With hotel rooms in short supply, the residents of Rio de Janeiro’s
favelas, or slums, are renting out their homes to visiting soccer fans
from around the globe.
Published: December 21, 2013
RIO DE JANEIRO — Gun battles
still boom through the streets. Drug dealers still ply their trade in
the labyrinth of alleyways. Residents of the Rocinha neighborhood still
fume over the brutal tactics of the police, who were recently charged
with torturing and killing an impoverished bricklayer.
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But with hotel rooms in perilously short supply and even modest hostels
in Rio de Janeiro charging as much as $450 for a bed during the World
Cup in Brazil next year, the residents of Rocinha and other favelas, or
slums, are making the most of the city’s acute shortage of lodging for
the event: They are renting out their homes to fans from around the
globe.
Maria Clara dos Santos, 49, is preparing to take as many as 10 World Cup
visitors into her three-bedroom home in Rocinha (pronounced
ho-SEEN-ya), which commands a stunning view of Ipanema’s sun-kissed
beaches in the distance. True, Ms. dos Santos notes, untreated sewage
reeks on her street and steel bars on her windows are needed to deter
break-ins, so she is offering guests a comparative bargain — about $50 a
night to stay with her during the tournament.
“We can provide a level of human warmth and authenticity that places
down below cannot,” she said, reflecting the growing popularity of
favelas for their vibrant musical scenes, cheaper prices and absence of
pretension compared with ritzier parts of town.
Housing tourists in Rio’s slums might well turn out to be one of the
smoother aspects of preparing for the World Cup, an event that has been
more a source of contention for Brazil than a crowning achievement in
its push for global acclaim.
Huge cost overruns and chronic delays as well as accidents
involving workers falling to their deaths or being crushed by towering
cranes are bedeviling the lavish stadiums under construction.
The Brazilian football confederation remains tarnished by bribery scandals at its highest levels. And if the enormous street protests this year
against government spending for the World Cup were not enough, anger is
now building over the costly transportation projects intended to get
soccer fans to the matches. Some will not even be completed before the
last goal in the tournament is scored.
“There’s a real lack of robust governance structures here to deal with
an event this size, so things start breaking and people start dying,”
said Christopher Gaffney, a scholar at Brazil’s Federal Fluminense
University who studies large sporting projects. “The absurd prices ahead
of the World Cup are part of this phenomenon. People perceive the event
as bringing only short-term benefits, so they’re seizing on the
immediate opportunities around the event.”
Brazilian authorities expect the nation to receive as many as 600,000
foreign tourists around the month of the World Cup, which starts in June
and will be held in 12 cities. Here in Rio, which will host the
tournament’s final game, hotel operators are clearly salivating at the
coming influx.
One reason: The city has only about 55,400 hotel beds for as many as
300,000 expected visitors, leading rates to surge to an average of about
$460 a night, roughly double what they regularly cost, according to a
report by Brazil’s state tourism agency.
Alfredo Lopes, the president of the Brazil Hotel Industry Association’s
Rio chapter, said the price increases should be expected. “Rio’s image
is being exalted around the world at this time,” he said. “It would be
absurd to try to regulate hotel prices when there are people prepared to
pay what the market determines is the correct price.”
Going further, Mr. Lopes compared Rio with certain coveted luxury
brands. “Some people are prepared to pay triple the money for a
Harley-Davidson than for another motorcycle, and there’s a reason for
that,” he said. “The same goes for Rio,” he added.
Never mind that the state of Rio de Janeiro is grappling with a new crime wave, illustrated by a surge in homicides
around the city, the shooting of a 25-year-old German tourist in
Rocinha and a string of muggings on beaches frequented by foreign
tourists.
For those who cannot afford to stay in Rio’s more glamorous districts,
or who are simply turned off by the city’s already high hotel rates,
favela lodgings are emerging as an alluring option.
“I wanted to learn more about the heart of Brazil, rather than the
facade,” said Isom Hightower, 30, an aviation consultant from San
Francisco now paying around $11 a night for a bunk bed in a Rocinha
guesthouse.
After quitting his job to travel in Brazil, Mr. Hightower found the lodging through Favela Experience,
a start-up created by Elliot Rosenberg, a 23-year-old fellow
Californian, that promises “affordable World Cup accommodations” in the
city’s slums. During the tournament, the rate for the bunk bed in the
same home may climb to about $50 a night.
Such guesthouses are proliferating, helped in part by the state’s sometimes polarizing campaign to take control of dozens of Rio’s slums by sending in army troops and police forces, a process commonly called “pacification.”
Big security challenges persist, like the abuses by the police recently
revealed in Rocinha, but living standards have increased in some
communities with Brazil’s stronger economy over the last decade. Basic
services like public health clinics and cable-car transportation systems
have been introduced and homicide rates have fallen sharply in some
areas. The effort has also opened new parts of the city to tourism, and
some favelas have taken on a chic allure, appearing as backdrops for
fashion shoots and videos.
Bob Nadkarni, a 70-year-old British-born painter who moved here more
than three decades ago, helped pioneer the concept of the favela
guesthouse with The Maze, his aptly-named labyrinth in Tavares Bastos, a
slum near the old presidential palace. Its private rooms during the
World Cup go for about $220 a night.
A real estate frenzy has struck this year in another hillside slum,
Vidigal, which overlooks the exclusive beach of Leblon. With investors
snapping up properties, basic one-bedroom homes there can cost about
$75,000 or more, reflecting bidding wars as hoteliers seek a favela
foothold.
“I think it’s going to be almost like a Mediterranean village in 10
years,” said Cello Macedo, an investor from São Paulo. He bought a house
in Vidigal and is transforming it into an upscale guesthouse, pinning
his hopes on a party scene that already thrives in the slum, attracting
bohemian travelers from Europe and the United States.
Vinicius Lummertz, a senior official in Brazil’s tourism ministry, said
that lodgings in Rio’s favelas, whether guesthouses, chic hotels or
merely rooms in the homes of families, would be welcome to bolster
options for travelers. In fact, he painted a relatively rosy picture of
Rio’s capacity to receive large numbers of visitors during the World
Cup.
“Prices for places to stay may jump before the tournament, but they
could also go down when people consider all the options,” Mr. Lummertz
said. He said the ministry had compiled an estimate of about 150,000
available places to stay in Rio and nearby resort cities, including
hostels, private residences and even short-stay love motels.
Indeed, these establishments, where clients can opt for trysts or
overnight stays, will be competing with the guesthouses in the favelas.
Of the 80 rooms at the Motel Villa Regia, a love motel near Rio’s port,
51 have already been converted into what appear to be regular hotel
rooms, removing ceiling mirrors, Jacuzzis and illuminated glass cases
selling condoms and snacks.
With themed rooms called Hollywood, High Tech, Japonesa and Versailles
already converted to more conventional uses, not everyone is pleased
with the tug of market forces in Rio’s hotel industry. “We have clients
who have been coming here for 28 years,” said Lourdes Will, manager of
the Villa Regia. “They feel abandoned.”
Nadia Sussman and Taylor Barnes contributed reporting.
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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