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Project June 19, 2018

How Property Titles Can Change People's Lives in Latin America

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Image by Chequeado. Argentina, 2018.
Image by Chequeado. Argentina, 2018.

Having property titles means home dwellers can access basic services like electricity and gas, sell their houses, pass them down to their children, and have the legal right to occupy them—and thus cannot be evicted. However, thousands of people in Argentina live in houses for which they do not have titles, either because they occupied their homes illegally and could never regularize their situation, or because they have state-provided housing that was never properly regularized.

There is academic evidence showing that just possessing a property title can have an impact on education levels and other sociodemographic indicators. In partnership with an academic specialist, Journalist Olivia Sohr will lead a team from Chequeado, a nonprofit media outlet that focuses on fact checking and data journalism, to analyze available data on the impact of title regularization. These journalists and researchers will focus on particular cases in Argentina, and will tell stories from two countries that have had large regularization programs in the past: Mexico, in collaboration with Animal Político, "Un hogar con escrituras y servicios, un privilegio al que no tienen acceso los olvidados de la Ciudad de México," and Peru, working with Ojo Público, "Los papeles de la tierra: la interminable crisis de la titulación en el Perú."

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Topic

Land Rights

Land Rights