Houses for the People, Power for the Gangs: Criminal Appropriation of Social Housing in Brazil

We argue that large-scale social housing can generate territories of opportunity for criminal organizations when the state’s distributive capacity outpaces its coercive capacity. Housing creates immovable and legible assets that criminal organizations can appropriate when the state does not protect beneficiaries or enforce secure property rights. We exploit population thresholds governing Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida program and homicide data for all 5,570 municipalities in fuzzy regression discontinuity and staggered difference-in-differences designs. Municipalities assigned more housing units experience higher homicide rates, with effects concentrated among demographic groups disproportionately exposed to organized criminal violence. Geolocated data from Rio de Janeiro show that housing delivery expands criminal territorial control and associated lethality, but only where criminal groups compete for a monopoly. In São Paulo, where that monopoly is historically asserted, the effects of housing on violence are null. The findings illuminate how redistributive policies, absent enforcement capacity, can unintentionally empower criminal governance.