# **C. Prevention of New Slum Formation or Expansion**

Urbanization is likely to continue in Bahia and thus preventing new slums from forming will be a key challenge. The State is 66 percent urbanized which is well below the national average and even below averages for the Northeast region. As the Government moves forward in upgrading the existing informal housing stock, it will also be a challenge to prevent new invasions.

The formal supply of land and housing in Brazil is limited due to existing policies and the regulatory and legal frameworks. National and local norms follow imported models which establish strict rules with regard to zoning and land use, subdivision of land and dimensions of plots, and density and patterns of construction. These regulations are impossible to enforce because they are costly and require substantial administrative capacity. On the other hand, demographic pressure and demand for urban housing is strong and the supply of affordable serviced land is low, with the resulting solution for the poor urban migrants being some form of informal housing. Estimates are that some 700,000 families annually in Brazil come to urban areas and invade lands, purchase lots illegally, or crowd into existing informal settlements.

The experience of Ribeira Azul has been successful in preventing new invasions in the Program area from the start. This is attributed to the intensive presence of AVSI and CONDER, outreach to the community getting them to play a monitoring role, and physical interventions specifically designed to prevent invasions (such as a “border” road between the houses and the sea which blocked the construction of new _palafitas_ ). The turnover in the community as a whole has also been relatively low which contributes to general stability.

Despite these successes, a new invasion has recently appeared in a neighboring community just outside Novos Alagados II, in part motivated by the proximity to the relatively high quality of services in the area that was upgraded. CONDER is working on trying to resettle these residents.

Urban upgrading of precarious settlements can also generate incentives to invasions indirectly, as there are often incentives for beneficiaries to sell their houses and invade elsewhere. A CONDER/AVSI survey indicates that a relatively low number of residents in a section of Ribeira Azul (17% of a 280 sample) sold their homes to move elsewhere. These data, however, refer to formal transactions only, and thus it is not known if and how many houses have been sold informally. In any case, according to impressionistic perceptions by field workers, the turn-over of residents has been quite low. In contrast, in other upgraded _favelas_ in Salvador the picture is strikingly different – for instance, in the _favela_ Silvio Leal (in the region of Pau da Lima), the turn-over of residents was about 75 percent. This appears to be closer to the norm in Salvador.

Beyond the approaches used in Ribeira Azul, a more systematic approach to slum prevention will be necessary for scaling up. One of the new policies being considered is the provision of serviced land for the poor. While the availability of appropriate public 19