Unfortunately, the story didn't cover the most interesting parts: where the residents get their electricity from, whether they pay for it, what about fresh water pipes. Are they treated by the utility companies as any other customers by taking their money and providing the service in return, or they have to hook into utilities without paying for them (in that case, why they are not being cut off).
I had the opportunity to visit two months ago. Amazing place. The residents pay about $6 per month towards the community fund. Electricity is stolen. There is no fresh water. All water is walked up.
We got up to the 24 floor and watched them take up some lemonade for some workers pouring concrete.
Why is walked up? This seems like major inefficiency. It is very easy to create a system (the building has elevator shafts after all) with pulleys and winch-es that could pull up and down the load.
You could jury rig some 40 horse power combustion engine from the auto morgue (almost free) as a power plant and you need 2 platforms to counter balance each other. It will not be safe for humans but workable for heavy loads.
Gas is basically free in Venezuela. To fill up a car with 50L/13 gals was 4 or 6 Bolivars, which is about 15-20 cents at the black market exchange rate.
We had a driver for one day and he had to fill up the car. I bought him a can of Coke which cost twice as much as the tank of gas.
It was possible to pay a motorbike taxi driver to take you up to the top of the car park. That saves about 10 storeys of walking. We did not though as we found lots of interesting shops, factories and people in the first 10 storeys.
Wow, do you have pictures or videos?
how do you think, can WE improve their situation, politically, technically and technologically?
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Such sad irony, that a tower build for Banks, that theoretically exist to serve people, now actually and really serves people, directly. Sad, because those banks and the politicians running that government were the cause for their pain.
Unfortunately I hear about a lot of corruption and that it's normality in Brazil from a friend who moved from Norway to Brazil. And I with my idealogical green glasses would not live for long, if I were to protest against the Government for hot-pots like the Rainforest, according to him and other Brazillians.
Yes, lots of photos and videos. We are working on a 15 min story for TV in Australia.
Talking with the Caracas locals (not living in the tower) it is seen as a bit of an embarrassment. The government there has no good solution for housing, so the people took it into their own hands.
Some of the apartments are amazing. $1 million+ views but without proper fitouts or running water.
can you explain the context? my immediate reaction is that this sounds disturbingly like "poverty porn" for tourists (something i started thinking about while watching the original video).
Normally in a slum, especially a squat, formal utilities don't exist and you either tap in illegally, or use alternatives...like a generator or stove. Water is brought up in buckets and waste is brought down in same. In this case, I bet they are just tapped in illegally, perhaps through bribes.
In the Netherlands (admittedly a place with few slums, if any), it's completely common for squatters to smply sign up and pay for electricity, internet, TV, running water (assuming the squatted building is hooked up to these services already). The services companies don't care who uses the services as long as the bills are paid.
And that's why the Netherlands is still considered "first world"
Let me explain how they do it in Brazil. Someone with a long pole shuts down a switch in the utilities pole. Then climb it and wire their house to it, no meters.
Normally like the vast majority of slums in the world? Most aren't build in areas that were planned out and had infrastructure run so its not like you could call up the water company and have them bill you, there's simply no infrastructure. At least this is my understanding of slums in countries such as Brazil, India and similar where the neighborhood has grown organically.
Ah, but this is a commercial building, just unfinished, in the downtown core. They had to have valid permits, and utility hookups, if they were planning at all to finish the building and rent it to people.
I remember noticing that it was common practice to steal electricity when I was in India about four years ago. I also work with an Indian who backed this up.
I decided to check up on the statistics when I read this comment. It seems like 32% is stolen nationwide, making it the highest world-wide [1], with reports of 42% in New Delhi [2].
You are right. Also, they manage to pay for DirecTV service. You would be amazed at the number of satellite TV antennas in all the slums in Caracas.
This is true for most of the slums were most people don't pay for electricity or water. But I had a teacher that worked in Electricidad de Caracas that said that it was a point of honor for residents of these slums to actually get a power meter. She said they saw it as something that set them. Apart from the rest of the residents.
This tower was on the news two days ago. The police were chasing a commando group that tried to rob some jewelry stores in Caracas. The chase ended near this tower and the people that live there started throwing rocks and garbage at the cops, injuring some of them.
Also this place is used by kidnappers to keep their victims. It's pretty lawless. There's another tower like this one that was a invaded too. It used to belong to an insurance company I think. My mother worked right next to it and said sometimes you could hear gunshots inside.
There's mire than one building like this one in Caracas, but this is the tallest one.
One of JG Ballards best novels is High-Rise, a sort of Lord of the Flies in an apartment tower. It's a lovely skewering of the social mores of proper English people, as well as a musing on the thin veneer of polite society. Only tangentially related, but it's a good read. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70256.High_Rise
Ballard is awesome, though most of his real gold is in his short stories (a rare writer who really got into the format rather than treated it as a side line). A lot of interesting "ideas" related to science and society get explored, such as overpopulation, the psychology of insomnia, medical experiments, etc.
On reddit someone from Caracas posted pictures of a different skyscraper on fire for days because the fire department didn't have the equipment to fight it. It was a business building but I can only imagine what would happen to a building full of families and no water for fire system sprinklers.
This tower draws interest because of its unusual case of being a skyscraper exclusively inhabited by squatters, but in the end it is really nothing more than a vertical shantytown, much like the millions that are sprawled out over the rest of Caracas and in other major South American cities like Rio. I assume daily life for the unfortunate people living in the tower isn't much different than the rest of the population living on or below the poverty line.
The video is definitely worth watching. However, it feels like its only an introduction. For a building housing 2500 people, it seemed surprisingly empty. I can only assume that most of the adults were elsewhere trying to earn a living.
I'd love to see more footage or read more interviews.
This feels like a very surface-area preview. They didn't have too much footage of the interior, and didn't really have a chance to dive deep on any of the interior mechanisms of the tower.
For instance, they mention an economy and internal policing - but don't elaborate on either. Who are authority figures inside the tower? What kind of ad-hoc governance do the residents have? As another comment mentioned - how are the basic utilities actually handled?
All of these are unanswered questions, and I would really want to learn more before I take at face value the 3 interviewed residents statements that everything is sunshine and roses inside the tower. There's no way they were going to give negative testimony, after all.
You don't find too many details about Kowloon floating around, which is a shame since it was quite a unique settlement.
The best source of information about it is probably a photo essay called "City of Darkness" (http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1...) which is frequently out of print, but which I highly recommend if you can snag a copy. It's a fascinating historical document in its own right, and one of the few reliable sources of information about the walled city, which is why it's referenced so heavily in the Wikipedia article.
Internationally? I watch and read a lot of news and I'd never heard of this before. I agree Vice is phenomenal. It's what the NYT, CNN, etc... should be doing instead of screwing around with more artful ways of presenting puff pieces ie: "snow fall".
I thought this was going to be about the Parque Central East Tower that burned in 2004 (http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/741). As far as I know that one still hasn't been fully repaired, but I guess no one lives in it (yet).
Totally my first impression, too. That these poor people might have to endure even a fraction of the 'block war' life portrayed in Dredd, albeit sans the sci-fi elements, is probably not too far fetched.
The people they interviewed didn't look like they were terribly down on their luck. One couple just looked like young couple who might have moved in there because it's trendy, and the older guy looked like he lived there just because it was cheap. Remodeling the place, watching football on TV...
They really don't seem like the poorer people you could see from the shots outside the building.
I'd like to see them talking to people who gave the place the reputation it has. Is there some 'rule' there, like don't go above the 20th floor to stay in the 'good' part of the building?
Television sets and clothing is 'empty gifts of capitalism', not necessarily expensive. Take a look at benefit claimants in the UK - typically they have a bigger TV than you do and clothes with 'better' branding than you do.
Once you take market rate prices for housing out of the work-bills equation you find 'empty gifts of capitalism' can be afforded.
I would say that as well as 'cheap' being a reason to live there, there is also the matter of community. You are probably better able to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbours there than if you lived in a gated community. People are much more likely to know each other's business so there is security that guns/police/CCTV can't buy.
So long as you don't mind the stairs and fire hazards (which can't be that much worse than the Twin Towers), all is good.
So the Broad Group continues to claim [1] they are going to build their 225 story building in 3 months. (well erect it would be more accurate). One wonders if this sort of construction would be a better solution than occupying partially constructed buildings.
It took me a moment to figure out why your comment didn't read right, then it clicked.
You are wondering if building more towers would be a solution for people, due to high housing costs, occupying a tower that never finished construction.
Sorry yes, there are two economic outcomes, one being an unproductive asset (the abandoned building, and although one of the tenants mentioned paying 'rent' it was entirely unclear who was collecting the rent and by what right other than perhaps force majeur) and the other being housing built which is economically viable to rent 'legally' and thus providing some GDP in the city.
Creating affordable housing allows the capture of that economic activity which can be used to enhance and support public services supporting people using it.
Well I hope the community pulls it off and makes it the most awesome place to live in Caracas, then go on to become a model solution and case study for future housing, I hope.
Not likely. Most probably, it will end up being something like the White Elephant, a squattered building at the edge of Buenos Aires [1][2]. It was going to be the largest hospital in Latin America, but then after the 1955 coup, the construction stopped, the building was abandoned and it was squattered. It has become a very dangerous place, and even the police and gendarmery (an intermediate between police and military) are afraid to enter there. I have worked for a security company that had to place security cameras there, and the workers had to be protected by gendarmery officials. While they were installing the cameras, some bullets where shot from windows. Luckily, nobody was injured.
PS: Relevant to the second link, the project "Sueños Compartidos" or "shared dreams" was closed soon after the article was written, because of a high profile corruption scandal involving the project.
Incarcerated in monolithic interstitial dreck, that forlorn inquisitive youngster in a long empty corridor may grow into a seasoned coder to escape Caracas' concrete war-zone of dread, and this is why here in the states, the preterites get free roam bugged `Obama Phones', with 250 minutes/month, as one of Kieth Alexander's many new worries is that lone savvy `Tuttle' in Brazil, that drones can't even target, and who later retired as 'Jack Burns', ex-florist, in a pleasant home and family circle of trust, recently augmented by a suspicious new pothead son in law, who, unbeknownst to Kieth, Tuttle/Burns has a back story as a NSA-hated CIA field agent to foment global terror to justify US surveillance agencies ever escalating budgets and security cleared retirees' revolving-door golden-parachutes. So the NSA, CIA, and FBI uber-state independent silos all become a patch-quilt of allied targets.
