Overcoming poverty in Argentina involves much more than increasing income. Structural poverty is most evident in the 6,467 low-income neighbourhoods where more than 5 million people live without adequate access to housing. The socio-urban integration policy offered a powerful tool to address this challenge. However, since 2024, it has been increasingly attacked, defunded and dismantled. In the current context, it is urgent to resume, deepen and accelerate the socio-urban integration policy. Three key lines of action to move forward in this regard.
In collaboration with:
Working-class neighbourhoods in numbers
92% of low-income neighbourhoods in Argentina lack formal water connections, more than 98% do not have formal access to the natural gas network, 97% do not have formal access to the sewerage network, and 66% depend on irregular or informal electricity connections. Seventy per cent of neighbourhoods are exposed to at least one environmental risk factor (such as flooding, open dumps, or water pollution).
The territorial and morphological heterogeneity of neighbourhoods prevents linear solutions and demands a situated approach that addresses local specificities. On the one hand, there is a high concentration of the population living in working-class neighbourhoods: the Province of Buenos Aires and four other jurisdictions account for the majority of the population. On the other hand, 70% of neighbourhoods have fewer than 150 families and require interventions tailored to their scale, location and specific context.
More than 99% of low-income neighbourhoods face insecurity in land tenure. This situation hinders public and private investment in infrastructure, prevents families from accessing credit and subsidies to improve their homes, and exposes residents to the risk of eviction.
Structural deficit, investment deficit
There is a structural financing gap to advance the integration agenda. The estimated investment needed to address the infrastructure gap is over $27 billion. The annual investment required (over a 12-year period) is $2.25 billion.
The funding allocated to socio-urban integration policy in recent years has been insufficient to cover the structural deficit. Since 2024, this situation has been exacerbated by the sustained decline in public investment: so far in 2025, spending on socio-urban integration programmes has amounted to just $4.2 million, barely 0.2% of the annual investment required.
Public policy recommendation
Guidelines for a National Infrastructure Intervention Plan
The Plan must ensure that low-income neighbourhoods have the same access to basic services and infrastructure as the formal city. The pillars of this plan are:
- Recognise uniqueness in diagnosis: conduct an individualised analysis of each neighbourhood to define priorities and intervention strategies, using objective criteria such as environmental risks and access to basic services.
- Involving the community: Community participation is key to ensuring that projects respond to the real priorities of residents, strengthening transparency and local capacities.
- Start with connections to basic services: Regularising connections to essential services (electricity, water and sewerage) should be a priority, as they have a direct and significant impact on people’s lives and reduce the high economic and human costs of informal connections.
- Implement preventive policies: integration should be seen as a preventive approach, not just a corrective one.
Extending the scope of the Family Housing Certificate (CVF)
Given that the CVF has established a new minimum standard of security of tenure, the challenge is to broaden its scope, acceptance and ownership. Strategies include:
- Securing technical and financial resources: it is crucial that the CVF is supported by a structure that enables its widespread and efficient use, including regional teams, technological infrastructure and an adequate budget.
- Dissemination, training and control: the Secretariat for Socio-Urban Integration (SISU) must ensure that the powers of the CVF are known and complied with by public and private bodies.
- Greater regulatory integration: the CVF could be integrated into land registration processes and bodies, such as cadastral surveys and property registries (RPI).
- Expansion of benefits: explore greater facilities for accessing public services, social tariffs and other economic and social rights.
- Regulatory changes: evaluate reforms such as the addition of the concept of special individual and collective urban adverse possession to the Civil Code, the reduction of the period for administrative acquisitive prescription, or the modification of the effective date of the Pierri Law No. 24,374.
Innovating in financing
It is necessary to design sustainable strategies that combine national, provincial, and municipal funding sources with innovative instruments.
- Exploration of Debt Securities (VRD): The issuance of VRDs within the framework of thematic bonds (social or environmental) is an innovative and promising approach to leverage the financing of integration works, given that the objectives of the works coincide with the categories established for inclusion as Social Bonds.
- Use of existing funds: explore the possibility of investment by the Guarantee and Sustainability Fund (FGS) and Mutual Funds (FCI), including Green and Sustainable Mutual Funds.
- Revenue generation by subnational and local governments: boost the contribution of municipalities and provinces by capturing urban land value gains and improving the efficiency of property tax collection.
