São Paulo is a city of stark contrasts. Brazil’s largest city is experiencing the “biggest boom the country’s real estate market has seen in recent years,” according to Raquel Rolnik, one of Brazil’s most prestigious urban planners. But at the same time that multiple neighborhoods see towers spring up like mushrooms, São Paulo has — for years — been facing a generational housing crisis.
In Latin America’s wealthiest city, more than 52,000 people sleep under awnings, bridges, and overpasses — and depend on the work of NGOs and beds in the city’s overcrowded (and often violent) homeless shelters.
Planning rules in São Paulo over the last decade encouraged the construction of tall buildings filled with small apartments, particularly close to main public transport hubs. These small flats soon became overvalued. As a result, São Paulo currently has almost 600,000 unoccupied properties, according to the latest census data.
Ironically, much of São Paulo’s homeless population and its empty properties are located in the same physical space: the city’s geographical center.
Once the playground of São Paulo’s elite — not by chance, one of the neighborhoods which make up the area is named Campos Elíseos, inspired by Paris’s Champs-Élysées — the region entered into steep decline amid the coffee crisis of 1929.
The wealthy coffee barons were forced to sell their mansions, the city’s elite switched area codes, and the center was left abandoned by policymakers — becoming a hotspot for street violence and open-air drug consumption.
The area is the workplace of Júlio Lancellotti, a 75-year-old Catholic priest who has worked with the homeless population for 40 years — and is internationally recognized for it. In 2020, Pope Francis called him a “messenger of God” for his work with the poor.
During the Covid pandemic, which put Brazil’s poor in an economic chokehold, Father Lancellotti hammered down stones placed under overpasses intended to keep the homeless from settling.
A law prohibiting so-called “hostile architecture,” an urban design strategy that uses...
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