It was a modest, yet emotional, ceremony in Santa Cruz, province of Guanacaste. At the Sagamat II residential complex, President Laura Chinchilla welcomed 21 families to their brand-new homes. Until this past Friday, many of these families were squatters or homeless. Today, they are homeowners in Costa Rica thanks to a government initiative that managed to benefit 598 families in Santa Cruz.

Many of the 21 low-income families had previously squatted in a Santa Cruz slum known as Los Pochotes. Other families were staying with friends or relatives in overcrowded conditions, and 17 of these families are lead by single mothers. Their new two-bedroom homes have 42 square meters of living space plus an open plan kitchen that connects to a small dining-living room combination. A bathroom and an airy laundry room round up the humble floor plan.

Sagamat is a fine neighborhood of 50 single-family cookie-cutter homes. Residents enjoy electricity, water, paved streets, sidewalks and recreation areas. The houses are mostly prefabricated, but they meet the columnar seismic code requirements. The cost of building this community was approximately $1.5 million, which was mostly funded by the government of Costa Rica through its Ministry of Housing and the National Mortgage and Housing Bank (Spanish acronym: BANHVI).

President Chinchilla has been in Guanacaste and the northern region of Costa Rica since early 2014. As she wraps up her mandate, which has been plagued by sharp criticism, she has made clear that she intends to focus on the poor and disadvantaged during her final days in office. As recently reported by the Costa Rica Star, President Chinchilla has been forgiving mortgage debt and handing the keys to new homes for needy families in Guanacaste over the last few days.

According to online Guanacaste news site Primero en Noticias, 598 families in Santa Cruz received new homes during the administration of President Laura Chinchilla -an investment of about $9.5 million, which means that taxpayers pitched in a little less than $16,000 per each home delivered.