After being removed from the process of revitalisation of the port zone, the Ministry of Cities was ordered in 2015 to free the use of 1.5 billion reals worth of national insurance funds for additional financial support, apart from the 8.5 billion already spent on the revitalisation. This was under the Dilma Rousseff government (PT party).
The Ministry demanded to attach the money to the production of a Plan for Social Housing (PHIS) “in a participatory form” for the Port. The plan had as a target the creation of 10,000 homes for people on low incomes in the area.
“To make affordable homes, it is necessary to concentrate on those areas where there is availability, where the price of land doesn’t make it unviable,” said president of Cdurp Alberto Silva.
As it was already promised to real estate companies, a large part of the public land could not be used for affordable housing any more. So the Plan for Social Housing was forced to migrate to those districts surrounding the Marvellous Port.
One problem is that the plan ignores the presence of about 1,000 people who live in the region’s corticos, according to research by the Observatorio das Metropoles e da Central de Movimentos Populares.
The port zone is the area of the city with the most coticos, and there is no plan for their future.
In 2016, there were 710 rooms spread out in 54 corticos, and more than half of these were between nine and 12 metres squared. Thirteen were even smaller, with rooms varying from between four and eight metres squared.