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'Colonia' Land and Housing Market Performance and the Impact of Lot Title Regularisation in Texas

Department of Sociology and LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, Sid Richardson Hall, Austin, Texas 78712-1167, USA, pward{at}uts.cc.utexas.edu

Flavio de Souza

Department of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federale de Algoas, Campus A. C. Simoes, Cidade Universitaria, Maceio—AL 57072-970, Brazil, fdesouza{at}ctec.ufal.br

Cecilia Giusti

Center for Housing and Urban Development, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, 77843-3137, USA, cgiusti{at}archone.tamu.edu

This article analyses performance of the land market in several irregular settlements (colonias) outside Rio Grande City, Starr County, Texas. Specifically, it explores the impact upon land prices of a major title 'regularisation' initiative to clear property titles of very poor households undertaken by the Community Resources Group (CRG) Receivership Program at the behest of the Texas State government between 1995 and 2002. Land price data and trends are analysed using a major CRG database of over 1400 price records and files, complemented by a questionnaire survey of over 260 households applied by the research team as part of an evaluation of the CRG Program. The data show that prices are relatively 'flat' in real terms over time and that, while there was a spike in prices during the early 1990s, there does not appear to have been any significant increase since regularisation. The data suggest that prices appear to be shaped more by socially determined criteria associated with the developers themselves, rather than by settlement characteristics, location, etc. Regularisation of land title appears to make little difference to land market performance and, while colonias are a vehicle for investment for low-income groups, the rate of return compared with other segments of the (formal) property market is very low. These findings are compared with similar work for less developed countries and also challenge those theories that argue in favour of land regularisation as a means to improve land market performance and integration of the urban poor.

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