Chile’s Pobladores movement: redefining a neoliberal housing policy from its margins

Based on participant observation and interviews, this chapter focuses on the Movement of Struggling Settlers (MPL) in Santiago, Chile, one of the leading organizations of the national Pobladores Movement, since its formation in 2006. Since its formation, the MPL has conducted tasks previously run exclusively by private housing firms, like acquiring land, obtaining building permits, designing the housing complex, hiring and working with construction firms, and collectively running the whole building process. Under Chile’s strictly top-down technologized state housing policy, housing beneficiaries rarely perform these tasks, and the MPL has fulfilled them all. Through its practices, the MPL occupies and disrupts Chile’s housing market and emerges as a political force, advancing from protest to managing a set of construction technologies supported by militant professionals (as replacements for the external, private, and expensive sponsoring firms that have characterized Chile’s conventional housing policy), with assemblies run chiefly by women. MPL has mobilized enormous state-originated resources based on a disciplined community reserve, learning and organization capacities, and rational economic thinking. Although newer organizations have not replicated MPL’s practices so far, and nor has this model been institutionalized by the State, we conclude that MPL’s achievements are a reference point for Chile’s housing and political movements’ trajectory.