Pablo Rojas

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July 06, 2009

This week at the office

This week I have a couple of interesting and hopefully productive meetings. I'm finally scheduling meetings and running them myself (without my boss), so I feel far more productive. It's a little intimidating. Last week I scheduled a meeting at a horrible time, changed the time of the meeting several times, finally had to cancel the meeting, and irritated plenty of people along the way. Hopefully this week will go better.

The first meeting is about the old problem of the abandoned houses in Moravia. As I've mentioned in a few previous posts, the city administration bought 3 houses inhabited by 9 families, but did not pay for the third floor of one house. Consequently, one family is still living there and the buildings cannot be demolished to make way for the intended park. The abandoned houses have been used by express kidnappers, drug dealers, street kids, displaced families, and others to commit crimes or otherwise live there harmlessly but illegally.

The meeting will consist of various agencies getting together to sort through the problem as quickly as possible. It's really as simple as getting a lawyer to describe the necessary steps to buy the house, getting the budget and planning office to provide the money to pay for the house, and getting the various agencies executing the Moravia project to negotiate the purchase and finally demolish the building. Maybe that doesn't sound so simple, but the reason it hasn't happened already is because of lack of inter-agency coordination and the fact that everyone is already so busy.

My job will be to coordinate the meeting and to argue for a quick purchase and demolition. There may be some people who want a clear plan before moving forward, but, having been to the site myself, I understand that the abandoned houses have caused a very urgent crime problem for the very neighborhood we are supposed to be helping.

The second meeting will be about the new housing projects in the Pajarito sector. One of this administration's main goals is to provide 15,000 homes for the city's poorest residents, many of whom are homeless or living in unstable shacks. Pajarito is a sector high up in the hills of Medellin where the city has put a MetroCable station and built dozens of public housing buildings.

Unfortunately, while there are many social workers in Moravia, once people are relocated from Moravia in Pajarito, they are outside of the Moravia project's jurisdiction. In other words, nobody is monitoring the social and economic situation in Pajarito. Crime, conflict between neighbors, vandalism and otehr problems have become rampant. There may be plenty of other problems that we don't know about simply because the city administration does not have a strong presence in the sector.

The meeting will consist of a discussion of the problems in Pajarito, recent attempts to have an agency monitor the social situation there and the necessary next steps. I will also visit Pajarito next week to see the situation for myself, identify problems that the city may not know about, take some photos to provide for a visual effect when trying to convince various agencies to help out and prepare an official report summarizing the problems in Pajarito.

The third meeting will be about the recycling facility in Moravia. The city has decided to build a recycling facility in the neighborhood for various reasons.

First, it will send a strong message of change as Moravia consists of shacks built by poor people on the city's old trash dump. Second, it will begin to solve the serious problems of public health and hygiene in the neighborhood. Third, it will hopefully become a commercially successful recycling facility for the entire area of North-Central Medellin that will provide employment for Moravia residents.

Finally, it will serve as a model solution for Colombia's (and many other countries) informal recycling problem. Medellin, like many cities in developing countries, is home to hundreds informal recyclers who search the city's trash for recyclable material. The new facility will employ those people and organize them in a way that will make their lives more comfortable, dignified and sanitary.

Unfortunately, bad planning and bureaucratic processes have delayed the project. It is many months behind schedule. Meanwhile, a private recycling facility has just launched not too far from Moravia.

It is unclear whether or not Moravia's facility will be commercially sustainable in spite of the new competition, but we are proceeding with the project anyway partly because it was a promise made to the city and, more importantly, to the neighborhood and it would be politically difficult to rethink or delay the project any further. There are many people counting on the project and, given recent local opposition to some project initiatives, the city cannot afford to further strain relations with Moravia residents.

I may or may not have a fourth meeting about problems at another housing project, this one within Moravia itself. The building has plenty of physical structural problems, but the main concern is its proximity to the Medellín river. Because there is no barrier, residents fear that their children may fall into the river, especially during the rainy season. Again, the idea is to visit the area, produce an official report and meet with various city agencies to plan the building of a barrier.

Posted by Pablo Rojas at July 6, 2009 04:51 PM

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Posted by: Abe Lowenthal at July 6, 2009 05:59 PM

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