Sorry so slow. We’ve been in Caracas for eleven days now, and still no apartment. Someone in the Ministry told me, only half in jest, that finding an apartment is “harder than the revolution itself.” I laughed when I read that, but it seems less funny after eleven days in a hotel room. This unfunnyness is compounded by the fact that I have a fuckload of work to do, and I can’t seem to get any done in a hotel room.

Why so hard to find an apartment? A few reasons. Firstly, there’s the massive overpopulation of the city—the population has doubled in the last 40 years, and grows at an average of 3% annually—a trend which is mirrored in most Latin American countries, and which results largely from the rural exodus that has been occurring since the 1960s. This was partly a result of a state policy which essentially abandoned the interior of the country, and as a result of which Venezuela, a country which could grow pretty much anything, ends up importing more than two-thirds of its food. This is one of the trends that the Chávez government hopes to reverse, and certainly its most ambitious strategy.  In a nutshell, reversing this trend is what is meant by “endogenous development.”

Aside from the obvious drawbacks of such an urbanized population, the situation in Caracas has gained an increasing urgency in recent years, most notably with the December 1999 mudslides which killed some tens of thousands in the outskirts of Caracas, in which entire towns were washed down the steep northern slope of El Avila and out to sea. Now, one sees news programs about communities at “high risk” frequently, often on opposition news channels eager to emphasize any governmental shortcomings.

One recent program emphasized the residents quite understandable desire to remain in their crumbling houses, but used this desire to make the offer of shelters by the local Mayor Freddy Bernal look downright totalitarian. But as with the reversal of the rural exodus as a whole, the government’s policy has been far from totalitarian, and while endogenous development projects such as the “City of Wood” and “City of Steel” might seem to echo the Soviet planning of Magnetogorsk, nothing could be further from the truth. For better or for worse, incentives are the only means the government has to reverse migration.

So back to Caracas. The population is allegedly somewhere between three and five million, but surely much more given the chronic undercounting of the barrios (which partly explains why the opposition pollsters are so frequently wrong). A friend recently told me that Catia, which essentially encompasses all of the barrios to the west of Caracas, has three million residents, and that moreover, Petare in the east of the city has nearly that many more.

There aren’t nearly enough apartments. One of the government’s central goals has been to increase housing stock both through increasing construction and facilitating expropriation of apartments by long term residents (i.e. if you’ve lived somewhere long enough to have essentially bought the apartment, there are new legal measures for expropriating the building from its “owner”).

This expropriating zeal has frightened the opposition, and has gotten the General Mayor of Caracas Juan Barreto in some trouble (see a forthcoming post on antagonism). For those trying to rent apartments, it means that landlords are all selling off, and no one is renting: a browse of the classifieds shows approximately twenty offers to sell to one offer to rent, alongside ten or so desperate posts looking for a place to rent. Those rentals that are available rival the most expensive areas of the U.S.: $1,500 for a furnished one-bedroom in wealthy Altamira; in the poor city center, with some luck (a lot of luck), you might pay as little as $450. I return to this desperation, where I began the post.