Household privacy: a study of needs in remodeling or adding on to homes

Abstract

Adequate housing must include spaces protected from the elements and be favorable to health, privacy,safety and security. The authors discuss homes in terms of the privacy they afford and their internal capacity to accommodate families of varying compositions with basic standards of convenience. Government programs for low-income housing should include not only the construction of new homes, but also guarantee the renovation of older residences as well, together with the corresponding technical assistance. We propose a criterion for evaluating the internal privacy of houses and suggest an indicator of Dwelling Extension Requirements based on the desirable number of bedrooms, other rooms and bathrooms, based on age, gender and marital status of the occupants. The proposed indicator includes seven levels of need, varying from the enlarging of a single room, at the lowest level, to the building of another bathroom and at least four rooms, at the most advanced level. The indicator can be useful in public policies for remodeling and extending residences. The results indicate that, in 2008, 46% of Brazilian households needed extensions or remodeling, but the qualification of this indicator on seven levels indicates that public policies could focus, for example, on levels that would encompass approximately 16% of all Brazilian households. The highest proportion of appropriate households can be seen in the Southern Region (67%), whereas the worst situation is in the Northern Region, where only 37% of households can be classified as adequate.