Rio building collapse: Will Brazil be ready for the Olympics? (+video)

And over the past year, more than 60 manhole covers in Rio have exploded, injuring dozens of people and damaging windows and cars.

Major push to build housing

Brazil's housing crisis is adding to pressures. The country needs some 15 million houses to meet demand.

Since 2009, when it announced the start of the Minha Casa, Minha Vida, or My House, My Life program, 700,000 new homes have been handed over to the poor. Another 2.3 million are either being built or are on the drawing board. Investment should top $100 billion on new homes, with another $28 billion to be spent on removing and upgrading the notorious favelas that house at least 11 million people.

Under the Minha Casa, Minha Vida program, most of the houses would go to families whose monthly income is less than 1,600 reais, around $900. The rest will go to families earning up to 3,100 reais (approx. $1,750).

The houses are heavily subsidized, with new owners paying 10 percent of their salary over a set period of up to 25 years.

“This is the first time that the government has invested massively in urbanization on such a grand scale,” said Inês Magalhães, Brazil’s Housing secretary. “That is important as the object is to recuperate those spaces lost due to the lack of an effective plan for housing.”

But the quality of those homes has been criticized.

Here in Franca, where the homes were built under a separate program, as well as at a Minha Casa, Minha Vida development in nearby Ribeirao Preto, problems have arisen.

In the latter, residents are already threatening to turn the neat rows of houses into a favela, or slum. Within days of moving in, some have turned their front rooms into stores selling drinks and staples and are building garages and ugly cinder block walls on or round their front gardens.

At the former, roads and surrounding walls haven’t been built and seven months after moving in residents are still waiting for basic repairs to take place.

“I’d say that 95 percent of these houses have problems,” said Juliana dos Santos, one of the residents who has tried to organize protests. “[This place] would be an enormous source of pleasure for me if it wasn’t for these problems.”

The company responsible, Emes Construtora, said the problems were "minor" and "normal" and promised it was working on resolving them. The state’s housing director said the problems were much greater than that and promised to investigate.

The auditor sent to review the problems agreed said more care must be taken to ensure quality matches ambition.

“The company in charge said they would sort out these problems and they haven’t,” said Orlando Naves, an auditor with the Sao Paulo state government. “How can you hand over new houses when the roads aren’t even paved?”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect dateline. 

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