Having a home of our own is essential to leading a dignified life, but in Venezuela, where access to housing is enshrined as a right in the Constitution, renting adequate accommodation is an unattainable luxury for hundreds of thousands of families, and buying property is almost impossible. Not only do market prices far exceed the average household income but inflation has also wiped out home loans, leaving citizens without access to financing.

By the end of 2024, 70 per cent of Venezuelan households had a monthly income of between US$150 and US$300, an amount insufficient to cover the cost of rent, forcing many families to lower their living standards or seek increasingly precarious and improvised housing options. Nairobi Lara, a 30-year-old single mother, is one such example.

She lives with her son in a room in Petare, the largest and most poverty-stricken informal settlement in the country. Until last year, she was earning US$300 and paying US$100 for a two-bedroom apartment with a bathroom and kitchen. But with the pay cut at the NGO where she works and the rent increase – applied every six months – she has had to move into one room, where she now sleeps in the same bed as her son.

“I’m currently paying US$80 to live here. But I only earn US$185. That leaves me with US$105 to buy food, pay for school, internet and transport. The truth is, I don’t even have enough money to cover my fixed expenses. I’m really struggling. That’s why I had to give up a room, so that I’d still have somewhere to live. I squeezed into the other one, as best I could, with just the bare essentials,” she tells Equal Times.

Organisations from the trade union world, such as Central ASI Venezuela, have long been calling for a fair pay policy that would enable the country’s workers to meet their housing costs, something that is currently no more than a “pipe dream” given their “zero ability to pay”.

UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, uses a housing affordability indicator. According to this benchmark, housing costs should not exceed 30 per cent of household income. In Lara’s case, the figure is 43 per cent, exceeding the threshold by 13 points. This makes it very difficult for her to cover other basic needs such as food, healthcare and education.

In addition to rents being unaffordable, the living conditions do not warrant the prices paid. Lara does not have daily access to drinking water. If she is lucky, it comes twice a week. Nor does she have mains gas. These shortfalls not only affect her living standards but those of the eight out of ten Venezuelan households that rely on alternative water sources – most of them unsafe – for their daily household needs.

And no, the housing crisis is not being suffered in silence: people are protesting. In 2024, 1,299 demonstrations were held in Venezuela for the right to decent housing. That averages out at three per day, making it the second most common cause for protest in the country, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict. Women, who are the heads of household in 65 per cent of cases in Venezuela, headed most of these protests.

“The demand for decent and affordable housing was a constant feature of the protests in Venezuela, reflecting the urgent need for decent living conditions for thousands of families in the country. Faced with government inaction and the lack of effective policies, citizens resort to protest as a means of pressure, to give visibility to their situation and demand concrete solutions,” notes the report on social conflict in Venezuela in 2024, published in February.

Solutions in sight?

The housing shortage in Venezuela continues to rise as public investment in housing falls to historic lows. In 2023, at least 10 per cent – three million people – of an estimated population of 30 million were in highly or moderately vulnerable situations due to the lack of access to decent housing, according to the National Survey of Living Conditions (Encovi).

Although the Constitution establishes the right to “adequate, safe, comfortable, hygienic housing with essential basic services”, the budget allocated to the sector shows a different reality. That same year, the Ministry of Habitat and Housing received just 0.41 per cent of the national budget approved by Parliament.

For Cristofer Correia, a specialist in housing, habitat and cities at the Ibero-American Centre for Strategic Urban Development, the investment needed to remedy the situation is considerably higher: at least 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). In Caracas alone, integrating informal settlements into the urban structure would require a minimum investment of US$1.3 billion, according to the expert’s calculations based on recent experiences of urban regeneration in South American cities such as São Paulo and Medellín.

“Yes, it’s a lot, but it amounts to only five per cent of the country’s GDP. And if it is spread out over a five-year plan, the annual investment would be only one percent,” explains Correia.

His proposal moves away from the traditional formula of large-scale housing construction and focuses on integrating low-income groups into urban development. The key, as he told Equal Times and also says in his book Integeneración Urbana Inclusiva (Inclusive Urban Regeneration), is to ensure infrastructure and social facilities, which includes essential services such as water, electricity and transport, as well as suitable environments for education, employment and leisure.

But, again, it is not just a matter of building more housing. While relocation is essential in some cases – especially for families in high-risk areas, such as unstable or landslide-prone terrain – the structural solution involves formalising land tenure and improving conditions within existing neighbourhoods.

“Work is needed to formalise these homes, to provide opportunities and capacity for development. That means issuing documents that certify the legality of the house and the land, as well as creating decent living conditions, such as streets that are wide enough for a refuse collection vehicle or an ambulance to pass through,” says Correia.

Demolishing neighbourhoods and rebuilding them from scratch, as some are proposing, would not be viable, underlines the expert. Not only because of the social impact, but also because the cost would be exorbitant. Building an apartment in any Latin American country costs around US$20,000 per unit, while comprehensive intervention within existing communities – such as that carried out in Comuna 13 in Medellín, which included escalators, libraries and recreational spaces – cost US$4,000 per house.

“That would cost us at least five times less than simply building flats that are often not fit for human habitation, like some of those built under the Great Housing Mission of Venezuela. Not all of them, but certainly some,” he cautions.

Launched in 2011, the Great Housing Mission of Venezuela was presented as a response to the housing shortage, with the construction of social housing for people on very low incomes and those affected by natural disasters. Since then, the Venezuelan government claims to have delivered millions of units, but many of these developments are uninhabitable.

Reports by Transparency Venezuela, the national chapter of Transparency International, have denounced that some of them were built on geological faults, which has caused pipes to collapse, sewage collection systems to fail, walls to crack and subsidence.

The average cost has been US$60,000, according to figures from the Maduro government itself, which has promised to build two million more during its new term, from 2025 to 2030. If this pledge is fulfilled, it would mean building 333,000 homes a year. Correia, however, questions the plan’s economic viability.

“The national budget for 2025 is US$22 billion. If Maduro really were to build two million homes at the cheapest price indicated by his own government of US$60,000 per unit, the total cost would be US$20 billion, which is equivalent to 90 per cent of the national budget,” he calculated.

What about the market?

Buying or renting in the most impoverished areas of Venezuelan cities has become, for many, the only option available with the collapse of lending and rising prices on the formal property market. It is a lifeline of sorts in an adverse economic climate. Thirty-three-year-old Dennis Linares, for instance, managed to purchase a 60-square-metre home in El Guarataro, a low-income community in western Caracas, in 2023. He previously lived in a small studio flat in San Agustín, which he also owned.

“We sold our previous house, and with the money from that sale, and after having saved a little, we put everything together to buy this one. It took us two years. We couldn’t get a mortgage,” he says.

Although he now has more space, Dennis admits to feeling overwhelmed by his surroundings: endless staircases, shacks on either side and constant water supply failures. Still, he believes that owning something, even in a vulnerable area, is better than paying an exorbitant rent with no guarantees. “They ask for three months’ deposit and up to a year’s rent in advance. It’s impossible,” he says.

Economist Jesús Castillo, a professor at Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) and consultant at Ecoanalítica, warns that with mortgage lending “almost completely restricted”, households’ mobility and prospects for progress are severely limited. “This means a structural problem,” he says. In the past, between 70 and 80 per cent of homes were purchased with financing, but with that option no longer available, demand has stagnated.

“Almost a quarter of the country’s population has left. And that means there is availability and supply in terms of housing, but the supply remains structurally expensive for a market where there is no access to credit and people are impoverished,” says Castillo.

Some private initiatives have attempted to offer financing plans, but these are not viable for most people. As a result, many families have been forced to share housing. “Multifamily households have emerged,” explains Castillo. “You grow up in your grandmother’s house, you have children, who in turn start having children. It’s a family with great-grandparents and even great-grandchildren living in the house. Venezuelans are unable to leave home and live independently, so this is what happens.”

Housing in Venezuela has ceased to be a stepping stone to well-being and has instead become an obstacle course marked by precariousness, inequality and a lack of real options. Having a decent home is still, to this day, not a right but a privilege. In the absence of sustained public policies, decent wages, accessible credit and comprehensive urban solutions, thousands of families are forced to move to vulnerable areas, share living space or forego minimum standards of habitability. The situation in the country is moving it further and further away from the global goal set by the United Nations of ensuring access to adequate, safe and affordable housing by 2030.