Housing Policy Matters for the Poor: Literature Review and Priorities for Future Research in Latin America

This document analyzes evidence in the literature about the effectiveness of housing policies in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, paying particular attention to regularities about the effectiveness of housing policies across countries that target low-income families. The review herein should help prompt a discussion to identify and prioritize future research to design more efficient housing policies. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a brief discussion of housing and poverty indicators to provide a sense of the magnitude of the housing problem in the LAC region and the common policy approach to housing that some countries in the region has adopted: the "enabling approach" to housing markets. Section 3 gathers evidence from various sources about the effectiveness of different policies on housing outcomes, with a particular focus on policies related to property rights, subsidies, urban infrastructure, housing finance, and land markets. The last section provides some conclusions and points out priorities for future research.