A Million Dollar View

Luana has written about our guided walk through Santa Marta, one of Rio’s smaller favelas -- about 1,000 homes serving 8,000 residents. About 20 percent of Rio’s 9 million people live in favelas, and it is interesting to hear local people describe them.


Many have been around for decades, and they all started the same way: poor people new to the city and looking for work threw up shacks in open space. All of Brazil’s big cities have them. In Rio, surrounded by hills and with limited available real estate, these favelas were often built on steep hills that were rated geologically unstable for construction. Thus, in Rio, they often have fantastic views -- local people say they are $1,000 shacks with $1 million views.

Many of these favelas are run by drug gangs, with police afraid to venture into them. The one we walked down through had been “pacified.” The drug gangs had been kicked out, and there were two police stations among the houses.

Rio residents don’t view these areas as shantytowns filled with the unemployed. Rather, in Rio they are seen as working class neighborhoods, since most of the people living there have jobs. These neighborhoods evolve. The people living in the shacks gradually replace the wood walls with brick. You can see houses that are halfway through this process, which can take some time as the resident earns the cash to buy the building materials and then does the work himself. In established favelas the city brings in water and sewer lines, electricity and even cable TV and Internet lines. All these services are free to the residents. All this is, in a sense, a form of welfare, but as was pointed out, since many of these people are employed as maids and gardeners for rich people it also allows those employers to pay lower wages.

Another big plus for the favela residents is the short commute they have to work; if they lived way out in the suburbs where they could afford land for houses, they would probably have a 2-hour commute each way. So, all-in-all, there are some economic and lifestyle advantages to living in these neighborhoods.

One disadvantage is when torrential rains occur; some of these structures slide off the hills. More than 240 Rio residents were killed in recent downpours about two weeks before our visit.

Stores, bars and churches also set up in the neighborhoods. One guide said the bars in the favelas have the coldest beer in the city, since the bars are getting their electricity free.

Our guide said a recent poll of favela residents in Rio found only 15 percent wanted to move to regular neighborhoods. I would tend to doubt that percentage since I wouldn’t want to raise kids in areas controlled by drug gangs. But in the safe favela we walked through the people were engaged in regular neighborhood activities: watching TV, children playing, dogs everywhere (a slight sanitation problem there), doing laundry, cooking, talking, etc. It provides a different perspective than the usual American one. I haven’t told Luana yet, but I’m thinking of moving to a favela for our retirement; free cable TV sounds like a pretty good deal.