Advocacy for Social Rental in Argentina

Why advocate? One of our strategic lines is Advocacy. We aim to influence systems, policies, and attitudes to generate large-scale, long-term change. The challenge of housing access requires efforts from multiple stakeholders. We know we cannot solve it alone.

Our commitment is to people living in vulnerable housing conditions. That’s why our advocacy work is nonpartisan. We follow the path of dialogue with all actors in the housing ecosystem—government, private sector, and other organizations. We believe in building bridges and creating spaces for collaboration in the search for solutions.

“The risks associated with advocacy are far less than the cost of doing nothing.”

Currently, we focus on three areas of work. First, we advocate for the implementation of a social rental policy as a way for thousands of families to access housing, instead of paying to “rent” inadequate spaces. Second, we promote secure tenure as a fundamental right for families. We meet with key stakeholders to help families obtain legal title to their homes. Finally, we advocate for access to basic services in informal settlements.

Programmatic Advocacy

A study conducted in 2007 to assess the feasibility of actions in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA) revealed that in the southern part of the city, many families had sufficient income to rent formally, but access barriers—such as guarantors, pay stubs, and discrimination—prevented them from doing so, forcing them to pay similar amounts for inadequate accommodations like boarding houses, tenements, and hostels.

Based on this study, we developed a pilot social rental project in the La Boca neighborhood called Estela de Esperanzas. We reclaimed an unused city space and transformed it into nine apartments rented formally to families living in tenements, boarding houses, or hostels.

The project includes two key approaches:

• Three-year residency, our main focus, with a staggered subsidy to allow time for families to regain employment and income.
• Creation and operation of a support network for training, job placement, and income generation in partnership with specialized organizations. This way, families in the program gain tools to achieve safe and stable housing.

After this long journey, our work now focuses on driving systemic, practical, and policy changes to improve access to fair rental housing for more people.

Work with the National Housing Secretariat

After several months of work, on November 19, 2019, we organized an awareness event with the National Housing Secretariat titled Social Rental as State Policy. This meeting was part of a consultancy aimed at providing technical advice to the agency, which began in August.

This initiative aligns with the Secretariat’s interest in adopting Social Rental as a state policy—recognized as an additional pathway to accessing social housing in the country—and was key to the inclusion of the National Social Rental Program in the Rental Law (27,551), enacted in 2020.

The publication Social Rental as State Policy details the research findings, key aspects addressed, and recommendations developed.

Social Rental NOW

Social Rental NOW was a Habitat for Humanity Argentina awareness campaign launched in October 2022 to highlight the lack of access to formal rental housing.

In March 2020, the Rental Law was enacted, creating in Article 17 the National Social Rental Program, whose potential to address the issue remains unexplored. This policy, already tested in other countries in the region, could allow thousands of families to access adequate housing.

According to the law, the Ministry of Territorial Development and Habitat, through the Habitat Secretariat, was responsible for implementing the Social Rental Program. However, this never happened, and in December 2023, the Rental Law was repealed.

During the campaign, we gathered over 6,000 signatures calling for the program’s implementation, met with dozens of key stakeholders, and organized the first Social Rental Conference in Argentina.

Next Steps

As part of the global advocacy campaign Home Equals, since 2025 we have been working on three fronts:

• Together with the Buenos Aires City Government, we are developing a Social Rental program for the most vulnerable population. This will be the first public program of its kind in Argentina.
• We are engaging local governments across the country to advise them on implementing housing access policies and programs through social rental.
• We are creating a Social Real Estate Agency to act as an intermediary between supply and demand excluded from the formal rental market.