The Rise and Fall of the National Housing Bank in Military Brazil

This paper traces the rise and fall of the National Housing Bank (BNH, Banco Nacional de Habitação) during Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985). Created in August 1964 just months after the military coup that year, the BNH represented the first truly national, large-scale federal urban policy and financing program in Brazil. The Bank re-shaped Brazilian cities of all sizes through funding of public housing, acquisition of private homes, and urban infrastructure projects until its demise amid financial crisis and corruption scandals in 1986, just one year after the restoration of civilian rule. As this paper argues, the BNH demonstrates how urban policy became a key area through which the military attempted to cultivate popular support for authoritarianism among working-class urban residents. Scholars such as Valladares (2005), Benmergui (2009), McCann (2014), Murphy (2015), and Bruey (2018) have centered struggles over housing as an essential arena through which everyday urban residents and Cold War dictatorships in Latin America negotiated the contours of citizenship. Whereas accounts of housing struggles during Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships understandably emphasize the repression of popular demands around housing, the BNH opens a new window onto housing as a means for dictatorships to build a popular base of support for authoritarian visions of development.

The paper draws on a diverse source base—including internal BNH documents, press articles, and case studies from BNH-financed public housing projects in Brazil’s largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—to show how the BNH attempted to capitalize on widespread popular desire for a casa propria or one’s own home. Through public housing programs that gave low-income residents private ownership of their housing units, the BNH made mass home ownership a central and enduring part of the social contract between the state and everyday Brazilians whose complex reverberations continue up to the present-day.