There was a lottery this past weekend for almost 60% of the new government-built houses (603 out of 1017) being developed for residents of the island who meet certain requirements and are interested in owning a home through low-cost payments. Those who were registered in 1999 were somehow left off the drawing and things got ugly with a lot of screaming and yelling-maybe some punches thrown. In addition to that, some people tried to take matters into their own hands by seizing some houses(about 40 of them) to claim as their own. What a mess and now they are trying to figure out what to do with the whole situation. Some are saying that this was politically motivated. Who knows.

Anyway, it is hard to get any decent new photos of the large Chacra XIII housing development that I previously posted about due to these events. The police have sealed off all entrances to everyone except workers.

Some of the houses are already being painted on the outside as you can see in the picture below on the left. Hideous two-tone blue.

Just lay out a plot with some string and stakes. Toss some pallets or other junk in order to make it hard for others to claim that land as theirs.

The first tin tipi I’ve ever seen.

Might help to build a shack over the weekend.

A sign with your name too…

…but then someone might cross it out and put their own.

Robert Wright up in Buenos Aires has a great ongoing section called “housing for the masses” over at his site. Although that section primarily covers mass housing projects and their style of architecture from the days of old, I couldn’t help but think of a similar situation that is occurring down here in TDF–minus the grand architecture schemes.

I was driving around the other day to see what’s new in the development side of things around the city of Rio Grande. Electronics assembly plants, warehouses, and homes are popping up everywhere. Chacras, the name given to government-funded housing projects (Chacra I, Chacra IX ,etc), are also in on the boom–the new ones are now numbered in the mid-teens. Before they pretty much consisted of large apartment type complexes but now the new developments are focusing on houses and duplexes. (This is just a quick half-assed post and I’ll grab some shots of the older apartments and cover the topic more another day.)

The whole width of the above shot is filled with units that are under construction.

I really don’t know how many are being built in this Chacra.

Each unit is a duplex. (Might be some single-family mixed in but not sure at the moment)