THE HOUSING OF THE URBAN MIDDLE CLASSES IN BRAZIL Available to Purchase

Recent literature on housing studies (Batley, 1977; Bolaffi, 1983) fail to explain why the post‐1964 authoritarian regime in Brazil allocated a vast proportion of federal expenditure on housing to the urban middle classes concentrated in the South East region of Brazil. Since the creation of the National Housing Bank in 1964 state involvement in housing provision has been enormous. Housing has been one of the areas of general personal consumption in which successive governments for the past twenty years have been keenly concerned. Several million dwellings have been financed by the Federal Housing System since 1964. Currently there are a variety of programmes requiring direct public expenditure, including the provision of state and municipal housing, payments to trade union housing associations and state financed mortgages.