Of the 3,679,339 families who registered with the Great Housing Mission as needing housing or renovations, minister for science and technology Ricardo Menendez said 41.28% of them had single mothers as the head of household.

The families that registered around the country until last Sunday group together 10.8 million individuals. The housing mission aims to construct two million homes over the next seven years.

According to Menendez, the large registration numbers “reveal the credibility” of President Hugo Chavez, who initially made the call for the mission and the large-scale registration process.

Registration began in Caracas and other regions in May, then moved on to other regions over the months. The government wants to use the information to help plan its housing policy, and is currently in a process of verifying the data, setting up public worker-communal council teams to visit the registered families. It reports that so far accuracy has been very high.

73,74% of the registered families said they needed their own or new housing, perhaps because they rent, share housing with multiple nuclear families, or live in high risk situations such as steep hills prone to landslides. The percentage corresponds to 2.7 million new homes that need to be constructed.

The remaining families needed to repair or enlarge their homes. Of those needing new homes, 14% of families are renting their place, while 34% live in one room within a house.

57% of registered families live in homes with corrugated iron roofs.

Housing Minister Ricardo Molina said yesterday that the Great Housing Mission constructed 80,000 homes in October, which he said represented 93% of the mission aim for the month.

Of those homes, the government built 50,891 and the private sector contributed 29,247. Of the state built homes, 22,682 were built through grassroots initiative, such as through the program of Integral Transformation of Habitat (TIH) and the Substitution of Shanties for Houses program (Suvi).

President Chavez has blamed exclusion and underdevelopment produced by capitalism and Venezuela’s colonial experience as the principal causes of the housing crisis. 

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