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A half-built bank tower in downtown Caracas became home to thousands of families with nowhere else to go.
Vocativ’s 2013 documentary “The world’s tallest slum: Caracas’ notorious Tower of David” went inside the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, a 45-story concrete shell abandoned mid-construction that squatters turned into a self-run vertical city. By the time the crew filmed there, the tower housed thousands of residents across 28 occupied floors, with no working elevators, no municipal water, and no legal electricity hookup. What they built instead — an elected council, rigged-up utilities, its own economy — is the actual story.
- Construction on the 190-meter tower, named for financier David Brillembourg, stopped in 1994 after his death triggered a national banking crisis.
- Squatters occupied the vacant complex starting in October 2007, and the population eventually grew to an estimated 2,500 to 5,000 residents across 28 floors.
- In July 2014, the Maduro government relocated the families to social housing in Cúa, roughly 50 kilometers south of Caracas, leaving the tower empty.
From Banking Showpiece to Concrete Shell
The Centro Financiero Confinanzas was drawn up in 1990 as a flagship 45-story banking and office complex, meant to project the confidence of Venezuela’s financial sector in downtown Caracas. That confidence collapsed with Brillembourg. His death in 1994, combined with a banking crisis that wiped out several of the country’s major financial institutions, killed the project outright. The unfinished tower sat exposed to the elements for more than a decade — a bare frame with no windows, no interior walls, no working systems, and no owner willing or able to finish it.
It stayed that way until October 2007, when Venezuela’s housing shortage — worsened by expropriations and a growing urban population — pushed squatters to move in. What started as an occupation of a derelict building became, within a few years, one of the most densely inhabited informal settlements on the continent.
Building a City Without an Elevator
Vocativ’s cameras captured the workaround economy residents built to survive in a tower never designed to be lived in. Motorbikes ran informal taxi routes up the first ten ramps of the old parking garage, since there was no functioning elevator to serve the upper floors. Water pumps were jury-rigged to push supply as high as the 22nd floor, and bootleg electrical connections powered apartments throughout the building.
On top of that infrastructure, residents ran an entire local economy: grocery bodegas, barbershops, churches, a gym, and even an unlicensed dentist operating out of the tower. An administrative council, funded by monthly dues collected from residents, managed disputes and coordinated services — effectively a functioning local government inside a building with no legal deed. The result was less a slum in the conventional sense and more a self-financed, self-policed micro-city stacked 28 floors into the sky.
No elevators, no railings, no city water — and still, residents built bodegas, a gym, a church, and an elected council to run it all.
Danger, Reputation, and a Community’s Defense of It
Outsiders mostly knew the tower by its reputation as a haven for gangs, and Vocativ’s reporting didn’t paper over the real hazards inside: open elevator shafts with no doors, balustrades missing their glass railings, and a documented history of children falling from unprotected edges. Those risks were constant and lethal in a way few residential buildings anywhere have to contend with.
Yet the residents interviewed pushed back against the outside narrative, pointing instead to the security of a tightly knit community, the solidarity of neighbors who’d built the place from nothing, and the sweeping views of Caracas from apartments 20-plus floors up. That tension — real danger against real pride of ownership — is the same dynamic that’s defined other Latin American informal settlements built out of necessity rather than design, from Caracas’ hillside barrios to Kingston’s Tivoli and Trench Town.
The Eviction and What’s Left
The improvised city didn’t last. In July 2014, the Maduro government carried out a peaceful eviction, relocating the hundreds of families living in the tower to newly built social housing apartments in Cúa, about 50 kilometers south of Caracas. The Confinanzas complex, once home to thousands, stood completely empty afterward.
It didn’t stay untouched for long. In August 2018, a major earthquake struck the region and damaged the vacant structure badly enough that its top five floors were left visibly tilted — a fitting final image for a building that was never finished, never properly occupied by design, and never really resolved. For a broader look at how Venezuela’s economic collapse reshaped daily life in its cities, Vocativ’s companion reporting on how people live in one of the world’s most dangerous cities covers similar ground.
The tower’s top five floors have sat tilted since that 2018 quake, empty of the thousands who once ran bodegas and barbershops out of it — a 45-story reminder that Caracas’ housing crisis never actually got solved, it just moved 50 kilometers south to Cúa.
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