Jose Alvares and daughter Sandra visit the site of their new ELEMENTAL home.

"Beyond Heaven"
Families await completion of a partnership building project in Chile

By Shala Carlson

Habitat is a relatively new venture in Temuco, Chile, having built about 100 houses in its four years of existence. One partnership project currently underway stands to double, triple and eventually quadruple that number.

Working with the state of Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, World Vision and a handful of other organizations and businesses, Habitat is part of a building project known as ELEMENTAL. The project began as a Universidad Católica-sponsored design contest, an effort aimed at getting scholars, architecture firms and private enterprise to think about new solutions to low-cost housing; the results are a series of affordable housing developments situated throughout Chile. Temuco’s ELEMENTAL is in its first phase, 159 units, and will ultimately add two more phases, for a total of 439 homes. Habitat helped acquire the land for the project and is working with the local families selected by the government for participation, meeting with them to talk about house and yard maintenance and to formulate a kind of neighborhood association agreement.

Mercedes Astudillo Alvares looks forward to moving into ELEMENTAL in March. Along with her husband Jose and their two daughters, 17-year-old Arlene and 8-year-old Sandra, Mercedes currently lives in small house built in the yard of Mercedes’ mother. “It’s a small house with no big problems,” she says at first. “We could live there with no troubles.” But as she talks more about their living situation, she reveals that their small house with no problems also has no bathroom, a common truth for many families in the Temuco area; to use the toilet, she and her family must go over to her mother’s house, and they all bathe outdoors, using a shower they have rigged in the yard. This, she says, is what she most looks forward to leaving behind.

The family waited eight years for government assistance with their housing needs, she says, before hearing about ELEMENTAL. So she can wait the few more months until their new house is ready for them to move into. She has all of her plants ready for her new yard already, and the girls are choosing rooms. The families, she adds, have gotten together and chosen an indigenous Mapuche word for their new home: Nompehuenu, “Beyond Heaven.”