The locus of the affordable housing in são paulo over the growth cycles of the 1990's and the 2000's

This paper aims to investigate housing policy and private sector initiatives affecting housing provision in Brazil over the 1990's and 2000's. Within an historical and theoretical framework, it identifies the trends of these polices and the strategies of private sector as well their impacts on the built environment. It focus mainly on the case of São Paulo, where the growth of house building in Brazil is greatly pronounced and has shown a concentration of new affordable homeownership production over last decades. In the 1990s with the lack of resources to foster the Housing Finance System, the choice taken by construction companies, developers and cooperatives managed by private agencies was the self-financed housing for middle-income households, an innovative way of organizing production, enabling to eliminate construction and sales loans.  However, over the mid 2000’s the new  economic conditions and the guidelines of National Housing Policy have engendered financial innovation and investment alternatives making the housing sector more competitive mostly pulled by public financing and subsidies that enables the expansion of the housing market for the middle income and lower middle households. The paper achieves a comparative analysis of the patterns of supply and demand of the affordable housing production over the growth cycles of the 1990's and 2000’s in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo  mainly focusing a number of specific questions/hypotheses related with the factors that have affected the choice of location for new housing developments.