Joinville Welcomes the Minha Casa Minha Vida Affordable Housing Programme

The government backed programme now it's third year has already helped house tens of thousands of Brazilian families and made a substantial dent in the countries housing deficit

Joinville is a middle-sized city and metropolitan area in the south of Brazil. It's the largest built up area in the state of Santa Catarina and consequently provides the main focus for business and finance in the region. However, the administrative capital of the state is elsewhere, at Florianopolis some 185 Km away.

The population of the city of Joinville proper is rather more than half a million these days with the wider economic area included it reaches about twice that. Because of its relative prosperity Joinville is regarded as having one of the highest general standards of living in the Country. In fact the city has a very high GDP per person and this amounted last year to the equivalent of nearly US $8500, an impressive amount by Brazilian standards.

The economic hub of the whole area is Joinville's huge Industrial Park. This includes representatives from a very wide range of industries and businesses and currently involves nearly 1.900 units. Organisations present include Amanco, Busscar, Ciser, Buschle and Lepper, Datasul. Multibras and very many others. The city was founded in its present name in the year 1851 by European immigrants. Unusually these were not from Portugal or other 'Latin' countries (as one might expect) but rather from Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia.There is still a noticeable 'Germanic' flavour to some of the city, its culture and architecture. Indeed many of the local people (though no longer a large majority) trace their ancestry back to Germany and even speak the language to some extent.

The city's surprisingly French-sounding name comes from the 1840's when the French Prince de Joinville married the Brazilian Princess Francisca. Much of the local land was a wedding present from the French and Brazilian Royal families. Shortly afterwards however, the impecunious French Prince sold most of his land in southern Brazil to a wealthy German politician, Senator Mathias Schröder. Senator Schröder was a leader of a colonisation/emigration society based in Hamburg. The Society soon arranged for a steady trickle of (mostly) German immigrants to come to this part of Brazil in search of a new and better life. In the second half of the century a total of over 17,000 poor but industrious Germans (and some Norwegians) came to settle in the Joinville area. Most of them were agricultural people who practised the Lutheran religion.

Nowadays the dominant local language is of course Portuguese. However many others are still spoken in the city including of course German (which is even still taught in some schools), plus of course the universal Spanish and English, so important for Latin American (and indeed global) trade. An important selling point for attracting tourists and business people to the area is the large number of good-to-excellent hotels, of which the local business community and government are both proud. The total available in the main Joinville area is in excess of 5,000 beds, an attractive feature for companies planning conferences, sales conventions, trade fairs and the like.

Brazil's largest cities are easily reachable. For example, Curitiba is only 135 Km away and Sao Paolo 520 Km making Joinville the ideal location for social housing developments with a number of major property developers already in the process of securing land suitable for Minha Casa Minha Vida housing developments due to launch in 2013.