Often times, within the core territories of the complexes, there just is no legal landlord. People have the possession of the houses they and their families live in (sometimes having built it themselves over time). As generations pass and families become smaller it becomes interesting to rent those spaces out to the people who need them, especially in favelas close to affluent neighborhoods in Rio’s South and Southwest Zone, as well as some pockets in the North. But these informal agreements are subject to the power politics of faction rivalry and coalition building. Someone can be forced to pay rent in the form of a protection racket, which is part of the whole package of ‘gifts’ that they receive from the para-state nature of factions. Someone else might be forced out of their home with death threats due to a perceived (or real) alignment with the old faction or the old leader that controlled territory.

The first point where things start to blur is when complexes form. Control over a critical mass of slums next to each other allows a faction to exert control over its environs, eventually assimilating small neighborhoods and habitational complexes into the ‘Favela Complex’. These places have legal owners who may or may not have to pay a protection tax to the faction but may find other ways to benefit from illegality. Consumer good stores within a faction’s territory can become highly lucrative, either because they don’t have to pay any taxes to the government that doesn’t protect them or because they end up helping launder money for the factions. The protection tax I mentioned isn’t always in the form of money either, it is not uncommon for a select group of people from a favela to have the rights to extract goods from, say, a supermarket chain, from food to electronics. It is all very fluid and varies from community to community but the long term effect is rather clear, businesses close, real estate depreciates and tax revenue decreases over time - not just because of loss of population and business but because the bourgeois State finds itself unable to justify charging property taxes over a region it only barely guarantees the right to property. In these cases, the legal house owner will often just sell off what they own to whoever buys it from them and just move on. That is, if they can sell it at all.

As a final note, think back to how I’ve talked about how criminal organizations have changed in Rio. With the drug trade now a minority portion of revenues, factions have professionalized in a way where they’ve become para-state organizations. The first Tropa de Elite movie is mostly bloodbath porn and hero worship material but it does represent something that is true. When Milícias where formed in the late 90s and early 00s they came to the realization that there is a lot of power within impoverished communities. 20% or so of Greater Rio’s population lives in favelas, all these people have to work, consume, worship, vote and have a roof over their heads. One good symbol of how factions like the Milícias (criminal orgs drawn from cops/ex-cops/soldiery/their families) exploit that is the collapse of a habitational complex that they themselves built in the Muzema/Rio das Pedras from a few years back. We aren’t talking about shacks or substandard housing all the time. In that case we have a faction playing at real estate speculation, construction and landlordship all at once, actually charging rent, condominium taxes and selling lots/apartments that turned out to be too cheap to be reliable. This tragedy is emblematic of an entire sector of real estate speculation under the control of the Milícias and there’s probably no State org that has a full understanding of how big this is.