More than half of new homes in the Dominican Republic are built without permits
About 50,000 homes are built every year in the Dominican Republic without construction permits, according to Diario Libre. Officials explain why, and what they plan to do about it.
Key points
- More than half of the homes built each year in the country have no construction permit.
- Between 2018 and 2024, the housing deficit fell by about 134,000 homes.
- % of middle-income households cannot afford the cheapest formal home.
- An intervention project in a Santo Domingo neighborhood is estimated to cost 5,000 million pesos.
More than half of the homes built each year in the Dominican Republic go up without a construction permit. That is according to Joan Guerrero, director of Housing and Habitat Policies at the Ministry of Housing, Habitat and Buildings (Mivhed), speaking at an event organized by Ciudad Alternativa to review five years of housing policy.
Guerrero said the country's urban growth combines two realities: a formal city, vertical and concentrated, and an informal one, horizontal and self-built, that spreads out without a continuous road network.
Between 2018 and 2024, the housing deficit dropped by about nine percentage points, equal to roughly 134,000 homes. Serious gaps remain, however: 97% of buildings with this kind of deficit lack adequate water, and 19% lack proper sanitation. Guerrero said that the difficulty of accessing affordable urban land pushes families toward the informal market, and that economic and job limitations add to the problem. 57% of middle-income households cannot afford the cheapest formal home, and 54% of the workforce is informal, which makes mortgage loans hard to get.
Guerrero warned that late planning and late state intervention are costly. "When the State arrives late to a community, the cost of intervening triples," he said. As an example, he cited a project for about 1,900 homes in a densely populated neighborhood of the Distrito Nacional, estimated at 5,000 million pesos, 32% of which would go only to demolishing and improving precarious structures.
To address the problem, the Ten-Year Housing Plan includes building permits scaled to risk level, simplified technical standards, and public technical assistance for people who build their own homes. "The goal is to stop disorderly urban growth, reduce the cost of state interventions, and move toward a planned, compact and polycentric city model," Guerrero said.
Why it matters
Difficulty buying formal housing pushes many families to build on their own without permits, which can affect the safety and quality of their homes and the cost the state later pays to upgrade those communities.