Abstract

The subsidized social housing policy, widely applied during the 1990s in Santiago de Chile, formed a highly segregated popular periphery. Since 2000, the application of this instrument has decreased, which is interpreted as a movement of expulsion from social housing to the peri-urban area of the city. In this framework, this work analyzes the location of social housing built between 2000 and 2017 in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, to identify patterns of expulsion, displacement, and / or segregation of the beneficiaries of this policy. Through a mixed strategy that combined analysis of secondary information, photointerpretation of satellite images, and interviews with the director of municipal works of peri-urban distrits, we conclude that: 1) there is no evidence of a process of massive displacement of households in social housing towards the peri-urban of the city after the 1990s, and 2) the production of social housing, both in the city of Santiago and in its peri-urban, is lower than the new housing requirements, increasing the housing deficit. It is concluded that the current scenario is one of exclusion of the new poor households from the Santiago housing market, rather than of displacement or increase in residential segregation.