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When the clock strikes six in the evening, the Carioca metro station, in the financial heart of Rio de Janeiro, is abuzz with people going in one direction.
Everyone rushes down the stairs looking for the cars that will take them home.
Hardly anyone makes it to the center of Rio when night falls.
Everyone leaves.
In a few hours the scenario will be that of a ghost town.
The streets where thousands of office workers ran around during the day will remain empty until the next morning, when the floods of workers arrive again.
The center of Rio de Janeiro brings together, in addition to a large part of the city's historical and cultural heritage, most of the GDP of the metropolitan area and more than 800,000 jobs.
But if the entire metropolis is home to more than 12 million inhabitants, barely 41,000 people live in the center, divided into small nuclei that are almost like a 'Gallic village' that resists the zombie city around it outside of working hours.
To remedy this, the city council launched the
Reviver Center
program last year , with strong incentives for housing construction.
Windows of a commercial building that is gradually becoming a residential building in the center.Leonardo Carrato
“Downtown Rio is mainly offices.
It never made the transition that other cities did to have more residents downtown.
And the pandemic showed how problematic that model is.
Everyone depends on a single use, and when that use fails, everything falls apart," Rio's Secretary of Urban Planning, Washington Fajardo, the ideologue of the project, explains to EL PAÍS, inspired above all by the recovery of the degraded center of Rio. Melbourne.
The center of Rio was already dragging several problems.
Some date back to the 1960s, when the city lost the country's capital status to Brasilia, leaving huge empty administrative buildings and an identity crisis yet to be resolved.
Others are more everyday, such as dirt or a feeling of insecurity, but the pandemic hit the Achilles' Heel: dependency on offices.
With the arrival of remote work, many employees did not set foot on the streets again, stopping consuming in restaurants and shops, which now display hundreds of lowered shutters.
A double economic crisis.
change the laws
Now, the city council project gives tax incentives to construction companies so that they are encouraged to invest in the center.
In addition to eliminating the payment of some taxes, those who build housing or transform old office buildings gain construction potential to build more profitable real estate in the most coveted and already very densely populated areas of the city.
Since the new legislation came into force a year ago, the construction of more than 1,700 new homes has already been approved, more than in the entire previous decade.
On Presidente Vargas Avenue, the widest in the city, an apartment building will be built for the first time in 77 years.
Something begins to move, although breaking the inertia is not easy.
Until 1994 there was even a law that prohibited building houses in this region.
Now,
People going down the escalators of the Carioca metro station after a day of work.Leonardo Carrato
But until the cranes appear, the challenge will be to conquer the minds of Cariocas, for whom the center is a place to go to work or have fun, not to live.
The middle and upper classes still dream of living in front of the beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema or Leblon or even further from the center, in Barra da Tijuca, a kind of Miami of expansive urbanism where everything is done by car.
Fajardo, however, believes that little by little the idea that living in the center improves quality of life will take hold.
To convince the pioneers, the city council is already working with a special line of credit for public officials who want to move.
With the arrival of the first neighbors, it is expected that a virtuous circle will start to attract more and more people.
For the UN Habitat representative in Brazil, Rayne Moraes, the benefits go beyond the recovery of the central area of the city, because thousands of displacements and the consequent CO2 emissions would be avoided.
Cariocas spend an average of 67 minutes a day on public transport, and 11% spend more than two hours, according to a recent study by the Moovit app.
It is the third city in the world where its inhabitants waste more time in traffic jams, only surpassed by Jakarta and Istanbul.
Repopulating the historic center and creating other centralities in the city would avoid the pendulum movement, points out Moraes, who nevertheless believes that the most important thing is that the city council dictates the rules of the game and not private initiative.
"There has to be subsidized housing, social rental and different alternatives of sizes and values, because otherwise we will return to the initial process, in which only the rich can return to that noble area of the city," he warns.
Heavy traffic of cars and people on a normal working day in downtown Rio De Janeiro.
Leonardo Carrato
For now, the city council promises 600 apartments for those who earn less than 3,600 reais a month (about 662 dollars).
It is something practically symbolic in a city where almost a quarter of the population lives in favelas, in many cases in situations of extreme social vulnerability, but in Brazil public housing policies are very precarious, if not non-existent, laments Fajardo himself. .
The closest thing would be the program of the federal government 'My house, my life', one of the flags of the governments of the Workers' Party (PT).
More than a solution, in most cases these impersonal blocks built in series ended up aggravating the problem, by driving low-income families back to the periphery, without any kind of public service at hand.
The weakness of the housing policy at the state level ends up being a brake on the recovery of the center, since thousands of poorer families would be willing to move if the public power made it easier for them.
The other problem is a classic in this type of urban renewal process: the dreaded gentrification.
This fear of rising prices has already loomed in the central area of Rio since before the 2016 Olympics, when the port's waterfront was completely renovated, renamed 'Porto Maravilha'.
Tourists and citizens enjoying the weekend on the downtown Olympic Boulevard.Leonardo Carrato
Fajardo refutes that it is difficult to expel neighbors, because they are very few and most live in owned houses.
“It is the lowest population density in the city.
It is a matter of new neighbors arriving, not of expelling those who are already there, ”he says, and stresses that the priority is to avoid a real estate bubble.
At the moment, it is in the port region (which does not benefit from the fiscal incentives of the municipal plan, despite being close to the financial center) that the expected housing boom has begun to flourish the fastest.
In just one year there are already more than 4,900 apartments up and running.