Stuck

          I love to ride the bus in Latin America. The range of parcels, the crammed-in commuters, the drivers outside my window swerving through city streets, and the criers announcing routes in sing-song tones make the experience better than any amusement park ride.  But at some point, what always strikes me about the bus are the people who stay on long after all others have departed.  I would ride the bus to the improvised settlements at the periphery of cities, where the vendors would stop trying to sell me gum and flipflops and empanadas and get off to go home. 

          Most of my research is in Bogotá, Colombia, where traffic is one of the most visible ways to understand social inequality and the challenges that governments face to address it.  The average commute time in Bogota is 90 minutes each way.  Intrepid people increasingly ride motorcycles or e-bikes to weave in and out of stalled traffic.  Thousands of cyclists—with huge “Rappi” backpacks—make a living shuttling food around the wealthy areas of the city.  But for a third of city residents, the bus is the way that they get to and from their jobs.  The amusement park fun fades away as commuters spend their days stuck in traffic.  I stop thinking about the unusual variety of sounds and smells I experience on the bus and start thinking about how my bus route demonstrates inequality.   

Alisha Holland in front of the Quito metro. Photo courtesy of Alisha Holland.

          Inequality is a hard concept to understand.  For economists, it’s fundamentally a mathematical idea about the variance in income.  Thinking about rising income inequality involves the capacity to imagine not just one, but two abstract groups—the “rich” and the “poor—and how their incomes change relative to each other.  Throw in the middle class, or questions about how inequalities differ across regions of a country, and even more complex statistics are needed to convey how incomes are distributed.  Studies show that people struggle to understand inequality, and often don’t favor policies that would reduce it even when they would benefit.  It’s not clear what ordinary people have in mind when scholars, politicians and the media voice alarm about high and persistent levels of inequality in Latin America.  

          But most Latin Americans do have an intuitive understanding that people’s lives are structured in totally different ways, both spatially and socially separated by income.  For most people, what we grok is not income inequality.  It’s the disparities in health, education, housing, policing, traffic and the like.  The philosopher Amartya Sen perhaps better captured some of the challenges in his well-known essay, “Equality of What?”  We care about income inequality because it overlaps with so many other facets of life.  Inequality is about what we can do and become in society, and whether society supports our capabilities to do what we desire.

          Governments are at the heart of many forms of inequality.  Even the ways that we talk about social inequalities often are defined by government.  Colombia offers a clear example.  Starting in 1994, the government mapped each city into zones with different payment rates for public services like electricity, water and gas.  The classification runs from Strata 1, the poorest areas with the lowest service prices, to Strata 6, the richest with the highest prices.  These government designations for payment schedules then turned into social categories.  Colombians casually refer to people as “strata 6,” to designate extreme wealth, or “without strata” to talk about the people who aren’t even seen as part of the city.  When I run public opinion surveys, firms construct samples of Strata 1 people.  Perversely, an effort to make public services more accessible turned into another way to turn spatial boundaries into social classes.  

          Spatial divisions often map on to social ones due to the housing structure in most Latin American cities.  My first book explored the consequences of inadequate housing policies across Latin America.  With no options to access affordable housing, squatters took over land.  Rural landowners sold small plots to convert into housing developments.  Politicians deliberately tolerated these legal violations because they couldn’t raise taxes and build housing in any other way.  Forbearance was the housing policy of most Latin American governments in the 20th century.

The Quito metro back in construction in 2017 (it’s still only partially open). Photo by Alisha Holland.

          Today, Latin American cities are ringed by housing developments built by the poor that have expanded to multi-level homes and transformed from “informal” neighborhoods, meaning housing developments in violation of property or zoning laws, to places with full legal recognition.  Many poor families trying to make their way to the city for the first time lament that there is no land left.  New informal settlements today only form on the most dangerous stretches, under high-tension wires or on environmental protection land that never can be legalized.

          Government housing policies often have made urban segregation worse, rather than better.  An extreme example comes from Santiago, Chile.  The military government razed centrally located informal settlements in the city’s center and northeast.  It instead created large government housing developments on the southern edge of the city, where land was cheap and initially zoned for agricultural use.  Satellite images show the dramatic shifts in the footprint of the city, from a compact circle to a sprawling oval with the poor concentrated south of Plaza de Italia.  The local government in Santiago’s wealthiest district, Las Condes, has a per capita budget ten times greater than the poorest district, La Pintana.  Similar challenges can be seen in the housing programs of Brazil and Mexico, where affordable housing has been developed on the cheapest land far outside city centers.  Citizens who receive these homes often are even less supportive of their government than those who don’t.  

          Housing segregation reinforces wage inequality, too.  Consider the case of caregivers.  I have small children so often have hired a nanny when I travel to Latin America for longer periods.  Many caregivers themselves have children, and commute from the poorer outer neighborhoods of the city.  If I ask a caregiver to match a standard 9-5 work schedule, that means they will leave their home at 6 in the morning and return after their children have gone to sleep.  Many people rationally draw spatial lines in the city—in Bogotá, for example, some are willing to work up to 90th street, but no farther north.  Others choose types of work, often selling food or goods in the street, where they can control their own schedules and locations.  Many of these choices come with reduced wages, further widening gaps in the income distribution, but they can bring greater control and dignity to one’s life.

          Why don’t Latin American governments do more to connect their cities?  Why not build metros and bus lines to allow the poor to reach central employment?  And why not offer more central housing options?  One part of the answer is that it’s simply harder to address spatial inequalities in cities built through sprawling, low-density informal development.  Subway lines depend on densities that are reached in cities like Tokyo or Seoul, but not the poorer parts of Mexico City or Quito.  Moving people into high-rise apartment projects or creating rental markets is hard in a region where three-quarters of households own their homes.  

          It’s also not clear that the rich want greater connectivity in cities.  Stories abound of wealthy neighborhoods, from Morumbi in São Paulo to Georgetown in Washington DC, that worry that subway connections only will bring crime and poverty closer.  In Bogotá, a housing scheme that would have required developers to reserve 20 percent of new units for affordable housing never made it out of the city council, though the city has managed to require developers to expand affordable units in the urban periphery.  

          Most Latin American city governments are trying to foster greater integration by stressing the broad benefits and convincing a growing middle class that it’s in their interests.  In Bogotá, the construction of a bus-rapid transit (BRT) system, Transmilenio, promised to reduce social inequalities.  The poor would see their commute times diminish.  Those with greater resources would hop on once they saw a more efficient way to move through the city.  Former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who began the system in 2000, often says: “The mark of a truly advanced city is not one where the poor use cars but one where the rich use public transport.”

          Yet, as BRT systems have become overcrowded, both poor and rich are looking for other ways to navigate the city.  Subways are popping up from Panama City to Quito and Lima.  Bogotá is building its first metro line to be inaugurated in 2028.  

          The class politics around subway projects don’t follow the usual divisions.  We might expect that the poor would be those most excited by subway projects that could shorten their commutes.  But I find in my research that it’s the upper classes that show the greatest enthusiasm for subways, like the new lines in Bogotá.  Although the rich don’t expect to take public transit, they want others to use it to reduce traffic.  They often see big infrastructure projects as part of becoming a modern city.  The poor are more likely to see the same neglect and inequality reflected in these projects—routes don’t reach their homes, fares are too high, and stations don’t connect (or require a second payment) to take auxiliary buses.  

Graffiti in protest of the Quito Cable project. Photo by Alisha Holland.

          Corruption scandals have reinforced the popular sense that infrastructure projects aren’t meant to integrate cities.  The Car Wash scandal affirmed a general belief that construction projects line the pockets of politicians and firms involved.  The Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht has been accused of manipulating contract tenders around the Quito and Panama City metro projects.  Bogotá residents were unsurprised by such accusations, given that their former mayor Samuel Moreno already had been removed for office for a “contracting carrousel” that inflated the price and stopped construction on the Transmilenio system.  

          Cynicism about the political motivations to build infrastructure and push social integration is coming at a time of economic slowdown and uncertainty across the region.  Latin America made progress to reduce inequalities, bridging social divides in education, health, and traffic during the commodities boom of the 2010s.  Much of this progress now has stalled.  The pandemic interrupted the education of millions of students.  Job markets have yet to recover.  The withdrawal of aid, tariff battles and territorial threats by the United States are set to hurt Latin American finances.  

          One of the most famous metaphors for inequality in Latin America revolves around traffic. Princeton economist Albert Hirschman imagined a driver going through a two-lane tunnel.  If both lanes are stuck in traffic, drivers may be frustrated but resigned to the situation.  If one lane starts to move, but yours does not, drivers begin to get furious, switching lanes or honking horns.  Many Latin Americans saw their lane start to move in the past decade.  Citizens were promised metros, housing projects, jobs and opportunities that have not always materialized.  How to get unstuck is the big question.

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