Affordable Condominium Housing: A comparative analysis of low-income homeownership in Colombia and Ecuador

As cities grow and more dense communities are built, the meaning of homeownership changes. In a highly urbanized future, it will be critical to know how to make high density housing in condominium ownership sustainable and resilient. A sector of social housing policies in Latin America subsidizes the provision of affordable housing for low and middle income homeownership. A network of professionals, both from private and public sector are involved in this process. In the context of Bogota, Colombia and Quito, Ecuador, dwellings for homeownership are built in multifamily and collective arrangements of land and architecture. The property system involved in these urban housing solutions is the condominium regime. The problem is that affordable condominiums, particularly those subsidized by national housing policy deteriorate over time. The common property elements of housing complexes or buildings are suffering from serious lack of maintenance. Why are low-income homeowners not taking care of their properties? How can we better understand the problem of lack of maintenance of the affordable condominiums? Tenure forms are one of the most important institutions in housing policy and research. This comparative housing research looks at condominiums as a private common property resource and applies Ostrom´s institutional framework (Ostrom, 1990, 2005) to understand both formal and informal institutions involved in management and governance of the affordable condominiums. In condominium housing, owning a home of one’s own implies a more complex configuration of rights and obligations than just the possession of a single unit. The institutions of condominium housing studied in this thesis make a significant contribution to theory and housing policy and positions Latin American social housing policy in a global perspective.