The owners of the city. With that name she titled the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) the report in which they analyze the characteristics of the owners in CABA. Do they have a large number of properties or do they only have the home they live in? In what parts of the city are your properties located? What is the incidence of vacant land? Are we facing a phenomenon of great concentration of real estate? They wonder. Some numbers serve to answer: The 10% of owners with the most properties in CABA concentrate more than a third of the total urban land.
According to the Government Administration of Public Revenues (AGIP), there are 1,028,022 individuals and legal entities that have at least 50% of a property in the City of Buenos Aires. All its properties add up to 1,523,651 declared properties. Each owner has, on average, 1.5 properties.
The natural persons who own them each have, on average, 1.4 properties, while the legal entities have 5.1. The 10% of natural and legal persons with the highest tax valuation concentrate 60% of the total tax value of the city, and the 1% of those with the highest value concentrate 35%. The authors Fernando Bercovich, Camilo D’Aloisio and Catalina Marino, reveal that and96.5% of the owners are natural persons and only 3.5% are legal entities. However, these entities own 11.9% of Buenos Aires properties.. “Are we facing a phenomenon of great concentration of real estate in the City of Buenos Aires?” they question.
72.3% of the natural and legal persons who own it have only one property, 16.7% have
two, and 11% have at least three properties. «The 10% of the physical and legal owners of the CABA that have the most properties in their possession concentrate 33% of the total properties in the city, while 1% concentrates 12% of the total«, they highlight.
wastelands
The commune where the properties are concentrated in the smallest number of owners is 1 (Retiro, San Nicolás, Puerto Madero, San Telmo, Monserrat and Constitución), where each one has, on average, 1.8 properties. It is followed by 14 (Palermo), 13 (Belgrano, Núñez and Colegiales) and 2 (Recoleta).
Recent studies indicate that in the City of Buenos Aires There are around 13% empty homes, which is equivalent to more than 200,000 units. “An increase of 4 percentage points from 2018 to today,” he points out. Fernando Bercovich, sociologist of the ACIJ’s Right to the City program.
Vacant lands constitute another form of idleness on which, in most cases, dozens of homes could be built. According to the AGIP, in the City of Buenos Aires there are 6,472 vacant lots declared. “It’s equivalent to about one vacant lot every two blocks,” Bercovich notes.
Vacant lands have very different concentration characteristics than real estate in general. 68.2% of these lands belong to legal entities and less than a third to individuals, a substantial difference compared to ownership of the entire property which, as already mentioned, belong 88% to natural persons and 12% to legal entities
The commune 12 (Coghlan, Saavedra, Villa Urquiza and Villa Pueyrredón) is the one that contains the greatest amount of vacant land, although considering every thousand properties the incidence is higher in the communes 8 (Villa Soldati, Villa Lugano and Villa Riachuelo), 9 (Avellaneda Park, Liniers and Mataderos) and 4 (Barracas, La Boca, Nueva Pompeya and Parque Patricios).
Landlords and tenants
In the City of Buenos Aires, the 40.3% of households are made up of people who live in a home they own. This percentage has been in sustained decline since 2003, when it represented 65.5% of households.. In contrast, the number of those who rent reaches 38.9%, the highest figure in decades. In a context of deregulated rents, with increases above inflation, the scenario is critical.
By contrast, Those who live in their own house and land are 40.3% of Buenos Aires households, a percentage that has been steadily declining since 2003, when it represented 65.5% of households. On the other hand, the percentage of the population that has precarious housing tenure, according to the Annual Household Survey of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, is 12.7%.
This dynamic also occurs in a period in which the city’s population remained relatively stable and housing construction grew continuously.
Bercovich points out that the Concentration is a phenomenon that occurs in many large cities, especially European ones.where large homeowners are a major player in the rental market: “for example in Spain and Portugal, very attracted by foreign investments with certain facilities from the State that later end up being problematic because there are owners of many homes who put a very high rental price.
“This is a problem that is not very present even in Buenos Aires,” he clarifies, “but there is a ‘natural’ tendency toward concentration in many large cities because good quality urban land is increasingly scarce, it is more expensive and There are very few who can buy it. Those who do not have a home are increasingly further away from having one, and those who already have one have easier access to a larger property.«.
How to avoid greater concentration? Bercovich responds: «For there to be less concentration it must happen that those who have zero properties have some, and those who have 20 have fewer, For this, the role of the State is important.generating policies so that people in a position to contract a mortgage loan can do so, and also generating the necessary taxes so that people with many highly valued properties pay the corresponding taxes, and with that money collected, access policies are financed. the House”.
One thing is clear: the City has had the same number of inhabitants for decades (three million) but more and more is being built. The authors conclude: “In debates about the situation of people who rent, In general, the other part of the contractual relationship: the owners of the homes. Although there is a widespread perception that the rental market in Buenos Aires – and in Argentina in general – is not structured around companies or large owners, there is no conclusive data that supports or refutes this perception.
