Brazil may be showing the U.S. how to do affordable housing better. And Marc Norman, head of NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, thinks Washington should be taking notes from Minha Casa Minha Vida.
In an interview with Brazilian outlet Metro Quadrado, Norman argues that one of the biggest strengths of Minha Casa Minha Vida is that it helps low-income families become owners, not just tenants, allowing them to build and pass on wealth instead of relying only on rent subsidies as in the U.S.. He contrasts Brazil’s ownership-focused model with American tools like rent control and rent stabilization, which help with monthly costs but don’t create assets that can be transferred to the next generation: “In the U.S., we’ve never tried anything like Minha Casa Minha Vida… In Brazil, people can pass the property on to the next generation. We have a lot to learn from that,” he says. Norman was in Brazil with 24 NYU real estate master’s students on a technical visit to São Paulo and Rio, meeting major developers along Faria Lima and visiting communities such as Paraisópolis to see how people actually live, not just how financial centres look. He describes Brazil as a “distorted mirror” of the U.S., sharing legacies of slavery, inequality, big cities and abundant resources, and sees these trips as a way to swap solutions on shared urban and housing challenges, while also building networks and business prospects for students who mostly work as asset managers and developers. At the same time, he notes that Brazil could learn from the U.S. on transparency, pointing out how hard it is to access property data locally compared with the open records system American investors take for granted.
Leave a Reply