Housing deficit for people with disabilities in a radically neoliberal country: Chile's case

This chapter presents evidence that a decade after Chile signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the country has failed to reduce the historical gaps in access to and quality of housing for people with disabilities. We argue that the subsidiary logic of the state of Chile cannot implement public policies that, in a consistent and meaningful way, address the historical conditions in which people with disabilities have lived. We analysed the quantity and quality indicators of housing for people with disabilities estimated for the period 2009-2017, using the National Economic Characterization Survey (CASEN) by applying a Bonferroni-adjusted multiple comparison test. The analysis included the housing and environment factors and multidimensional poverty in CASEN 2017. We found that gaps persist between households with people with disabilities, and households without people with disabilities. We refer to the gap in the quantity of accessible housing for people with disabilities as the quantitative deficit, and gaps in the quality of that housing, including sanitation and building materials, as the qualitative deficit. Chile’s signing of the CRPD is considered to have been a step forward in defining housing policy from a rights-based approach promoting accessibility and universal design, however, in terms of implementation there is still a significant gap for people with disabilities.