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Policy-Making
4.3 The Catholic Church as a NonProfit Model
Hidalgo, Rodrigo, Tomás Errázuriz, Rodrigo Booth, ‘The Catholic Charity Housing in Santiago: institutions, constructors, and urban effects (Las Viviendas de la Beneficencia Católica en Santiago: instituciones, constructoras y efectos urbanos)’, Revista Historia (Instituto de Historia Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), 38 (2005), 327 - 366. (p.342). 35
36
Ibid. p.343.
Image 4.3.1: Población Leon XIII project urban floor plan. Image 4.3.2: Población Leon XIII’s church as one of the associated programmes. Images 4.3.3 - 4.3.4: Dwelling units.
The effective rethinking of social housing procurement has an inspirational and non-conventional example in the late nineteenth century in Santiago. Inspired by the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, the Catholic Church organized a collaborative nonprofit group of influential people who wanted to increase social awareness and improve physical and moral conditions for the poor. The group understood this as a moral responsibility, believing that the provision of housing was the most powerful way to educate and overcome poverty. Thus, in order to fund the first housing project, the inhabitants rented the houses for a low price during a period of nearly fifteen years, until they became property owners. The project’s intention was not just to overcome the lack of the housing provision, but more importantly aimed to create a new project for the city. According to Rodrigo Hidalgo, ‘what this institution provided were not only private dwellings, but also a particular type, a dwelling programme, a street design, a neighbourhood with defined neighbours, green areas, leisure places, and meeting points; ultimately, what the institution intended to do was rather to provide a certain way of life.’ 35 The Catholic Church not only provided housing but also associated programmes (primary school, church, theatre, several oratories, and mausoleum) in order to raise the living standards of the impoverished working class. After a decade, this first social housing project led to the creation of Housing Trusts, who support low income groups and act in several points within the new residential periphery of Santiago. These points were conceived as new centralities which provided strategic buildings with the aim of providing social housing and further basic services. Through the collaboration of different non-profit institutions, programmes, and communal open spaces, the Housing Trusts intended to cover several aspects of the working class’s daily life, trying to provide a geographical and cultural identity to
their inhabitants. In Hidalgo’s words, the Housing Trusts were ‘real neighbourhoods understood as differentiated units within the city, where the individual dwelling was not any more a mere physical space, being displaced by several motivations and desires transformed in a moral and spiritual space.’ 36 The successful non-profit models of the first Catholic Church project and the Housing Trusts created something that in a different and contemporary way needs to be replicated: the emergence of a new social housing policy. In 1906 the state created the first housing policy, the Labour Dwellings Law (Ley de Habitaciones Obreras), which saw the state committing to its responsibility for social housing. Hence, instead of arguing that a new policy could merely provide more funds through the addition of the new stakeholders, what these models suggest is that there are some specific programmes and buildings-types that have the potential of affecting the residential environment by creating new centralities. This is another problem that the research will explore. It finally raises the question: What functions and institutional collaborations could become actors that will establish better social housing procurement and new centralities?
4.3.1
4.3.2
4.3.3