The Never Ending Story: the AGN Once Again Detected Shortcomings in a Housing Program
<p><span style="line-height: 20.8px;">It is Techo Digno (Decent Roof), which is under the aegis of the Ministry of Federal Planning. Homes in flooded zones, with lots of waste and stagnant water, beneficiaries who were not on the register of applicants and failure to meet minimum quality standards are just some of the serious irregularities found by the Watchdog.</span></p>
Earlier reports from both the City and the Federal Government, put on alert the popular habitat. Long ago, the General Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) prepared a document on the hard Shared Dreams program, and a suspicious fund management, found that the square meter is overvalued by 77% and there are deficiencies in building houses to the point of making them uninhabitable.
The monitoring agency of Buenos Aires, meanwhile, in a report adopted in February 2013, said there was a "poor management" on the relocation of the inhabitants of villages and slums around the Riachuelo, because, among other issues, "the works are done in unlawful lands or in Cultural Heritage sites."
This time the axis of the report of the National Audit Office is the "Decent Roof" program since 2009 is under the auspices of the Ministry of Federal Planning, Public Investment and Services and aims to "build houses and construction of additional infrastructure."
To organize multiple calls of attention that made the Watchdog, it is practical to start with the housing itself, which "do not meet the minimum quality standards."
The technical and legal choice –bad- land highlighted in the report because, for example, of the 300 units built in Ezeiza "flood-prone areas, large quantities of waste and waters were found to be close to Arroyo Aguirre, made of clay soils unsuitable for construction, deficiencies in the thermal conditioning, carpentry outside standards, breaches of the Health and Safety standards by contractors and a lack of security features to prevent intrusion."
When evaluating a housing program it is important to go beyond the purely architectural and emphasize that for the most vulnerable, in addition to issues of infrastructure sectors are also essential services associated with that place, water, electricity, gas and others as accessibility to the means of entertainment, educational and health services and connectivity to public transport.
But on this point the audit did not detect a very encouraging scenario in neighborhoods R. Favaloro and MT Calcutta Jose C. Paz. There live about 1850 families, but found that there are "no educational institutions, neither public nor private, nor is there a health center." There also aren’t spaces for recreation, sports or social activities.
In Ezeiza, for example, where the executing unit is the Housing Authority, "there is no access to the amount of families that make up the standard of applicants." It is that "the list has a manual update" and both surveys and social reports "were incomplete, disordered and out of the corresponding dossiers."
In this situation, for AGN "did not have reliable documentation to evaluate and justify the priority of social situation of a selected family." In fact, "there is no rule defining criteria for the selection of candidates."
In Jose C. Paz, "there is no standard of applicants or awards" therefore "effective demand and local housing development is unknown." Nor was there a standard for selecting families or tenderers when the demand exceeds the number of homes provided.