Looking for funds, São Paulo struggles to find a good model to manage its assets

São Paulo turns 465 years old today. In Brazil’s largest city, everything is big, including its leisure options. Municipal venues such as the Pacaembu stadium, Anhembi sambadrome, and the iconic Interlagos racetrack host thousands of people in the city’s biggest events, but keeping them up and running is costing São Paulo millions. And the city desperately needs improvements to its transportation, education, and health systems.

Although it is also Brazil’s richest city, São Paulo is struggling to balance its accounts after being hit hard during the nationwide recession, and suffering from a broad deficit in local social security, which it tried to address with its own state pension reform.

In 2016, conservative businessman João Doria was elected Mayor of São Paulo, promising to run the city as “efficiently” as he would one of his companies. In office, he launched a plan to privatize SPTuris—the state-owned company that manages the Anhembi event complex and Interlagos—and put 108 municipal parks, 27 bus terminals, the Pacaembu stadium, Municipal Market, and the public transport card system (“Bilhete Único“) under a concession regime. Even the city’s cemeteries were on his list of “demunicipalization.” In 2017, during a roadshow for investors in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Doria presented his project with a video calling it “the biggest privatization program in São Paulo’s history.”

Three years later, Mr. Doria handed the reins of the municipal government to his vice, Bruno Covas, and was elected governor of the State of São Paulo. His plans continue, but after all this time, the city’s main assets remain under public control and are the center of a discussion about how this 465-year-old metropolis deals with its public spaces.

In a country hampered with corruption involving public and private sectors, privatization still carries a bad reputation, in spite of some positive experiences. People who oppose the plan fear that the population may lose their free access to spaces that are open today, such as parks, or the services may be of poor quality if the government fails...