House building in Peru

There is a big, strange and spontaneous phenomenon here in our “asentamiento humano” de Nueva Villa, and generally in Peru about the houses building. If you want to build a house alone in the neighborhood it is allowed. So you can see people building walls for them or other people during all day under the sun or in the night. When I asked people some information about this topic, at the beginning they were a little surprised because of my curiosity. But I could learn later that there are two cases. If you are in a condition of poverty and you can’t pay anything the State let you build your own house. So people build his home with all materials: adobe, sand, straw, … For this reason there is also one building site where workers look for materials to sell to people who need them. You are free to build where you want and as you want, without paying the field. The problem, in my opinion, is first: that there are not all comforts, for example light, water, sewer, etc. And second: if you dont’live in, for example you don’t sleep inside sometimes, the authority can destroy your house in one night and you are in the street with all your family the day after. The second possibility is for people who ask the bank to lend money to buy the field and the house. So you can sleep outside of your house or rent it without risk, a part if someone interested occupy it and you lose your house too! In both cases you have to pay a tax to the city hall, depending from the kind of building: with roof, of three floors, in cement, brick.

I could observe that it is a movement from the bottom that I have never see in other countries and I think that here, where somebody has nothing is partly helped from the authority and from the neighbors to survive.