translated from Spanish: Neighborhood rejection of real estate projects that advance on green spaces grows

The rejection of the loss of green spaces became one of the central issues of the political agenda of the City of Buenos Aires, based on the denunciations of neighborhood organizations to the projects of the management of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta to build towers in the Costanera Norte and Sur that facilitate the “advance of real estate speculation that does not find more free land” in the district. One of the witness cases occurs on five railway beaches in the neighborhoods of Colegiales, Caballito, Palermo, Liniers and Villa Urquiza, which total about 80 hectares, where there are urbanization projects that include tall buildings, to the detriment of green space. In Colegiales, on the land that extends over seven hectares there are three works of nine-story apartments and two subsoils that were acquired by the companies Sancor Seguros and Emfisa for real estate development in an auction carried out by the State Property Administration Agency (AABE) during the mandate of former President Mauricio Macri.The excavation work began a few weeks ago in five of the nine plots in which the property was divided, so the neighbors held several protests in the place to ask the Buenos Aires government not to move forward with the sale of the sectors that remain free to transform the place into a public space.” In Colegiales we need parks and squares because the beach is already surrounded by buildings,” said Adriana Fernández, a neighbor of the neighborhood. In dialogue with Télam, Osvaldo Guerrica Echevarría, of the Friends of Lake Palermo Association and member of Tierras Ferroviarias Verdes, said that they presented in the Legislature a project to repeal the laws that allow construction on the five plots bordering the affected train stations and to be rezoned as park urbanization areas. They sell the green spaces because real estate speculation does not find more land in the City,” he said, and considered that the landslide “causes us to lose quality of life because it increases the waterproofing of the soil and increases environmental pollution.” The rejection of the towers, meanwhile, is also observed in neighborhoods such as Parque Chacabuco, where, through a judicial injunction, the work was stopped in the block of Assembly and Pumacahua, to raise buildings that were going to reach 21 floors high. However, they estimate that the project could be resumed but with structures that do not exceed 15 meters to avoid “changing the physiognomy of the place of low houses,” they said. In La Paternal, the neighbors are on alert before the beginning of the work of preparation of the soil to raise eleven towers of different heights in the property located in the Park La Isla; while Villa Ortúzar conducted a survey showing that there are 81 properties for sale, mostly low houses, and some 56 construction works in progress. In San Telmo, the neighborhood claim aims to get the City Government to expropriate the property on the corner of Independencia and Bolívar, after the demolition of Casa Benoit, to transform the place into a public square.” The neighborhood of San Telmo suffers particularly from the lack of green spaces. In more than 120 blocks, there are only two small squares,” the neighbors said in a statement. A similar situation is going through the inhabitants of the Villa Santa Rita neighborhood, the only one in the City of Buenos Aires that does not have a square. There, the neighbors took a project to the authorities of Comuna 11 to declare “of public utility and subject to expropriation” a land of about 1640 square meters, which is one of the few without constructions that remain available in the neighborhood. ” We have nothing new from the Commune. It is very sad and very unfair that so many doors can be opened to approve the creation of the Wine District in the area and we are not answered to a project that has to do with the common good, public health and justice, because we are the only neighborhood without a square, ” he told Télam Guillermina, of the neighborhood group. In the Olympic Quarter, built for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in the south of the city, neighbors ask that a series of lots surrounding the buildings remain as green spaces and public access, on which the decision of the Buenos Aires Government to auction them governs.

Original source in Spanish