I talked about this last night, Petkoff picked up on it
too:
Failing grade in Housing by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual
Yesterday the President complained, not without bitterness,
of the slow progress of the plan to build houses. It is not the first time that
he refers to this matter, in the same terms of complaining. Because in this
area the failure of the Chavez administration is clamorous. Chávez, whose personalistic
conception of power makes him aspire to hand himself the keys to each house,
said that he would have to reach the age of Methuselah in order to fulfill that
purpose, the development of which is going, in his own words at the” speed of a
tortoise” Not that long ago he assured us that 120 thousand homes would be
built this year, among other things, thanks to the help of the Chinese. Well,
it is known that a Chinese mission came and after learning about the market,
they told him that it was silly to import prefabricated houses from China, that
he had to forget about it, because we have here in Venezuela an enormous
building capacity which is idle as well as high technical levels and all he had
to do was to lean on the private sector.
He was also told, not without some sarcasm
that if he continued to believe in “self-construction” and the “coops” he was
going to end , like them in their own countries, shooting the supposed
beneficiaries (Even though the term is used metaphorically). In other words, he
was told: you have here the ability to do it, use it.
What is true is that in the first semester 10.120 homes were
completed, 8.4% of the 120 thousand offered for this year and it is obvious
that, with the same methodology, it is very improbable that the goal can be
met. For the seventh consecutive year, what used to be routine for the previous
Governments (delivering each year between 60 and 90 thousand homes) the limping
chavista administration can not place one brick over the next. Moreover, there
is a conceptual problem. For the President, overcoming the drama of the housing
deficit consists simply in building houses and apartments.
That is why the Government got rid
of very early of the team that Josefina Baldo was directing in Conavi, whose
conception pointed to emphasizing the rehabilitation and humanization of the
popular barrio areas, taking advantage, it works in that case, of the enormous
potential for self-construction and cooperation that exists in the barrios, to
repair homes, give them complete public services (with emphasis in garbage
collection and sewage), creating community public services, transform in the
end , the habitat, in order to increase the quality of life of the poorest
sectors. This included an important inventory job to give title over the
property of the land and the shacks to its current inhabitants. All of this was
left in the nebula of the bureaucratic guerilla and what could have been a
truly revolutionary housing policy was discarded, to repeat the traditional
patterns, which rely exclusively on the construction of houses and apartments.
Here, however, with the bunch of useless (and thieves) that populate the civil
service, they can’t get any work done.
However, the blame is not on the blind people but on those that hit them with
the stick.
The Devil's Excrement 
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