Different reactions have generated a press article from El Mostrador that reports on the findings made by the researcher Dauno Tótoro Taulis in his latest work No Passing; military propertya book in which it refers to the one million six hundred thousand hectares of public land that are under the administration of the Armed Forces and the large percentage of them -around half- that have already been transferred to the Property of Fiscal Affectation of each branch.
The foregoing leaves a large part of that area available to the real estate market despite the evident need for the State to create a land bank that will allow it to face the severe housing crisis that the country is experiencing. It is estimated that the deficit rises to 650,000 housing units.
One of those who expressed the urgent need to promote legal and administrative changes to recover these lands was the deputy for Antofagasta Sebastián Videla, who emphasized the deterioration of the urban fabric of the regional capital as a result of years of insufficient public housing supply, which has resulted in the lifting of almost a hundred camps on the outskirts. Some experts have warned about the “favelization” of large sectors of the community. Videla has been, by the way, one of the parliamentarians in the area who have most criticized the slowness with which they have acted to recover the land and one of those who has most questioned this “real estate turn” of the military institutions.
Velásquez, indicated that only “in the Antofagasta Region there are 687 thousand hectares handed over to the Armed Forces”. Only one of those many Army lands – added the deputy – is being sold for 8 billion pesos to the real estate business.
Along these lines, Videla asked the Army to be more in tune with the social emergencies. “The land that the Army has, and that is not used for military matters, must be returned to national property as soon as possible and its use must be for the benefit of the citizens. It is not possible that, given this lack of land, having this enormous demand for housing, the Army is allocating part of that patrimony that belongs to all of us to different real estate projects”, declared the independent deputy with a quota from the Liberal Party.
Videla also recalled that more than 600,000 hectares of the Antofagasta Region are in the hands of the Armed Forces by virtue of massive transfers carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, being one of the regions with the most land allocated to the institutions of national defense.
“The housing situation in Antofagasta is just as pressing as the public security crisis, the migration crisis and the health crisis that we have with La Chimba. According to figures from the Chilean Chamber of Construction of Antofagasta, the housing deficit grew by 21% between 2014 and 2020, reaching 25,000 homes. We think those numbers have gotten worse with the pandemic,” he added.
“I hope that the Army can return these lands because we hope that the creation of the land bank announced by the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Carlos Montes, will materialize and not remain a simple promise,” said Videla, who also pointed out that housing own has become unattainable for the middle sectors in view of the non-existent supply of housing with prices below 2,500 UF.
