Practice between for-sale and rent in South America

Practice between for-sale and rent in South America 1/5
Listener Takuto Sando (Tsubame Architects )
Narrator Kenji Lopez(Urvita)
Desember 22,2020

What is Urvita and what are its aims?
Urvita is a residential development project that we started here in Monterrey, Mexico. It began from our observation that real estate development and the way we are making cities is broken in a lot of cities around the world. On one hand, there are people with a lot of money who are investing in office and commercial buildings in the central areas of the city that push up real estate value despite actually being underused or empty?even more so now because of the pandemic?and on the other hand, there are people without a lot of money who are acquiring expensive mortgages to buy homes in the surrounding areas of the city, where they don?t really want to live but have to, because those are the only homes they can afford. This has led to more and more people owning things that are neither doing much good for their individual wellbeing nor helping to improve the quality of life of the community as a whole.
We think this isn?t right. That?s why 10 years ago we started thinking about what we could do to make better cities for living. There are a lot of aspects to what makes a good place for living; it isn?t just about having a comfortable and inspiring home. Being able to walk to the services that you love and that make your life easier, being able to easily spend time with your friends and family, being able to find opportunities to do the work that you want to do, being able to take care of your body and mind, being able to participate in a fun and diverse community where you can express yourself?all these things are also important. However, the cities we have been developing haven?t been producing these outcomes, so we came up with the idea to create a series of residential buildings that can serve as new hardware for cultivating better living communities that actually provide these benefits.
We began by developing five pilot buildings in neglected working-class neighborhoods that have old infrastructure and old housing. These buildings are small with only three to four stories maximum, and they contain one- to three-room apartments. The smallest apartments are only about 25 square meters, but we have designed them with double-height ceilings so that they are cozy but airy and comfortable. You can rent the apartments for whatever period you want, from a single night to many years. We provide a 70-to-30 mix of apartments for long-term and short-term renters. Our idea was to use these buildings as labs to test and develop a scalable housing model that could potentially be used to remake the entire city. With our current model, we are actually providing two services: first, we are providing rental living space, and second, we are providing an investment platform that enables anyone, not just our residents, to invest in the buildings so that they can generate a constant income to prepare for retirement or earn an additional income. So, our aim is not only to provide people with better living communities but also to help people gain more financial stability and freedom by enabling them to generate an income while investing in real estate, as opposed to taking out credit to own a home that becomes a constraint on their lives. We believe that this model can be expanded to regenerate complete neighborhoods through the direct participation of their citizens in that it essentially allows us to put the money of the people to work towards building the cities that the people actually want.