In the winter of 2006, the CRP department received visiting researcher Flavio Malta from Brazil. He presents us with an overview of one of the most challenging planning problems faced by Brazilian cities: the exploding housing demand for the poor and the conflicts that it generates. Through the case of São Sebastião municipality, in São Paulo, he discusses some of the issues he deals with in his job as a city planner: the control of illegal settlements and the production of low income housing in a city which depends on tourism development and is located in an environmentally protected coastal zone. From a sociological point of view, housing is an issue that depends on specific economic and social realities and needs to be understood in its full dynamics and complexity. The provision of housing is not only a material issue, but it also responds to a collective demand that is present in most cultural conditions, in individual and family aspirations. This helps to explain why demand for housing varies significantly within the different sectors of society, and why it is subject to a continuous change over time. In Brazil, social reality is compounded by inequality. In other words, the market does not operate equally for all people and reveals the fact that capitalist processes are deficient in many ways, particularly in the provision of housing for the poor. As a result, today Brazil’s housing deficit is around 7 million units, mostly in the southeast and northeast regions. Moreover, a great number of existing dwellings in the country have very poor living conditions and lack adequate infrastructure, such as sewage and drinking water. It is important to note that “housing deficit” is a key concept for the planning of public housing in Brazil because it expresses a deficiency in the housing market. Firstly, the deficit encompasses all housing that is inadequate due to precarious building conditions or bad infrastructure. Such units may also be overpopulated or located in areas not fit for residential use (such as flood zones, areas subject to landslides, public rights-of-ways, etc) and need to be replaced or evicted. Therefore, the housing deficit is a concept that needs to include not only the production of new housing but also the replacement, reconstruction, and expansion of existing units. Secondly, bearing this concept in mind, it has been identified that 84% of the housing deficit in Brazil is concentrated on families earning less than three minimum wages (a minimum wage is around $360 per month).