sink in each kitchen. Best of all, they’re free. As in free, free. The catch is that the apartments never really become yours. All units are “communal property,” and the people who live in them cannot sell, rent, sublet or divide them. With no clear title and often no paperwork of any kind to prove their right to remain, residents here live at the community’s pleasure. This breeds remarkable ideological consistency. Every resident I met on a visit last week expressed gratitude and support for Chávez. I didn’t hear the jittery, coerced support of a North Korean; I heard what sounded like deep personal affection for our leader — coupled, I soon realized, with generalized disdain for the government he leads. “When Chávez came they showed him the apartments down there. His ministers took him to see only the first few buildings, which are really nice,” one resident told me. “They didn’t bring him up here,” she said, pointing out the water damage that’s already started to crack the walls in her three-month-old apartment. “The president was deceived.” Residents heap scorn on the middle-managers of Chávez’s socialist experiment: everyone from ministers on down is fair game. Shoddy construction, flood-prone sewers, poor coordination between the local authorities and the shelters that assign apartments — all are pegged on Chávez’s underlings. Chávez, you see, must have been deceived. In Cacique Tiuna, the comandante presidente has built a powerful cult of personality, one made stronger because it allows for venting. Heavy, even strident, criticism of the government is O.K., so long as it doesn’t put a dent into the man himself and is couched in terms supporting the revolutionary project. But, hanging, say, a poster supporting one of the opposition candidates from an apartment window is strictly verboten. More than verboten: it’s unthinkable. Walk less than a mile from the commune to La Rinconada, Caracas’s main horse-racing track, and you get a sense of why. The stands have been turned into a massive, semi-permanent shelter for some of the 100,000 Venezuelans who are still homeless after the 2010 floods. With commune apartments scarce, no one in a shelter would risk setting back her chances for a new home with an ill-advised remark about the president. Heading into the October election, Chávez has engineered a way to give voters no option but to support him if they want to maintain access to the basics of a decent life: an apartment, a job, a sense of belonging. To be sure, many of them support him proudly. But in the final analysis, none really has a real choice. Chávez, you see, is not deceived at all. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
