“MEVIR encarna lo mejor de nuestro país: hacer las cosas bien, el cuidado, comunidad, y alegrarse del otro (MEVIR embodies the best of our country: doing things well, taking care of things, community, and rejoicing in each other).” These are words which Luis Lacalle Pou, President of Uruguay, chose to lead his speech at an inauguration of MEVIR homes in Casupá, a town of 2,400 people 110 kilometers northeast of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. As Lacalle’s presence at this event suggests, MEVIR is a political gold mine. The organization delivers its policies reliably, meeting its promises both on time and within planned budgets.
Luis Lacalle Pou, President of Uruguay, speaks at an inauguration of MEVIR homes in Casupá, Florida Department (photo by author 29 February 2024).
How do you house the rural poor at a national scale? This question drove one of the most audacious social policies in twentieth-century Latin America. Guided by the slogan, “To see it rain from inside without getting wet”, MEVIR, short for Movimiento Pro Erradicación de la Vivienda Insalubre Rural (Movement for the Eradication of Unhealthy Rural Housing) was founded in 1967 to provide dignified living for rural laborers, many of whom who had previously resided in precarious dwellings, often made of mud and straw. Over more than five decades, MEVIR, a parastatal entity, has built over 33,000 homes and is present in almost every small town across in Uruguay. After making rent payments for twenty years, residents can sign deeds to become owners of their homes. A sui generis effort to bring housing policy, urban planning, formal homeownership, and a sense of community to remote areas, MEVIR serves as a brake on rural-to urban migration, keeping people rooted in the places they call home and away from informal settlements on the outskirts of cities. In the predominantly urban field of social housing, MEVIR is a rare case of best practices in a rural setting.
This postage stamp, on display in the MEVIR office, commemorates the institution’s fiftieth anniversary. It depicts the contrast between MEVIR homes and the insalubrious dwellings of mid-twentieth century rural Uruguay. These last often hosted the chagas disease-carrying vinchuca bug (photo by author, 25 October 2022).
To those unfamiliar with Uruguay, 33,000 homes and counting may not seem such an impressive statistic. This amounts to around three percent of Uruguay’s national population. However, this is a truly significant result for rural Uruguay. The Oriental Republic of Uruguay, so named because it lies to the east of the Uruguay River, is a country of 3.5 million, one where half of the population lives in and around the capital, and most of the other half reside in the capitals of the 18 interior departamentos (akin to counties) or in beach towns. Targeting dispersed rural areas and towns of 5,000 people or less, MEVIR is synonymous with social housing in most of the places where it builds. In some of the most out-of-the-way places, MEVIR is synonymous with housing period, constituting the entirety of the housing stock. Especially in these remote locales, having a home of your own means having a MEVIR home. This means not just having a roof over your head but living in a well-built and dignified dwelling.
MEVIR homes in Cerro Chato, Treinta y Tres Department (photo by author, 20 July 2017).
As the title of my recently completed doctoral dissertation in Geography at UCLA, More Than a Home: Dwelling, Place, and Poverty in Rural Uruguay, implies, MEVIR’s aims are not simply to house people. The institution pursues a more holistic vision of development, one aimed at improving economic production, social-well-being, and the surrounding environment. As stated on its website and often paraphrased in events by its officials, MEVIR sees housing as “one element in a complex system where various factors act in a balanced way: territory, the production of goods and services, the human being in community, community services, and physical infrastructures.” This attitude is true in both modalities through which MEVIR builds homes: groups of nucleated homes achieved through mutual aid for families lacking property, and individual homes for working families who own property, but do not have sufficient capital with which to build a new home or to remodel their current one.
This map was displayed by MEVIR at the institution’s stand at the 2024 Fiesta Nacional del Pollo y de la Gallina (National Chicken and Hen Festival) in San Bautista, Canelones. It shows the localities where MEVIR has built homes or other infrastructure as of December 2022. This map is almost inversely proportional to a map Uruguay’s population density. The orange icons represent places where MEVIR has recently begun building homes made from wood (photo by author, 4 February 2024).
In More Than a Home, I argue that MEVIR’s sustained effectiveness in housing the rural poor and winning the support of actors across Uruguayan politics and civil society comes down mainly to three factors. First, there has been a clearly defined objective, rooted in the Catholic conscience of its founder Alberto Gallinal (1909-1994), to improve the quality and quantity of the housing stock for the poor in a specific geographical context. Second is a time-tested methodology of policy implementation. MEVIR is not simply a housing builder. Instead, it executes every stage from research to homeownership in a process of positive social and spatial transformation, one that crafts participants, builders, and neighbors rather than beneficiaries and bystanders. Third is MEVIR’s sensitivity to the scales and places where it operates, from the house to the nation. As my travels with MEVIR technicians to all nineteen departments of Uruguay illustrate, MEVIR vindicates the power of geographic knowledge.
August 1971 photograph of Alberto Gallinal in Pueblo Celeste, Salto Department (image courtesy of Rosario Bisio and the Grupo de Vecinos de Nuevo Valentín).
Funded by various sources, including a grant from the UCLA Latin American Institute, More Than a Home draws on twenty-two months of fieldwork in Uruguay, including analysis of archival documents on MEVIR’s founding in the Archivo General de la Nación, observation of the MEVIR office and MEVIR field sites, and interviews of over forty actors involved in MEVIR throughout its history.
Each MEVIR home bears a plaque with the organization’s logo depicting the rufous hornero, or red ovenbird (Furnarius rufus). Each house also receives a number, situating it historically in the chronological order in which MEVIR homes have been built. The design of these plaques are symbolic of how MEVIR has modernized along its more than five decades. On the left is a hand-painted hornero from the early 1970s in Sacachispas, Soriano Department (photo by author, 17 July 2022). On the right is a stack of horneros ready to be placed on new homes in Capilla del Sauce, Florida Department (photo by author, 13 September 2022).
Ensuring that people of modest means can satisfy the fundamentally human desire for a dignified dwelling to call home is an enduring ethical challenge worldwide. Learning about MEVIR’s origins, evolution, and outcomes can inform scholars and policymakers about how, why, where, at what rate, and with whose support, homes can be better built for the poor. Several aspects of MEVIR explain its success relative to more widely known national scale housing programs, including Mexico’s INFONAVIT, Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida, and Colombia’s Viviendas 100% Subsidiadas. First, as a parastatal and non-partisan organization, MEVIR has been able to maintain close contact with state networks and resources while remaining less susceptible to regime change and political patronage. Second, MEVIR’s focus on incremental growth and on modestly sized construction sites have helped it avoid expanding beyond its means. Third, there is an iterative relationship between service provider and recipient that elicits greater trust and continuity than when making purely modular housing interventions. How MEVIR uses sweat equity is instrumental to why poor Uruguayans brave a long and demanding process to build and live in a MEVIR home. Lastly, MEVIR’s holistic notion of habitat and territory illustrates the broader point that the implementation of housing policy is best mediated through place.
MEVIR architect Alejandro Plada (with his hand on a map of the boundaries for an upcoming plan of homes) and the social worker Margarita Lasarte (to Plada’s left) interview local actors at Rural School # 60 near San Gregorio de Polanco, Tacuarembó Department. Plada, Lasarte, and MEVIR agronomist María Delia Núñez (out of the picture to Plada’s right) ask questions about all aspects of the vicinity, from employment to transportation to leisure. Only after forty-five minutes do the MEVIR technicians begin to ask about housing (photo by author, 8 July 2022).
Beyond its value to scholars and practitioners of housing, MEVIR illustrates the particularities of Uruguay within the wider field of Latin American studies. MEVIR is a development project entirely due to domestic agency. It was created by and is administered by Uruguayans for Uruguayans and was never imposed by outside agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, or IABD. MEVIR has long recognized that housing is experienced not simply as an objective good, but as a place saturated with emotion and identity. Never straying from its mission to improve housing access in rural areas, MEVIR has thrived since 1967 under twelve years of dictatorship (1973-1985) and decades of democratic regimes led by different parties. This is in large part because of its sensitivity to a specific geographic context, influenced by terrain and climate, social relations, cultural preferences, land use patterns, and the juridical constraints of the nation-state. Understanding why MEVIR works as a housing solution requires understanding Uruguayan geography. Conversely, MEVIR does provide a general recipe, or at the very least, a data point, on how to address a universal moral concern: the need to dwell.
The architect Federico Becerra (white hard hat) and the skilled construction worker Miguel Ojeda (yellow hard hat), both MEVIR employees, work with a participant (blue hard hat) on the obra, a word that cleverly signifies both “construction site” and “work” as in “a work of art” or “a life’s work”, in Capilla del Sauce (photo by author, 7 April 2022).
Using such concepts from humanistic geography as topophilia and geopiety, I argue place is not a static backdrop on which MEVIR homes are built. It serves instead as a significant factor in the life of the homes before, during, and after their construction. This is true at the scale of a town or a neighborhood, but also at that of the nation. Uruguay has a storied history of policy innovations, ranging from legalizing divorce by the will of the woman in 1912 to legalizing marijuana in 2013. MEVIR’s genesis and impact are part of this vanguardism made possible in part by Uruguay’s relatively benign geography. Uruguay’s search for identity has long involved finding ways to differentiate itself from Brazil and Argentina, its much larger and better resource-endowed neighbors. Furthermore, Uruguay is a middle-income country with fewer extremes between rich and poor than any other Latin American nation. The lessons to be learned from studying MEVIR span both the developing world and developed worlds.
Memory plays an important role in MEVIR. Leonel and Orfilia, participants in Paso de Pache, Canelones Department, celebrate signing their deed. They show a picture of Orfilia at the inauguration of homes in the late 1990s (photo by author, 30 May 2022).
Given MEVIR’s continuity and stability, it is intuitive to inquire where the institution might look to expand outside of Uruguay. The problem with government policies, laws, and public entities, however, is that they can only be applied within the country to which they pertain. It would thus be more realistic to ask about where beyond Uruguay would be best suited to implementing a MEVIR-like program. For reasons of place specificity, any attempts towards a close replica of MEVIR are likely a futile exercise. The operative question, therefore, is not whether MEVIR can be copied but rather what combination of its features are transferrable in any given place. A confluence of conditions has made it possible for MEVIR to thrive. Among these realities are a democracy that shares power between parties and mediates interests across classes, an earlier lack of market and state provision of a service (well-built and dignified housing) in a specific geographical context (rural areas), access to land at a suitable scale and cost, and a middle-income country with relative social uniformity. These factors which have uniquely aligned in Uruguay should not prohibit other countries or sub-national polities from following MEVIR’s lead in attempting to build housing for people of modest means in rural areas using mutual aid construction and providing a path to property ownership. Any MEVIR-inspired program will work best where it fills a niche, identifying and addressing social problems with a high degree of precision beyond a general urge to alleviate a “housing crisis”.
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Samuel T. Brandt completed his PhD in Geography at UCLA in June 2024. This fall, he will begin a four-year Research Fellowship in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.