 |
| Carmen Martínez says she hopes she can finally repair her house in Havana. Photo: Jose Goitia for The New York Times |
By Victoria Burnett, The New York Times, February 15, 2012
HAVANA — As
fixer-uppers go, Carmen Martínez’s derelict shotgun house is no cakewalk. The
living-room roof collapsed 15 years ago, and the porch soon followed suit,
leaving two teetering columns with nothing to hold up. The bathroom is a
squalid privy, and the kitchen consists of a sink with no taps and two oil
drums full of water.
But roofs — even
half-missing ones — are a hot commodity these days in Havana, which has been
swept by a bout of real estate fever. So Yoél Bacallao, a 35-year-old
entrepreneur, offered to repair Ms. Martínez’s dilapidated house for free on
one condition: that she let him build an apartment of his own on top of it.
“It was as if a ray
of light had come down from the sky,” said Ms. Martínez, 41, who would hang
laundry in the roofless living room and sweep furiously during rainstorms to
keep the rest of the house from flooding. “I have been watching this house fall
apart around me for years.”
All over the
capital and in many provincial towns, Cubans are beginning to inject money into
the island’s ragged real estate, spurred by government measures to stimulate
construction and a new law that allows them to trade property for the first
time in 50 years.
The measures are
President Raúl Castro’s biggest maneuver yet as he
strives to get capital flowing on the island, encourage private enterprise and
take pressure off the economically crippled state.
For decades, the
government banned real estate sales and kept a jealous grip on construction.
Materials were scarce, red tape endless and inspectors meddlesome. Black
marketeers would deliver cinder blocks by cover of darkness, and purchasing a
bag of sand was a furtive process akin to buying drugs.
But during the past
two months the state has reduced paperwork, stocked construction stores,
legalized private contractors and begun offering homeowners subsidies and
credits.
On many streets,
the chip of hammers and gritty slosh of cement mixing rises above the sparse
traffic as Cubans paint facades, build extensions or gut old houses. Still, it
is generally small-scale stuff: Mr. Bacallao, who has savings from his business
repairing mobile phones, expects to spend about $10,000 on his project.
“Before, you had to
sneak a bag of cement here, a bag of cement there,” he said. Mr. Bacallao, who
rents a tiny apartment with his girlfriend, built a rooftop house three
years ago, but the state confiscated it because he could not explain how he
came by the materials. If this house works out, he will move his daughters to
Havana from the provinces.
“Now I can explain
where I got the materials,” he said. “I can explain where I got the money. No
problem.”
Behind scruffy
porticos and walls of bougainvillea, the wheels of the property trade are
turning. Unofficial brokers — who are still outlawed in Cuba
— say they have never been so busy, trawling the streets and the Internet for
leads and fielding calls from prospective buyers.
Cubisima,
an online classified service, said the number of hits on its real estate page
tripled to an average of 900 per day after the new property law took effect on Nov. 10.
The law allows Cubans to buy and sell their houses, and even own a second home
outside the cities, though it still bars most foreigners from buying.
It is a crude
market, where househunters rely on word of mouth and prices are based as much
on excitement as on any clear sense of property values, according to interviews
with homeowners, brokers and experts. Buyers, who at the top end are mainly
Cuban émigrés and Cubans married to foreigners, often declare a fraction of
what they pay, and money sometimes changes hands overseas, suggesting that the
government’s hope of reaping significant tax revenues may be at least partly
thwarted.
On a recent day, a
stylish flight attendant showed a viewer around the pretty three-bedroom home
she hopes will fetch $150,000; a mile away, an elderly widow held out for an
offer of $500,000 for her big, unkempt 1950s house — to be deposited in Spain,
please.
Many sellers plan
to downsize, so they can live better or leave. Victoria Pérez, a retired
doctor, put her spacious house and two-bedroom annex on sale last month for
$80,000. She hopes to buy something smaller and put aside about $20,000 to live
on and visit her daughter in the United States.
“To earn $20,000
would take 20 years,” she said. “This opens up a whole world of opportunities.”
Statistics are few,
and brokers admit that the curious outnumber the serious. The National Housing
Institute processed just 364 sales in the three weeks after the new law took
effect.
“Prices are very
inflated,” complained a Cuban-Canadian who was viewing a mint-colored
four-bedroom house priced at $240,000 one recent afternoon. He said he would
watch the market for a month or two to see how things shook out.
Steep price tags
notwithstanding, experts and brokers say there are signs that the better-off
are starting to migrate to areas like Miramar, Havana’s embassy district, and
build vacation homes on the coast.
“There is
definitely a rearrangement going on,” said Carlos García Pleyan, a sociologist
who worked for decades for the Cuban government’s urban planning department.
Other than Cuban
émigrés, he said, the gentrifiers were “the winners of the Cuba of recent
years.”
“People who have
made money legally, and people who have made money illegally,” he said.
“Businesspeople, maybe a restaurant owner, maybe someone who owns taxis, maybe
someone who has made money through corruption.”
“We shouldn’t be
worrying so much about how people rearrange themselves,” he added. “We should
be asking ourselves how such large social inequalities have happened.”
While the new
market dynamics helped Ms. Martínez, some worry they will do little to solve
the housing problems faced by many Cubans, whose wallets would not stretch even
to buy a $3,000 one-bedroom apartment.
“It’s all very well
for those who have money or who have a relative abroad; but if not, forget it,”
said Luis Martínez, a construction worker (who is not related to Carmen). “My
son is 18. The only way he’ll ever leave home is if he marries a girl who has a
house.”
If anyone needed a
reminder of Cuba’s critical housing problem, they got one in January, when a
building collapsed in central Havana, killing four people. Miguel Coyula, an
architect who specializes in urban planning, said an average of three buildings
collapsed in Havana each day, victims of neglect, overcrowding and improvised
construction. Well over 100,000 people are waiting to move to government
hostels.
Mr. Pleyan
estimated that it would cost about $3.6 billion to build the 600,000 houses
Cuba needs, according to the government. Independent estimates are more than double
that. The creation of construction and housing cooperatives is one step being
discussed: such arrangements would reduce building costs and allow groups of
individuals to build, say, a small apartment block.
But Mr. Pleyan said
Cuba would also have to open wider to foreign investment and look for models
that would balance public interests and private profit, by, for example,
encouraging developers to build local infrastructure.
Such projects will
not happen quickly — if at all — and Ms. Martínez feels lucky that she salvaged
her home before she and her family had to abandon it. Once the roof is on, she
said, she would like to get running water in her kitchen, replace the toilet
and finish building a bedroom for her teenage son.
“I need taps,
doors, windows, tiles; everything needs fixing,” she said, looking at the
stained walls and rotten shutters of her bedroom.
“Little by little,”
she added. “Little by little.”
No comments:
Post a Comment