The San Jose skyline is noticeably void of high rise buildings.

Despite being considered the most cosmopolitan city in Central America, Costa Rica’s capital city of San Jose is all but void of skyscrapers and modern building facades. The Banco Nacional building, the tallest in the country, sits unrivaled at an unimpressive 19 stories high. After over a decade of rapid urban growth and an affinity for one and two-story buildings, real estate in San Jose is preciously scarce and planning is all but non-existent as the city limits continue to expand in all directions.

At the close of the 4th National Construction Congress at the Hotel Real Intercontinental last week, Costa Rican Vice President Laura Chinchilla announced her intention to change this situation and do away with urban segregation and the damage it has caused to the environment in the Central Valley.

She called for a development plan for the Grand Metropolitan Area, which would modernize Costa Rica Real Estate and land registries and establish clear restrictions on land usage with the hope of creating more orderly development in the future. One of the key points of this plan would be to promote vertical development, which offers more housing and building space while using up less land, which would cut down on the uncontrolled urban sprawl.

In a period of 25 years, the population in Costa Rica doubled from 2 million to 4 million, with about one half of them living in the country’s capital. Without any proper plan for development, the city began to fan out on all sides. Whether it be the desire to have one’s own little plot of land, a fear of living above ground due to the region’s propensity to seismic shakes, or the lack of construction know-how in low income areas, Ticos prefer one-story homes.

The Vice President called such rapid urban growth chaotic, and said that much of the valuable real estate in the city center is underutilized. Her goal is to develop government housing projects, which would provide low priced housing in the form of urban apartment buildings for families in need.

In low income neighborhoods that lack green space and are characterized by small, overcrowded homes, this type of project could turn a city block of small, make-shift shelters into a several story apartment complex, allowing the same amount of people to live in a smaller space, and still have public space leftover for everyone to enjoy. The same would ring true for several story office buildings.

A Plan in Action

The current San Jose administration, headed by Mayor Johnny Araya, began a project called “San Jose Posible” to combat the move of Ticos away from the city center, by destining 40 city blocks for major renovations and cleanup.

Pedestrian walkways, revamped store fronts, parking areas and apartment complexes have all been included in the plan to rehabilitate a once dilapidated area. The hope is to renew interest in the city center, inviting people to move closer to their schools and places of work, thus bringing life back to the center as well as cutting down on the extreme traffic problems caused by those commuting back and forth.

While Chinchilla’s goals aim to restructure the low income housing situation in the center that have been raging out of control for years, Araya’s project hopes to attract investment to the forgotten center, redefining it as a center of culture, commerce and the arts.

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Filed under: Costa Rica News on June 9th, 2008