Radical Housing Journal, 2018

Vol 1(2): xx-xx

The fight of housing

cooperatives against
gentrification in the Historic
Centre of San Salvador

Natalia Quiñónez
Fundación Salvadoreña de Desarrollo y Vivienda Mínima
(FUNDASAL)

Abstract

The Historic Centre of San Salvador, in El Salvador’s capital city,

hosts a history of disputes regarding access to land, housing, public
spaces and basic services. In this article, the struggle of the centre’s
inhabitants for more decent housing is an example of how people
can change power relations embedded in cities as contested as
Latin Americans: through cooperative organisation, they
reclaimed their right to be part of urban transformations.
Although the central government has faced challenges for
Natalia Quiñónez is a assimilating and supporting their proposals, which imply
Salvadoran economist currently collectivization of property and bottom-up decision-making, joint
studying a Masters programme in coordination is providing results. Allowing space for their
Sustainable Territorial
Development at KU Leuven,
participation in the policy-making level has enabled cooperatives
Belgium. At FUNDASAL, she to become firm opponents of informal rentiership and land
worked with housing underutilization. Results so far constitute an unprecedented
cooperatives from the project attempt of developing adequate housing from a human right’s
evaluation area. perspective, not as a commodity. The housing cooperatives in San
Contact: [email protected]
Salvador’s Centro Histórico, to this end, might provide some
insightful lessons of resistance.

Keywords
housing cooperatives, informal rental markets, collective
property, historic centres, Latin America.

www.radicalhousingjournal.org
ISSN 2632-2870
 Quiñónez 2

Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to all leaders and members of the Salvadoran Federation of Housing
Cooperative Associations by Mutual Aid (FESCOVAM) for not giving up their struggle.
Same goes to my former colleagues at the Salvadoran Foundation of Development and Social
Housing (FUNDASAL) and We Effect, for their support to the housing cooperatives
movement in Central America.

Introduction

The experience recalled in this article comes from a housing cooperatives movement
evolving into an important stakeholder in the city’s revitalization, advocating for better living
conditions for the most impoverished. The definition of land use in the Historic Centre,
usually in favour of the interests of the private sector, is one of the main factors contributing
to their precariousness. Proliferation of informal rent markets controlling who has access to
decent housing is a byproduct of territorial development under the neoliberal paradigm of
governance. From the commodification of the centre’s cultural assets and heritage value,
incipient gentrification processes have started to set their own foundations.
The objective of this article is to discuss how the housing cooperatives’ experience in taking
their alternative model of housing, conceptualised as a human right to be collectively
produced and owned, reached the policy-making level. From its successes and challenges,
some lessons can be drawn, as well as reflections upon the importance of supporting
autonomous resistance efforts in aiming at higher institutional levels of action. In behalf of
local inhabitants’ rightful claims for access to urban land, decent housing and the city, it is
necessary to reflect on how they can take part of urban revitalization processes. Several
alternatives, such as the one proposed by housing cooperatives, certainly exist and are
gradually getting more visibility. Within a deep-rooted institutional tradition of prioritising
private interests in the configuration of cities, can counterproposals of this kind have space?

1. Housing insecurity in the Historic Centre of San Salvador and the

informality behind it

Despite being located at the very heart of the capital since its colonial genesis and Republican
apogee, the Historic Centre of San Salvador has faced decades of abandonment and
degradation. After enduring the impact of the October 1986 earthquake and a 12 yearlong
civil war, high income families, governmental institutions and most commercial activities left
the centre to decay. In addition, the absence of clear state policies that aim for the centre’s
recovery facilitated social and economic inequalities to reproduce (Barba and Córdoba, 2001:
 Quiñónez 3

14-15). Within it, a vibrant socioeconomic tissue of transients, small and micro-
entrepreneurs, street vendors and inhabitants subsists.
The most impoverished population of the centre lives in highly precarious conditions, part
of a housing backlog that relegates low income households to reside in insecure and
overcrowded dwellings, with limited access to basic services. This typology of housing,
commonly referred to as mesones, were formerly built to house high class families during
the 19th and 20th centuries, and have not had proper maintenance. No less than 75 per cent
of mesones are made of deteriorating wood, metal, plastic and other reused items with a high
risk of provoking fires. They are subdivided into rooms (called piezas, around 40 m2 each)
rented to family groups, while facilities for basic services (water and restrooms, for example)
are shared among all tenant families in common areas (see Figure 1). Despite all, eight out
of every ten inhabitants wish to remain in the centre, due to how wellconnected it is and the
strength of local social networks (FUNDASAL, 2005a: 137).

Figure 1
Families living in Mesón Palacios,
at the core of the Historic
Centre of San Salvador,
collaborate with household
chores. Mesón Palacios currently
houses over 19 families
organized in a housing
cooperative, one that will
benefit from an upcoming State
revitalisation programme.
Source: Amal Achaibou.

Mesones are also the most impoverished households’ only choice for remaining in the area,
mainly because of their affordability: a monthly rent for a room can cost them no more than
15 per cent of what they earn in a month. In consequence, they shelter up to 95 per cent of
the centre’s lowest income families, which are almost a third of the total population
(FUNDASAL, 2005a; UNDP and FUNDASAL, 2009: 58). Still, mesones owners and
managers can extract profit, mainly by rooting in informality. They have thrived on the basis
of oral agreements instead of formal rental contracts, silent evictions (and threats thereof),
harassment from ‘property managers’ and defining arbitrarily the rental fees tenants have to
pay (FUNDASAL, 2005a; Herrera and Martín-Baró, 1978: 821). They constitute a small-
scale, specific rental market whose functioning depends from keeping the formal options out
of reach for the poorest population: in El Salvador, 82 per cent of families with a lower
income level than the average are in housing deficit, while only 33 per cent of the total
 Quiñónez 4

population have access to the formal land and housing market (Guevara &Arce, 2016: 69;
UN-HABITAT, 2013: 3).
The Historic Centre’s situation mirrors the one happening at national scale. Here, where
private sector agents –property or landowners, construction and real estate companies and
banks– are the main actors defining where and how housing is produced and who has access
to it. The rental market of mesones benefits mainly a group of rentier capitalist individuals who
have owned the properties for decades, obtained as a safe investment that improves its
profitability with the expansion of urban development. They started to prosper under the
protection of the Ley de Inquilinato (‘Tenancy Act’) applicable since 1958, one that has been
overlooked by owners and managers in order to ensure profitability (González et al., 2013:
41).
The existence of a strong speculative market based on land and built-up assets in the centre
should not be disregarded either. Estimations of latent vacant land area only in the Historic
Centre of San Salvador can rise up to 45 per cent of its total area, considering idle, abandoned
and underutilised plots. In a country with no land taxation instruments, speculation on vacant
land, particularly where public investments for urban expansion and regeneration take place,
serves the purpose of maximising profits for a few (Lungo, 1999; as cited in Araujo, 2003).
In this context, the State can hardly compete with the private sector as a supply agent in the
housing market: it lacks the necessary financial and institutional capacities and the few
solutions it provides for have not ensured real access to adequate living conditions for the
population in need. Also, despite the efforts made on creating policies and legislation that
reorganise how territorial development governance is structured, competent institutions
remain dispersed and/or lack resources to operate.
These structural conditions have prevailed thanks to a neoliberal framework of policy-
making that has reduced the State’s role in favour of commodifying land and housing in a
liberalised market-driven economy. (UN-HABITAT, 2013: 95; Ferrufino, 2014: 13). Families
living in mesones, for instance, are often excluded from social housing programmes and
acquiring subsidized loans with public financial institutions, due to their limited debt
capacity. To change this, alternative solutions require discussing three key aspects: the
interests or needs prioritised in policy-making, the role played by the State and the
predominance of private property in the politics behind access to land, housing and the city
as a whole.

2. Setting the path to gentrification: contextual elements and concepts for

analysis

While housing for the poor remains controlled by informal rental markets, the Historic
Centre of San Salvador is also disputed for the different values its built-up environment
 Quiñónez 5

holds. Apart from residential buildings, the centre is characterised by having many public
spaces and edifices valued as heritage sites, surrounded by commercial activities and services.
The perimeters of the area now recognised as the Centro Histórico were officially declared a
‘heritage zone’ in 2008, a milestone in terms of policy-making for the area (Decree nº 680,
2008). Since then, local government authorities have paid more attention to the centre
because of its potential for attracting commercial and other tourism-related investments.
For this aim, latest interventions made by the Municipality of San Salvador include projects
of façade restoration and renovation of buildings categorised as tangible heritage assets,
installation of video surveillance systems, refurbishment of public plazas and conversion of
streets into pedestrian-only zones (see Figure 2). From 2012 onwards, it has invested more
than USD$4 million for these projects, according to former Mayors’ public declarations (see
Table 1). Cultural revitalisation projects have also taken place, attempting to highlight the
centre’s‘intangible heritage’ but to make visible recently renewed projects as well.
Table 1. Revitalization interventions developed by public authorities in the Historic Centre
of San Salvador since 2012.
Type of Site(s) Cost (in Funding sources (when Year (of
intervention intervened USD$) available) inauguration)
Installation of video 94,000
Various points Municipality of San Salvador 2012
surveillance system (approx.)
Andalucian Agency of
Conversion to 470,000
Arce Street International Cooperation for 2013
pedestrian-only area (approx.)
Development (AACID)
Gerardo
Renovation 1.5 million Municipality of San Salvador 2017
Barrios Plaza
Refurbishment and National Palace 90,000 Municipality of San Salvador (44
2017
exterior lighting and Theater (approx.) %) and Sherwin Williams (56 %)
Renovation Libertad Plaza 1.5 million 2018
Municipality of San Salvador
Renovation Morazán Plaza 895,000 2018
Total estimated cost of all projects: 4.49 million (approx.)
Sources: based on various newpaper articles from Diario El Mundo (2017, 2018) Diario La Página
(2018), El Diario de Hoy (2013, 2017) and InformaTVX (2017).
This does not mean that the Municipality did not try to invest in the improvement of the
centre’s conditions before: since 1995, the local and central governments have been
elaborating plans for the recovery of the centre, primarily understood as the relocation of
informal commerce from the streets and public spaces into new marketplaces. All of them
have yielded more drawbacks than concrete results (Barba and Córdoba, 2001; Espinoza,
2015). For this paper’s purposes though, it is more relevant to look into what has been
recently done and projected for the future. This year, the Municipality revealed a rather
ambitious programme of action, the Corredor Urbano project: it seeks to transform streets and
renovate parks, plazas, marketplaces and museums, to connect them with other green space
project to be inaugurated soon, the Cuscatlán Park. The whole project might cost up to
USD$180 million, with a contribution of USD$11 million by the Municipality. The rest is
 Quiñónez 6

meant to be funded by USAID and private investors (US Embassy, 2019; Diario El Mundo,
2019; La Prensa Gráfica, 2019).

Figure 2
Overview of Historic Centre of
San Salvador, after most recent
renovations. Most of them were
developed by recent Mayors
Nayib Bukele, elected as
upcoming President in the
February 2019 elections, and
Normal Quijano, former
Presidential candidate in 2014.
Source: Wikipedia.

How can this growing interest on renovating the Historic Centre of San Salvador affect the
living conditions of the poor? The Municipality’s attempts to make out of the centre an
attractive urbanscape for middle class passersby and investors have already been confronted
by street vendors and inhabitants. This type of conflicts arise when cities with relevant
heritage value enter processes of ‘touristification’ (turistificación), as Delgadillo (2015) has
described them in his studies on Latin American cities: gentrification trends are strengthened
by the commodification of a city centre’s heritage assets, promoted to incentivize services,
commerce and cultural activities related to the tourism industry. Urban cultural tourism has
the potential of generating important revenues for the conservation of heritage and the
benefit of hosting communities; nevertheless, it is usually promoted for maximising the
profitability investors can obtain by changing land use and developing an exclusively tourism-
oriented economy.
Unlike the Global North, touristification turns historic centres into spaces of fraught
coexistence between the consumers of the commodified city and the low income population,
confined within the degraded spaces and services. These lighter forms of gentrification,
rather than attracting wealthier newcomers as residents, tend to increase the inequality gaps
and oppression exerted by local authorities over the urban poor, only to attract more
potential consumers (Hiernaux, 2003, as cited in Delgadillo, 2015). The socioeconomically
powerless have to endure higher costs of living, which in the longterm denies them access
to the city’ services. Moreover, if their livelihoods are permeated by the economics of
informality, they face more risk of being excluded from renewed areas and the pressure for
migrating, in the case of inhabitants (Janoschka, 2002; López Morales, 2013, as cited in
Delgadillo, 2015). When it comes to them, informality can leave them defenceless from
landlords’ abusive practises and the dangers of eviction (Gunter and Massey, 2017: 30-31).
 Quiñónez 7

In terms of housing for the urban poor, the informality at the base of rental markets benefits
small scale landlords who operate by virtue of the absence or permissiveness of regulatory
frameworks. The capital and land that is required to enter this market is already under the
control of a few (Rodríguez et al, 2018; Soares, 2011). Also, low income populations with
limited financial capacity to afford a house or access credit are not particularly interesting to
big real state agents. Instead, they look for opportunities that different gentrification
dynamics can pose for maximising profits and capturing value. This process implies local
demographic recompositions linked to the segregation, exclusion or displacement of the city
dwellers (Delgadillo, 2015; López-Morales et al, 2014).
The coexistence of these two market dynamics needs, however, a State that plays a role of
mediator and facilitator of several conditions to be met, in order to operate freely without
being confronted. For instance, gentrification stems from capital influencing the production
of space; from capital identifying and settling where private appropriation of urban rent can
be intensified to the maximum extent (López-Morales et al, 2014; Harvey, 2003, as cited in
Rodríguez et al, 2018).
To meet the homogenising (global or local) standards of competitive cities for tourism, the
State has to invest and create regulations and policies accordingly. Touristification is thus
one of the many forms that gentrification can assume, as a manifestation of how cities, under
a neoliberal paradigm, are a byproduct of the private expropriation of value that is collectively
produced. Guided by the neoliberal premise of economic prosperity, the State shrinks and
urban space develops into different types of privatised commodities, and housing is at its
core. In turn, wealth generated by urban development is kept hostage in a few areas and even
fewer hands, to benefit those who can afford access to it, while the marginalised majorities
sink in poverty (Janoschka, 2002; Imilal et al, 2016; Rodríguez et al., 2018).
From the previous elaborations, to fight for the city as a human right in neoliberal societies
seems unthinkable. Shifts in multiple structures and scales are necessary to revert cities’
instrumentalization for reproducing social, economic and political inequalities. The non-
exploitative reproduction of goods and services that satisfy basic needs should be prioritised
in the politics of urban development. Janoschka and Hidalgo (2014: 10) give some hints
about the complexity of the matter: the neoliberal governance systems demand that
institutional debate and decision-making remain depoliticized, markets to define the rules of
the game and majorities at the bottom of the power structures to be silenced. More
specifically, urban policy ends up promoting public-private partnerships, private sector
alliances and cooperation for economic growth, certain schemes of interinstitutional
coordination for enhancing the commodification of the city, among other market-driven
strategies. In all stages of these governance systems, those who do not represent the interests
of real state and financial capitals are rarely considered decisive actors: they can be consulted,
even participate in negotiations and discussion spaces, but almost never have the final
decision on the actions of the State.
 Quiñónez 8

This leaves the people with only a few –but still transitable– paths to regain the grounds of
the urban politics. Given that neoliberal cityscapes are not all the same accross the world,
social movements will also resort to different strategies, tactics and modes of political
activism to claim back cities and housing as human rights. Among this wide myriad of
rebellious inconformities, the organisational and political experience of the housing
cooperative movement from the Historic Centre of San Salvador is an interesting one to
look at; it is an experience of social production of habitat that has been able to scale up.
The concept of social production of habitat refers to organised learning processes through
which people become capable of managing resources, building and giving maintenance of
their own habitat, as a practise of ‘endogenous development’ (Ortiz, 2012: 73). This
translates, in essence, into people producing housing and their surrounding territories to be
protected and defended as human rights, because they contribute to the reproduction of
individual and collective lives. Under this premise, how housing cooperatives in San Salvador
have managed to set a precedent in housing policy-making and governance in a city
threatened by touristification trends, will be analysed.

3. The emergence and evolution of an alternative: birth and development of

housing cooperatives in El Salvador

Housing cooperatives (cooperativas de vivienda por ayuda mutua) emerged during sixties in
Uruguay, from social movements enduring the repression of a military dictatorship: they
transformed working-class families into agents of new urban configuration, capable of
constructing their own houses and communities. Since then, the Ley Nacional de Vivienda
(National Housing Act) has enabled them access to State funding and legal support. As a
result, housing cooperatives turned into “a sort of floating device for social segments that,
up to that moment, had only been capable of building themselves a house with their
economic means, ‘individually’.” (Solanas, 2016: 478). After consolidating as a strong social
movement in Uruguay, housing cooperatives ‘exported’ their ‘model’ to other Latin
American countries with the support of international cooperation agencies. By mid-2000s, it
reached Central America, arriving to El Salvador in 2004 (FUNDASAL, 2017).
With the technical assessment of FUNDASAL, an NGO that works with people from
precarious settlements in the Central American region, cooperative organisation has been
promoted as an instrument of learning, resistance and advocacy. The model rests in the
implementation of the following principles (FUNDASAL, 2017: 19):
(1) autonomous decision-making and management of resources through direct democracy;
(2) self-help systems that generate peer-to-peer learning and strengthen social cohesion;
(3) collective property as a mechanism for protecting tenure of land, housing and common
spaces from commodifying interests; and
 Quiñónez 9

(4) technical assessment that share their knowledge and enhance the cooperatives’
constructive, organisational and administrative skills.
In February 2005, the first housing cooperative in the Historic Centre of San Salvador was
born. Even though it was not the first to be constituted in the country, it was the first one
that faced institutional opposition for positioning collective property as its tenancy regime
(FUNDASAL, 2005b: 12). Now, there are 21 housing cooperatives in El Salvador: four have
already built their housing complexes, two of them in the centre (See Figure 3). Their work
testifies for the model’s capability to solve housing precariousness with inhabitants leading
the process.

Figure 3
Pictures of the two housing complexes built by housing cooperatives in the Historic Centre of San
Salvador. They are currently housing 61 low-income households who used to live in mesones before.
Source: FUNDASAL.

From the construction of solidarity networks and a collectively defined agenda of claims and
proposals, housing cooperatives have become a social movement of more than 700 families
nationwide, represented by their federative association, FESCOVAM. Constituted in July
2010, it has advocated for State support and recognition of housing cooperatives as
organisations that produce affordable and decent housing for their members. Even so, their
participation in the political discussion regarding the centre’s revitalization had to be disputed
and earned.

3.1 The struggle against gentrification begins: housing cooperatives in the Centre

As Delgadillo (2015) indicates, the ethics of urban cultural heritage conservation rely in
valuing heritage because it contributes to build collective identities and preserve a social
memory that guides the future of communities or societies. However, the Historic Centre of
San Salvador has seen economic development taking over as the political priority instead. In
consequence, local authorities contribute to set the conditions for gentrification to take place.
At the same time, over 13 housing cooperatives have been constituted, gathering as of 2017
 Quiñónez 10

nearly 350 members from low income households, 70 per cent of them headed by women.
A great part of them are self-employed given that their main source of income, as either small
commecial entrepreneurs or informal street vendors, and have been inhabiting mesones for
one or even more generations.
But how can people with no constructive and professional training manage projects as
complex as building houses? Two of those cooperatives now living in their self-built
complexes were the first to prove these stigmatizations wrong. To get there, one cooperative
had to fight for their right to access urban land in the centre: one plot was purchased at a
subsidised price, after long negotiations with the Municipality, and the other was transferred
through ‘acquisitive prescription’, while enduring eviction threats and harassment (Martínez,
2006). As a legal action for transferring ownership rights in behalf of the 'social purpose of
property', acquisitive prescription is one of the few legal mechanisms in El Salvador for
reducing inequalities rooted in private property. Other strategies housing cooperatives used
were peaceful occupation of public idle land plots and demonstrations in public spaces.
Later in 2008, the first five housing cooperatives from the centre created a platform for
coordinating advocacy actions. One of its most important accomplishments was the creation
of a census of underused public land within the centre. Cooperatives turned this instrument
into a concrete proposal, presented to the State as a draft bill of land transfer in favour of
housing cooperatives (FUNDASAL, 2005: 32). Even though the project was sidelined by the
Congress, it served for future political discussions that were not necessarily smoother.
Nevertheless, the debate on how to scale the housing cooperatives proposals to the level of
public policy had already begun.

3.3 The revitalization program of the Centre’s housing purpose through cooperative
organization: a step forward

After years of campaigning, mobilisation and lobbying efforts with the central government
institutions and other influential stakeholders, the housing cooperative movement had its
first milestone victory in the policy-making field: in 2012, a loan of EUR€12 million from
Italian cooperation funds was made to the Salvadoran State for the integral revitalisation of
the Historic Centre of San Salvador, to be managed by the Vice Ministry of Housing and
Urban Development (VMVDU, 2012). The centre’s housing cooperatives are at the core of
the programme. Initially, they were assigned a sum of EUR€9 million for developing housing
cooperative complexes for 325 families (VMVDU, 2013), that were ratified in Congress in
July 2013. But for the loan to proceed, additional legislative steps had to be taken. In April
2014, the “Social, Economic and Cultural Requalification of the Historic Centre and its
Housing Purpose” programme, reached the Special Treasury and Budget Commission and
was approved for Plenary discussion (Verdict nº 271, 2014).
The gradual assimilation of the housing cooperative model by the State demands to carry out
in parallel two challenging processes: supporting the autonomy of FESCOVAM's proposals
 Quiñónez 11

as a social movement and guarantee the implementation of the programme. Until today, the
VMVDU and the National Fund for People’s Housing (FONAVIPO), a public financial
institution, are still understanding how the housing cooperative model works and how it
should be supported by the State. For instance, the programme’s financial scheme would not
be affordable enough for all families if a subsidies were not guaranteed with State resources.
Without subsidised loans at the disposition of housing cooperatives, several families would
have to quit the project.
Even if the VMVDU has continuously proposed changes many aspects of FESCOVAM’s
initial programme proposal, the movement has been able to defend each and everyone of its
principles. Amidst the challenging circumstances, the movement and its alliances have
advocated for alternative proposals that defend the model without allowing exceptions. The
struggle for getting the State’s commitment to transfer public land in favour of cooperatives
evolved in a similar way: the original proposal of the movement was to consider the 2008
census. However, from all listed plots, almost none could be transferred before the beginning
of the project according to the legally required procedures, given that most plots were
property of public institutions. Still, the need of improving interinstitutional coordination for
creating a public land portfolio was made evident.

Figure 4
Mobilizations and demonstrations called by FESCOVAM, in behalf of the positioning of their
proposals in the political and media agenda (2015, left), and advocating for the approval of subsidised
credit for housing cooperatives in the Historic Centre of San Salvador (2018, right).
Source: FUNDASAL and VMVDU.

As a solution, a part of the programme’s loan had to be reoriented towards the acquisition
of private land in the centre. For these properties to be transferred to housing cooperatives,
once again, a special act had to be passed by the Congress in July 2018. The legislative avails
for public land transfer and the stratified subsidy structure in favour of housing cooperatives
were approved, by virtue of the relentless advocacy and lobbying of FESCOVAM and the
 Quiñónez 12

people it represents (see Figure 4). The experience described above has been accomplished
due to the strength of the housing cooperative movement at publicly demonstrating in behalf
of their rightful claims for State support. Finally, the time for the State to promote social
production of habitat has come –and housing cooperatives are ready to take the lead.

4. Conclusions and lessons: can alternatives have a space in the State

policy framework?

The cultural heritage that the Historic Centre of San Salvador contains has been transformed
into a commodity by governmental institutions, international cooperation agencies and
private enterprises for tourism. In this process, cultural consumption, vitality, urban
marketing and economic competitiveness, among other aspects, become important. That is
why the centre has a strong potential of turning into a gentrified (or tourified) battleground,
where newcoming middle class consumers (internal tourists, at last) arrive often but do not
want to inhabit revalorised places, as it happens in Ciudad de México (Delgadillo, 2015). In
the historic centre of San Salvador, the conditions for this are being met, in detriment of the
low income inhabitants living in deteriorating conditions.
In this context, the experience of housing cooperatives based at the Historic Centre of San
Salvador can be recalled as a landmark of resistance against neoliberal precarisation of
housing conditions for the lower classes. It has emerged from the people's refusing mesones
as the only housing solution at their reach. In sum, they are positioning grassroots organising,
collective property and State policy support as elemental to the fight against one of
neoliberalism’s dynamics of influencing the urban development: gentrification in favour of
tourism (touristification).
First, the fact that the housing cooperative movement defines autonomously its own political
agenda reveals as a key strategy that strengthens the social cohesion of the movement from
the inside. Nevertheless, as Apsan and Monson (2016: 18) highlight, how “participation [that]
has been included in policy-making processes by the state often ignores issues of power or
the tensions between collective and individual roles in processes of participation that are
crucial to social movements”. This means that, in coordinating with the State, the housing
cooperative movement are at risk of disrespecting their internal mechanisms of horizontal
democracy. That is a key aspect connecting leaders with their bases; thus, they should not
neglect its importance. When overlooked, a sense of disbelief on the work done by the
organisation and its leaders might discourage participation or even fragment the movement.
Also, the cooperatives’ creativity for campaigning, lobbying and displaying resistance
resembles much to the tactics used by the Movimento dos Sem Teto in Salvador de Bahia,
Brazil, although they resort to occupation more often.
Secondly, under neoliberal control of production and access to housing, to oppose the
hegemony of private property and defend the collectivization of tenure as an alternative, is
 Quiñónez 13

not an easy challenge to take upon. The whole legal and institutional system has set up
barriers for a firmer recognition of collective or cooperative property. This figure protects
housing from being commodified, safeguarding its value as a human right due to the role
they play in providing shelter, a secure environment for families, a means of reproducing life
in community. Here, gentrification dynamics find no fertile opportunities for development.
As it is pointed out by Imilan et al. (2016: 185): from the uprooting of the individual dream
of owning a house, other property figures can take place and protect people from the risk of
getting evicted. In the case of the Historic Centre particularly, collective property also
becomes an instrument of preventing peripheralisation or relocation of inhabitants in further
segregated places. Where housing cooperatives decide to remain matters: location plays an
important role in either increasing or reducing inequality of access to the city centre’s
services.
Third, if territorial policy and regulatory frameworks that is effective in controlling
gentrification (and other processes derived from neoliberal urban dynamics), alternative
counterproposals should certainly have plenty of space. Anyhow, to rethink why the private
sector is able to capture value generated by urban interventions, from a policy perspective
that sees over public investments, should be discussed. In that sense, the revitalisation
programme for the Historic Centre represents a very important and transgressive step in
terms of housing policy in El Salvador. It is a product of policy experimentation, discussion
and design that defends a concept of housing as human right. It also implies the social and
institutional redistribution of roles, co-responsibilities and benefits on a housing production
that does not align with neoliberal developmental visions. This includes the recognition of
housing cooperatives as an important actor in local/territorial development processes. Its
existence is in itself a precedent for Central America on how to support housing production
systems that do not benefit the interests of real state and financial capitals.
Whilst the neoliberal paradigm of individualism and private property prevails, building
community and practising solidarity might be difficult for the movement when times of
urban precarisation and insecurity are critical. All in all, the programme is still suffering from
continuous delays in its implementation. Ideological clarity, solidarity and political autonomy
must be cultivated so that the housing cooperative movement transforms, step by step, the
Historic centre of San Salvador into a territory developed by and for its inhabitants. So far,
they have demonstrated to be more than able by far exceeding the expectations.

References
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