Affordable housing options for all in a context of developing capitalism: can housing transformations play a role in the Greater Accra Region, Ghana?

Abstract

Sixty-one percent of households in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana (GAR), with an average size of 3.8 persons, occupy single bedrooms. Addressing their housing needs would require strategies of unleashing room supply through new housing and from existing housing through housing transformations (HT). Extant literature on HT in Ghana has generally focused on immediate empirical questions such as who are the housing transformers and their socio-economic identities and characteristics, and how to predict the occurrence of HT. Consumer sovereignty and utility maximization – the autonomous preferences of transformers – within the market context, as the determinant of the production and consumption of rooms, are implicit in these discussions, which are reminiscent of the ‘self-help’ housing thesis. This study’s alternative model employs primary data to identify the transformers and non-transformers as social classes with specific housing market capacities, and HT as enmeshed in broader processes of production and consumption of housing within the developing capitalist mode of production and its petty commodity production sector in GAR. The findings leave little optimism about a potential role of HT in making a significant dent in the staggering housing deficit.

Keywords:

• capitalism
• Ghana
• housing transformations
• petty commodity production

Acknowledgments

Luther College, at the University of Regina, provided financial support for the fieldwork. The authors deeply appreciate the patience and generosity of respondents in Ghana and the excellent work of the research team.