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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that surprising that large favelas have things like supermarkets? Yes, there are drug lords and extreme gun violence and illegal electrical installations, but these slums have been around for decades and are home to hundreds of thousands of people. Many of these people are not interested in a life of crime, but simply don't have the means to live anywhere else, so what else would they do if not slowly build towards a semblance of civilization in the area where they are forced to live?

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Yes, it is surprising to see over 3000 illegal businesses in a neighborhood, working under a violent regime.

Is there a point to your comment we’re missing? It’s a lot more interesting to discuss the findings, than your impression of people’s impressions on it.

For example, how much cash flows from these business to traffickers.

Plenty of legal businesses too, e.g. Bank of Brazil in Rocinha:

https://goo.gl/maps/pK3K1Lc24fgh7wzv6

When I lived in an affluent part of Rio, I often got my haircut, bought fruit, veg and groceries in the local slum.

Many locals believed the slums were strictly no-go. While some certainly were, many were fine. Rather than build a mental barrier around these places, I find its better to interact.

Common sense, courtesy, some humility are all that are required - that goes for the high brow malls as well as the favelas.

I’d love to do this. I live in SP. How do I know which ones are safe even for someone with a noticeable gringo look and accent? Whose word to trust?

I tend to look at the risk as being relative.

For me, downtown Rio around 'Central do Brasil' bus and train station were far higher risk than many slums.

Various areas around Rio (and SP) have 'Cracklands' (Cracolândia) with many crack cocaine users who are frighteningly unstable. Reports describing hold-ups, with victims cooperating and getting shot - usually in a better parts of town put things in perspective for me.

Some slums are trying to open to tourism, as a starting point you could look up well-reviewed bars\restaurants in slums to get an introduction. As the article suggests, there are many legit businesses in slums, so going to the ones with a lot of business activity is usually a good bet. The economy of a slum can only develop if there is a reasonable level of security.

I can only trust my judgement. I have not encountered any problems so far. YMMV.

I think subconsciously many people think of slums as godless drug war zones with no sanitation, and that any soul dumb enough to ventures into one will never come back out alive. This census shows with some actual data that reality is a lot closer to what Bill Gates and poverty scholars have been saying about the poor: that they've been slowly crawling up in the quality of life scale, despite all the hardships.

I'm not actually all that interested in the exact cash flow figures. What I think is interesting is people's perceptions of some of the mechanisms in play. For example, take "protection tax". If you think about it, governments and the police operate under a very similar principle (you pay for police services through taxes and if you don't pay, you are punished, perhaps even via force if you resist). Also if you think about it, it's not in a drug gang's interest to extort businesses out of business, since then they would have nowhere to get food or clothes for their kids (yes drug gangs have kids). It's interesting how even in places where one would think anarchy would rule, systems still form that are similar to "normal" civilized systems, and it's interesting that there are local economies within slums and bias from outsiders similar to sentiment from some xenophones in US or Europe. It's almost like it's human nature that certain things develop the way they do.

> Yes, it is surprising to see over 3000 illegal businesses in a neighborhood, working under a violent regime.

Out of curiosity, why do you think there would not be illegal businesses in place where many people live and on one hand needs to buy things and on the other needs money?

On being surprising: thousands of illegal business would imply a massive network of parallel activities (banking, real estate, supply management, employment, and so on).

But I read it wrong, thanks @fnodsensei. It reads “licit”, which makes it not so surprising after all. Nothing to see here.

The gist of my comment was that the parent was characterizing everybody as naive (as in the follow-up comment below) while not commenting on the findings. New census, mapping data provided to Google with possibly far-reaching positive consequences, but somehow we need to comment on an imagined public reaction and high moral ground instead.

> somehow we need to comment on an imagined public reaction

I don't understand why you think the public reaction is any less important than confirming the fact that a place with the population size of a small country has ice cream shops.

I recall a project several years ago to build some low income housing at one of the edges of Heliopolis, and among the middle class there was a strong feeling of "this is just some corrupt politician pocketing money" or "they just want to hide the slums behind the buildings so they are not visible from the main street".

There's a lot of disdain among brazilian middle class against any government project aimed at helping the lower class. Discrimination is strong in Brazil: racism is rampant due to the slums-vs-rest dichotomy, kids trying to make money wiping windshields at traffic lights are often thought of as hoodlums working for a gangster that burns their income on drugs, etc. Many middle class people don't think about the fact that their housekeeper lives in a slum, and for years, most never knew about the various charitable projects happening in favelas, until Globo started doing investigative reporting about uplifting stories of the sort.

I think the perception of whether a slum has any hope of lifting itself out of poverty is an important factor in how much outsiders are willing to help in that very cause.

Is it that surprising that poor people still have to buy clothes and food and other products?

The article says "licit", i.e. legal businesses.

Why is that surprising?

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