Abstract
This article examines the range of strategic policy alternatives, employed by state housing agencies. They range from public sector entry into the urban housing market through the direct construction of (‘conventional’) ‘public housing’ that is let or transferred to low-income beneficiaries at sub-market rates, to the provision of financial supports (subsidies) and other non-financial incentives to private sector producers and consumers of urban housing, and to the administration of (‘non-conventional’) programmes of social, technical and legislative supports that enable the production, maintenance and management of socially acceptable housing at prices and costs that are affordable to low-income urban households and communities. It concludes with a brief review of the direction that public housing policies have been taking at the start of the twenty-first century and reflects on ‘where next’, making a distinction between ‘public housing’ and ‘social housing’ strategies and the importance of the principle of subsidiarity to ensure the political and managerial sustainability of urban development and housing production, maintenance and management.
1. Introduction
It is only over the last six decades that governments have assumed any responsibility for the production of housing for their citizens. Prior to the mid-twentieth century – the 1950s – government housing production was confined to the provision of accommodation for military and some public sector civic employees, for the periods during which they were in government service in a particular locality.
Table 1. SWOT analysis of informal housing processes.
Housing production was clearly seen as an engineering function of construction and so, for civil staff, public housing production was the responsibility, and a minor activity of departments or ministries of public works. Its management was confined to routine maintenance and the administration of allocation procedures. Governments’ intervention in the housing provision of the vast majority of citizens was confined to unsustainable attempts to control private sector initiative in the interest of public health, safety and amenity by imposing largely unsustainable standards that many low-income households could not afford to meet, and many city governments could not enforce.
In addition, in several countries, attempts were made to increase the supply of housing affordable to lower income groups and limit the extent of exploitation by private sector landlords; governments imposed rent controls on urban properties. However, in many cases, rent controls rendered the supply and maintenance of urban housing commercially uneconomic, leading to its abandonment and/or deterioration. In some countries, notably in South Asia, governments attempted to impose a limit on the number of urban properties that any landlord was permitted to own.Footnote1
As a consequence of increasing urban homelessness and the growth of slums, from the 1950s governments, throughout the world, started to intervene more directly in the procurement of urban housing by establishing housing authorities, departments or ministries or extending the mandates of ministries of works to embrace the formulation and implementation of new policies and strategies for the production of dwellings.
Over time, the political and operational bases for public housing production developed and took on wider objectives than simply the production of residential accommodation. Thus, the second half of the twentieth century was characterised by the design, development, testing and institutionalising of alternative strategies for public sector engagement and, in some cases, control of the production, maintenance and management of urban housing; explicitly engaging wider issues of social development of which the construction of dwellings and management of environmental infrastructure was but a component.
These approaches are reviewed in the subsequent sections of this article, concluding with a brief analysis of the ‘state of play’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is marked by a fundamental reversal in the apparently coherent progression of ‘enabling’ policies and ‘participatory’ strategies, and some indications of the way ahead.
2. Informal housing procurement processes
Before launching on an examination of alternative approaches to state interventions in urban housing markets on behalf of the lowest income groups, it is useful to briefly review the strategic mechanisms by which low-income urban households and communities house themselves informally using their own resources. Broadly, there are two basic approaches that are outlined in Sections 2.1 and 2.2.
2.1. The informal sub-division, sale and development of vacant land
This generally occurs on the peri-urban fringes of cities and varies widely with the topographical, economic and political characteristics of different geographies and societies. A universally common occurrence is the unauthorised subdivision and sale of peri-urban agricultural land by its owners, who recognise that higher financial returns can be made by selling small plots for development, even at prices that are affordable to low-income households, than from agricultural production (or quarrying, etc.).
Land made available for housing in this way is made affordable to the lowest income groups, by the ‘risk-cost imposed by its’ illegality. Even though the purchasers have paid for it in ‘good faith’ and often have officially endorse receipts to prove transaction, its sub-division into housing plots and building on it are officially considered illegal for one, or several of a variety of reasons, such as: (1) the transfer of ownership has not been legally registered; (2) its development for housing is in contravention of official master plan land use zoning; (3) plot sizes and building construction are not in accordance with the prevailing planning and building regulations; any of which may carry the threat of official confiscation of land and/or the demolition of buildings. A large part of the extraordinary growth of Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1950s and 1960s was due to the proliferation of ‘Barrios Piratas’ as farmers sub-divided and sold their land on the city’s fringes (Valenzuela & Vernez Citation1974). Similar processes have been common in cities of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly at times of extensive rural-urban migration and periods of drought that has reduced agricultural productivity and, therefore, the value of agricultural land and threatened the livelihoods of those employed in agriculture, forcing them to seek alternatives in urban job markets (Wakely & Abdul-Wahab Citation2010).
2.2. Land invasions and squatting
This process, in which land is occupied and developed unilaterally without any form of negotiation, agreement or payment between the landowners and informal ‘settler/developers’, takes one of two forms: (1) the mass invasion of relatively large parcels of urban land by organised groups of households under common leadership, sometimes controlled and supported by formal political organisations that also provide technical and managerial expertise to the settlement process. This was common in Latin American cities in the 1950s and 1960s; and (2) by accretion or the gradual take-over of land, plot-by-plot, by individual households, in some cities, gradually building up sizable squatter settlements.
These processes may take place on peri-urban vacant land or on inner-city empty plots or on undeveloped land destined for public or private use or that has not been built upon because it is geologically unstable, such as steep slopes or land that is liable to inundation, or that is being retained as open space for a particular functional reason, such as railway or canal bank reservations. Clearly, informal settlements on such sites can be subject to considerable danger to their occupants (Hardoy & Satterthwaite Citation1989).
The types of informal settlements discussed above tend to be on the fringes of towns and cities, where relatively large parcels of undeveloped land are available. Many low-income households, however, cannot afford to be located at distances far from centres of casual employment or outlets for low-skilled enterprise and are therefore dependent on securing affordable accommodation in city-centre locations, such as are provided by abandoned buildings or squatting on road reservations, street sidewalks and pavements.
In many cities, the demand, very often by the poorest of the urban poor, for city centre accommodation, has led to an often iniquitous informal market in high density (and usually high-rise) shelter provision. In towns and cities that have a sizable stock of abandoned or under-used buildings, that are unofficially let by their owners or squatted by informal real estate entrepreneurs who rent or sell rooms to poor households is particularly common in the older cities of South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. This has also led to the informal, illegal construction of multi-story blocks of small apartments and single rooms, often of dangerously low standards of construction that are rented to poor households, often built on the sites of demolished low-density, former upper-income group residential properties or land that has not been developed because it is geologically unstable (Simms Citation2010; Wakely & Abdul-Wahab Citation2010).
2.3. Incremental development of informal settlements
An important characteristic of both these informal development processes is the incremental nature of house building, infrastructure installation and the provision of urban services. Householders construct, extend and improve their dwellings when these become high priorities for the investment of their resources and energy and when disposable resources become available to them. This incremental process may take several years to accomplish during which many informal settlements remain in a ‘half-developed’ state that typically is aesthetically offensive to much of the formal establishment that tends to refer to them as slums and vest them with frequently unjustifiable pejorative physical and social characteristics.
The incremental housing process does not only have financial benefits that enable low-income households to access affordable housing when and where they need it.Footnote2 It is also important in building social capital (community cohesion and local governance and management capacities in otherwise socially disparate new urban communities) through the incremental development of locally controlled and managed neighbourhood infrastructure, services and amenities as well as the construction and improvement of individual dwellings.
2.4. Informal urban housing processes: an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT)
outlines the principal attributes of incrementally developed urban informal urban settlements in a compound SWOT analysis. Inevitably, there is danger of over-simplification and stereotyping in attempting to summarise the perceived attributes of informal housing processes globally in a single SWOT-table such as this. Nevertheless, it can be observed with some confidence that the preponderance of government and city administrations tend to give greater credence to the, often erroneous, perceptions of the ‘weaknesses’ and ‘threats’ of urban informal settlements than to their ‘strengths’ and possible ‘opportunities’, despite the fact that numerically they constitute well over half the housing stock of many cities in developing countries and increase at rates that respond to demand in a way that formal housing production is typically unable to achieve.
3. Slum clearance and construction of ‘conventional’ public housing – the public works tradition (1950s–1960s)
The two decades 1950–1970 saw the political independence of many former European colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and a new economic independence, emerging from the significant industrialisation of many Latin American countries that occasioned dramatic rates of urbanisation. At the same time, the 1951 and 1961 rounds of national censuses revealed the extent to which informal settlements had consequentially grown in and around towns and cities throughout the developing world.
The first post-colonial governments of newly independent Asian countries, anxious to be perceived as ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ by their electorate and internationally set in train programmes for the, clearance of ‘unsightly and unhealthy urban slums’ that tended to include all urban informal settlements and the construction of impressive ‘modern’ apartment blocks and housing estates resembling those of the recent post-war reconstruction of European cities, employing all the tenets of the then fashionable functionalism of the Modern Movement in architecture that offered a good vehicle for such gestures (Wakely Citation1988).
Many Latin American countries also launched their first public housing policies and set up public housing authorities and initiated slum clearance programmes in the same period. African governments started to intervene in urban housing markets soon after their political independence from colonialism in the late 1950s and 1960s, though generally not on the same ambitious scale as their Asian and Latin American counterparts.Footnote3
Box 1. Conventional public housing – the public works tradition (1950s–1960s).
Rarely were such public housing programmes sustainable for more than a few years. Such was the strain on national and municipal financial and managerial resources that few public housing programmes were able to meet their ambitious construction targets. In many countries, other sectors of the economy, such as import-substitution industrial development and national distribution networks, became higher political priorities for the investment of public resources in construction than urban low-income group housing. In addition, the managerial and financial cost of maintaining the stock of urban public housing, most of which was rented, rather than sold, to its low-income beneficiaries, became apparent and politically difficult to maintain. As a result, in many cities the relatively new public housing began to deteriorate rapidly with no way by which its cost could be recovered, thereby adding to political embarrassment.Footnote4
4. Non-conventional housing strategies – enabling supports and incremental (self-help) housing
The response to the apparent inability of public housing agencies to meet targets for the construction of subsidised ‘conventional’ public housing and to maintain them in use was to search for ways to reduce construction costs and to off-load responsibility for the maintenance and management of public housing and latterly to link access to housing more directly with wider social policies for urban poverty reduction and the alleviation of its social impact. This and the extent of the proliferation of informal settlements, revealed by the 1971 round of national population censuses, in virtually all cities of the developing world.
The efficacy and productivity of informal housing processes of the urban poor: an existing energetic resource that might be exploited to advantage by government housing authorities, was brought to the attention of governments and the international aid donor community, notably the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Regional Development Banks and European and North American bilateral aid agencies, in a seminal paper by John F.C. Turner and Rolf Goetze that was delivered to a conference on ‘Development Policies and Planning in Relation to Urbanisation’ at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and published by the United Nations (Turner Citation1968), and expanded upon later in Turner’s book ‘Housing by People’ (Turner Citation1976).
Thus, in the early 1970s a ‘non-conventional’ social housing paradigm that engaged the beneficiary occupants in the construction, maintenance and management of public housing, often referred to as ‘self-help’ was introduced in the housing policies of many countries, alongside the construction of ‘conventional’ public housing that was rarely, if ever, abandoned altogether by developing country governments or municipalities.
This change in paradigm and policies coincided with the proliferation of urban non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs), mostly with their origins and bases in the developed countries of Europe and North America, with institutional interest in urban housing and other aspects of urban and community development in developing countries
The three decades 1960–1990 saw a progression of development of ‘non-conventional’ urban housing strategies into two clearly identifiable sub-strategies: (1) organised self-help and (2) enabling supports to new sties and services and informal settlement upgrading. Each of these is outlined in the following sections.
4.1. Organised (aided) self-help (1960s)
Organised self-help, often referred to as aided self-help, urban housing programmes and projects were initially promoted in Latin America and, to a lesser extent in some Asian countries, by the United States of America ‘Alliance for Progress’ programme, administered by the then new US Agency for International Development (USAID) by the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s.
Box 2. Summary of principles, goals and objectives of organised self-help (1960s).
The principal objective of organised self-help was to reduce the cost of construction by engaging the future occupants in the construction process as un-paid labour, often referred to at the time as ‘sweat-equity’ and to develop senses of ‘community’, ‘identity’, ‘ownership’ and ‘pride’ in the new residential neighbourhood that they were about to construct, in the expectation that these would lead to good local management of community assets (local public infrastructure and services) in use, after occupation of the housing. In addition to providing labour, beneficiary households were expected to pay for the non-labour components of construction and the (subsidised) cost of land and infrastructure.
Project beneficiaries who were selected on the basis of their level of income and/or other indicators of poverty and housing need, were compulsorily organised into ‘work groups’ that committed them to an ‘agreed’ input of labour over the construction period of the project. (In many projects, to ensure ‘equity-of-effort’ housing authority project managers went to some lengths to ensure that individuals would not be assigned to work on the houses that they would eventually be allocated and occupy.)
The organised self-help movement was short lived as it failed to satisfy its basic objectives. Projects were centrally planned and managed entirely by the government housing authorities; in effect they only differed from ‘conventional’, contractor-built public housing by the use of unpaid, theoretically voluntary, labour, which fuelled severe criticism by the programme’s detractors.
Construction costs were rarely, if ever, lower than the direct construction of ‘conventional’ housing projects as the savings gained by not having to pay the labour, provided by project beneficiaries, who generally had no experience in even the most menial of building site tasks, significantly increased the cost of site supervision, rather than reduce it. Also the quality of the end product was invariably lower than that of ‘conventional’ public housing that was contractor-built by direct labour.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that the organised collective building activity ever led to better community relations than in any new neighbourhood composed of disparate urban, or migrant, households. Indeed, anecdotal accounts of disputes between neighbours over inequalities in the extent of labour inputs, etc., on occasions leading to serious social divisions and conflict, abound.
The micro-management of organised self-help projects was complicated and cumbersome, which impacted on the macro-management of government and municipal public housing authorities and agencies. So the organised self-help approach was soon deemed unsustainable and abandoned. Nevertheless, there are some examples of projects that, in the long run were ultimately successful.Footnote5
4.2. Enabling supports – sites and services and informal settlement (‘slum’) upgrading
The paper, by John Turner and Rolph Goetze, published by the United Nations (Turner Citation1968), persuasively argued that informal settlements ‘solve more problems [of housing low-income households and communities] than they create’. So, the paradigm shifted to one in which public sector housing authorities and agencies explicitly provided technical, managerial and some financial support to low-income households and communities to house themselves – i.e. emulating the informal housing processes, outlined in Section 2, though improving the quality, safety and amenity of the product, which, unlike informal settlements, were legally recognised as formal urban neighbourhoods (Wakely Citation1986).
The paradigm and policy shift was to a large extent led by the World Bank in Africa (Senegal, Zambia and Kenya) in the early 1970s and in India (Madras) shortly after.Footnote6 Enabling approaches to urban housing provision were also promoted by the regional development banks, notably the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and the major bilateral aid agencies with significant urban programmes.
Box 3. Enabling supports to incremental housing production, maintenance and management by its users (1970s–1980s).
By the end of the twentieth century sites and services and neighbourhood upgrading had taken on a wider role in urban development strategies than just the provision of access to affordable housing. At least in theory, they became treated as significant components of urban social development and poverty alleviation and reduction. Though few national poverty reduction strategies made clear distinctions between urban poverty and rural or ‘general’ poverty, the participatory processes of initiating and implementing urban sites and services and slum upgrading programmes and projects took on greater importance than the resulting housing products and were seen as fundamental to good urban governance and administration, fostering transparency and accountability in urban political decision-making and administrative practices.
Nevertheless by the late 1990s, sites and services projects had been declared unsuccessful and unsustainable and were virtually abandoned by governments and international aid agencies, alike. To a large extent this was due to their being ‘evaluated’ too soon (often only 2–3 years after occupation) against criteria used to evaluate ‘conventional’ contractor-built projects with little understanding of the incremental development processes or the time that it takes for low-income households and communities to build their dwellings and develop their neighbourhoods. Re-visiting sites and services projects 20–30 years after their occupation, however, generally provides a very different picture – often one of thriving urban communities and neighbourhoods, not of half-built, self-help settlements that they would have been a few years after the start of their initial construction stage (Wakely & Riley Citation2011).
4.3. Limits of the ‘self-help’ and participation paradigm
Of course, not all sites and services projects ultimately led to success. Many mistakes were made, common amongst which was a lack of understanding of the importance of location. In their drive to reduce capital costs, many housing authorities acquired cheap undeveloped land on the city fringes at long distances from trunk infrastructure networks, transport routes and other services. Thus, the level of infrastructure provision, notably water supply, was invariably costly and frequently inadequate. In addition, beneficiary households were far removed from their city-based social networks and from potential centres of urban employment and markets. So, the initial take-up of many such projects was low and they remained under-developed (Wakely & Riley Citation2011, pp. 29–31).
Another frequent mistake that rendered many sites & services projects unsustainable was the imposition of un-affordably high planning and construction standards. Fearful of accusations of officially condoning or supporting the development of ‘new slums’, many housing authorities imposed conditions on builder-households that dictated space standards, the use of stipulated (permanent) building materials and time limits for the completion of construction, many of which many low-income householders could not afford or meet, further jeopardising the take-up of sites and services projects. Financial conditions for the recovery of the capital cost of land and infrastructure were often based on erroneous understandings of affordability and poor urban households’ ability/willingness to pay for them. For instance, several World Bank financed sites and services programmes and projects used social survey data from existing low-income (informal) settlements to establish households’ ability to pay for housing (e.g. 25% of income), which was used to compute the repayment rate for the recovery of the capital costs of land and infrastructure, ignoring the additional cost incurred by constructing habitable dwellings. This led to severe financial hardship and/or the lack of take-up, or abandonment of the housing.
Such project-level problems compounded a more universal misunderstanding that in part led to the discrediting and eventual abandonment of participatory ‘non-conventional’ approaches to support incremental ‘self-help’ housing production in many cities. This was the process by which they were evaluated – too soon, using the wrong criteria, as discussed above.
Typically government supported housing programmes and projects were stubbornly regarded solely as construction activities and assessed by the quality (and capital cost) of the end product. The impact of the process by which the housing product was procured was rarely considered amongst the objectives of such programmes and projects. In reaction to this, in 1972 John Turner coined the conceptual phrase ‘housing as a verb – what housing does for people, rather than merely what it is’ (Turner Citation1972, pp. 148–175) to emphasise the importance of user participation in the processes of the planning, production, maintenance and management of housing to almost all aspects of urban social and economic development, as well as the quality and efficacy of the housing stock produced (Wakely & Riley Citation2011).
In addition to, and related to, the perceived problems with the ‘products’ of ‘non-conventional’ housing programmes and projects, they were generally judged as ‘messy’ and difficult to administer. For example, a World Bank review of its lending for urban projects in the mid-1970s recorded that shelter projects (largely sites and services and some informal settlement upgrading) tended to take almost twice as long to disburse funds as other urban projects, such as urban transport, telecommunications and water supply. It made a strong point of the political and managerial difficulties of assembling land and securing the recovery of the costs of non-conventional ‘self-help’ housing programmes and projects (Cohen Citation1983).
In the early 1990s, the World Bank, and many other multilateral and bi-lateral aid agencies began to withdraw much of their support for ‘non-conventional’ housing strategies, particularly sites and services projects, shifting support to the ‘structural adjustment’ of the management of national and metropolitan housing and urban policies as a whole, with some emphasis on easing private sector investment in housing and real estate development, financing and management (World Bank Citation1993), ultimately leading to renewed investment in ‘conventional’ contractor-built public housing and providing incentives to private sector developers, encouraging them to invest in new low-cost housing, accessible to the lower urban income groups at affordable prices. Government grants or guarantees were given to commercial banks and finance institutions to encourage them to provide housing loans or mortgages to low-income borrowers at what were perceived to be higher levels of risk than was customary.
Participatory approaches to the upgrading of existing sub-standard housing and neighbourhoods (informal settlements and slums) did continue to be promoted and supported by international aid agencies and national governments in many countries, often as components of wider poverty alleviation and reduction programmes, but these did little to expand the urban housing stock or meet the growing demand for new affordable housing in urban areas, though, in many countries, it did re-awaken the understanding of the social processes and values of urban housing production, maintenance and management and of its role as a vehicle for the development of community organisation and participatory local governance and administration, thus shifting the emphasis of public sector support to low-income housing into the field of social development, whilst still embracing the importance of technical innovation and physical place making.
As described above, an important conceptual underpinning of the ‘non-conventional’ housing paradigm is the freehold ownership of land and housing by owner-occupiers. Yet, as Alan Gilbert (Citation2008) points out: ‘One in three urban dwellers across the globe (one billion people) are tenants and in major cities [rental housing] often accommodates a majority of all households’.
Whilst the importance of outright freehold ownership of property as a stimulant to investment in its maintenance and development, is recognised, a large proportion of the lowest urban income groups in any society or culture are unable or unwilling to take on the responsibility and imputed costs of the ownership of urban property, but are willing and able to meet the recurrent costs of renting accommodation. Though much of the earlier ‘conventional’ public housing built by governments was let on a rental basis to its beneficiary occupants, in many countries, housing authorities, unable to meet the landlord costs of managing and maintaining rental housing for low-income tenants, sold their stock by outright purchase or entered into hire-purchase arrangements with beneficiary households (Gilbert Citation2008) and/or launched into ‘non-conventional’ approaches to housing for urban low-income groups, leaving the production, maintenance and management of rental accommodation to the private sector. However, renting to the lowest urban income groups is rarely financially attractive to formal sector developers and landlords and has often led to widespread exploitation, thereby giving ‘landlordism’ and the whole low-income rental housing business a bad name, leaving it to the informal sector, where the renting of accommodation, not only fulfils a market demand for affordable housing, but also typically provides an important source of income to a new category of ‘subsistence landlords’, who are often in the same low income group, or poorer, than their tenants (Kumar Citation2001).
5. The return to a new generation of ‘conventional’ housing strategies and incentives to private sector housing markets
The last decades of the twentieth century saw a distinctive change in paradigm, away from ‘non-conventional’ participatory approaches to low-income housing production and the re-emergence of government-sponsored and/or government-built public housing for urban low-income groups. As pointed out above, in the 1970s-1980s, when the ’non-conventional’ paradigm (sites and services and slum upgrading) was adopted as the preferred policy option for urban low-income housing procurement, many government housing authorities continued, to undertake or sub-contract the construction of ‘conventional’ ready-built public housing for rent and/or sale at subsidised rates to low-income households, in many instances only on a relatively small scale.
In other cases, the construction of ‘conventional’ public housing continued to be the official strategic policy, ‘non-conventional’ sites and services projects and slum upgrading programmes being treated as ‘one-off’, extra-ordinary, interventions. Therefore, the mind-set and operational systems were largely in place to revert to ‘conventional’ public housing production in the 1980s and 1990s. This was frequently accompanied by new programmes for the disbursement of housing grants directly to low-income would-be homeowners in order to assist them in gaining access to the formal private sector housing market.
For instance, the South African ‘ Finance Linked Individual Subsidy Programme’ (FLISP), launched in 1997 as part of the national government’s ‘Integrated Residential Development Programme (IRDP)’ made lump-sum grants of US$5000 (R54,238) available to low-incomeFootnote7 first-time-buyer-or-builder-households, who were eligible for a commercial mortgage or housing loan (by a bank), but could not afford it or were unable to obtain recognised collateral or guarantees, to buy or build a house in a development that was officially recognised as coming under the IRDP. In 2012 the upper limit of the eligible income category for FLISP subsidies was doubled and, as stated in a memo from the Director General of the national Department of Human Settlements (Housing Ministry):
[In order to] standardise, streamline, align and centralise all the processes…of disbursing the subsidies, [the National Housing Finance Corporation and Provincial Departments of Human Settlements are mandated] to introduce a ‘one-stop shop’ to work with [private sector] financial institutions and property developers to administer the implementation of the programme. (RSA Citation2012)
In effect, the government subsidy was redirected from the low-income groups to low-middle income earners and then switched from individual householders – the aspiring consumers of housing -, to the (profit-motivated) producers of housing – real estate developers and bankers.
Processes, such as this illustrative example of South Africa, by which state support was transferred from aspiring low-income home-owners to the formal institutions that control and maintain the private sector market in housing as a commodity, enabling them to reach down to lower, but not the very lowest, income groups, took place in many countriesFootnote8 during the late 1980s and 1990s, in which the new generation of ‘conventional’ housing strategies, are dominated by the profit motives of private capital that excludes the lowest urban income groups and has little concern for the social impact of appropriate urban housing on its users, or for the form or amenity provided by urban agglomerations at large.
Studies of private sector ‘conventional’, developer-built, low-middle-income housing projects in Brazil and Mexico in the early years of the twenty-first century demonstrate further problems created by the ‘new’ housing at the level of urban form and infrastructure provision and service delivery. In urban Mexico, the response to market demand for freehold ownership of individual houses, albeit on small plots of land, as opposed to apartments in larger blocks and at higher residential densities, has been the construction by private sector developers of extensive low-density housing estates on the peri-urban fringes of many towns and cities and in some cases several kilometres from the urban area – i.e. urban sprawl (Solana Oses Citation2013).
Similar urban problems occur in Brazil, where a study of the impact of the new generation of ‘conventional’ private housing development in the city of Recife, encouraged and supported by the Federal Government ‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida’ (My house, My Life) programme to construct 1 million dwellings, has revealed that the drive for profit-maximising has led to under investment in urban infrastructure and service provision in new municipally-approved low-middle-income housing developments by private sector developers and contractors (Fiori et al. Citation2014).
The new generation of ‘Conventional’ housing strategies, as considered here, represents a significant shift in priorities for government support to the housing sector, giving greater emphasis to the upper end of the low-income scale, rather than to the poorest urban households or those in greatest need. They are more concerned with the impact of housing markets and the construction industry on growth in national and municipal economies than with the social role of secure housing in the alleviation and reduction of poverty, though, of course, these can have a significant impact on productivity, economic stability and growth (Tibaijuka Citation2009).
6. Where next
Clearly the way forward lies neither exclusively in the construction of ‘conventional’ public housing nor only in government support to ‘non-conventional’ ‘self-help’ approaches to the delivery and maintenance of housing and urban domestic infrastructure and services by low income households and communities, nor does it lie solely in ‘enabling [private sector housing] markets to work’, as expounded by the World Bank (Citation1993) Housing Policy paper of that title (World Bank Citation1993).
In any developing city the need for official support to the production, maintenance and management of appropriate housing and community facilities, as a component of democratic urban development that is fundamentally redistributive and/or committed to urban poverty alleviation or reduction is so complex that no single strategic approach to housing production can possibly suffice equitably and effectively (Marcuse Citation1992).
Thus, the next generation of urban housing policies, and strategies for their implementation, must embrace a range of different programme and project approaches that include support to ‘non-conventional’ incremental social housing as set out by the World Bank-UN-Habitat joint Cities Alliance in 2011Footnote9 (Wakely & Riley Citation2011), and to the production of good quality public housing that includes socially controlled rental accommodation that is affordable to those households in the lowest income groups who are unable/unwilling to invest in fixed-capital assets – urban property Strategies have been proposed for government incentives and supports that encourage the beneficiaries of sites and services projects and upgrading programmes to provide rental accommodation (under close supervision of quality and rental cost controls) together with the development of their own dwellings (Kumar Citation2001). Such strategies have as much to do with supplementary income generation (by low-income subsistence landlords) as they do with the procurement of affordable rental accommodation (for the lowest income groups).
Such a holistic approach to supporting urban low-income housing that is sensitive and responsive to the particular social, economic and political circumstances of any urban area, neighbourhood or community, and is sustainable over the medium- to long-term, must be administered at a level of government no higher than that of the municipality. However, as pointed out in the previous sections of this article, in many countries housing policies and operational strategies for their implementation are administered by national-level authorities that rarely entertain the devolution of any real authority or decision-making down to the level of local government and municipal administration, and virtually never to levels of local organisation below that (i.e. assigning real governance or administrative roles or responsibility to community-based organisations or other NGOs).
Thus, in many countries, the principle of subsidiarityFootnote10 and the devolution of authority in the housing sector is an essential starting point. However, as Fiori and Ramirez (Citation1992) pointed out in their excellent analysis of the political economy of urban housing policies, ‘municipalisation’ and the co-existence, not to mention the integration, of alternative policy approaches, pose some fundamental political and ideological contradictions. They also invariably call for radical changes in the management of urban development and the administration of urban infrastructure and service delivery that in many towns and cities require complex and often contentious processes to ensure inter-agency cooperation and collaboration.
To assist and enhance this, it is conceptually helpful to disentangle the production of dwelling units (i.e. the ‘numbers game’) from the contribution of good, safe and secure housing and domestic infrastructure to the wider social processes of equitable urban development, notably the reduction of urban poverty and the alleviation of its social impacts. Clearly, to be effective municipal housing policies and programmes must address both these issues simultaneously, also taking into account the enhancement of the urban structure (form) of the city to ensure coherence between different areas of the city and the functions and amenities that they provide for the city as a whole – integrated and sustainable urban development. An approach to this is discussed by Ejigu and Haas in their excellent comparative review of the HOPE VI programme in the United States and the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that leads them to observe that ‘neighbourhood composition and architectural expression have … primacy over environmental and ecological issues. [Therefore] future revitalization and sustained development … relies on (re)considering these aspects of the developments through sustainable urbanism principles’ (Ejigu & Haas Citation2014).
Housing for low-income households is a major component of all towns and cities in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, typically covering 60–80% of the developed land area of towns and cities and accounting for 50–70% of the value of the fixed capital formation of urban areas of which they are an integral part (UN-Habitat Citation2003). Thus, low-income group housing policies and strategies for their implementation cannot be divorced from policies and strategies for the development, planning and management of towns and cities as a whole, as they have been, and still are, in many countries.
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Notes on contributors
Patrick Wakely
Patrick Wakely is Professor Emeritus of Urban Development in London University and formerly Director of the Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London. An architect by training, he has 40 years of experience of research, consultancy and teaching in housing, planning and urban development on which he has worked in over 20 developing countries.
Notes
1. Ceiling on urban property legislation in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal was a measure to curtail extortionate profiteering, rather than influence the supply of urban housing on which it tended to have a negative impact.
2. Incremental procurement of urban housing is not confined to low-income households. Almost all permanent and serviced housing is procured as an incremental process that takes place over relatively long periods of time. Only a minute segment of any society – the very wealthy – has the resources to purchase outright or construct their dwellings as a one-off event. Upper and middle-income households with regular incomes and collateral guarantees have access to long-term credit – housing loans and mortgages – that may take between 15 and 30 years of incremental repayments to redeem. Households with low or irregular incomes and no access to formally recognised collateral, construct minimal basic dwellings at very low cost, which they extend and improve as more resources become available and as the need for bigger or better structures becomes a priority. This process of extension and modification can take decades, or may be never ending (Wakely & Riley Citation2011).
3. The first independent Government of Kenya created a national Ministry of Lands and Settlement though the procurement of subsidised urban housing was made the responsibility of municipal government in the major cities. Similarly, in Nigeria the clearance of slums and the delivery of public housing was the responsibility of local government or local-level parastatal Development Authorities, such as the famous and ambitious Lagos Executive Development Board.
4. In the early 1970s, the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board in South India built blocks of small apartments to re-house families who had been displaced by slum clearance programmes in Madras (Chennai) that, before the end of the decade, the Board itself declared as them as ‘Slums’ as a result of its own inability to maintain them, and demolished them as part of its citywide Slum Clearance Programme.
5. 1972 Parcelles Assainies Sites & Services project, Dakar, Senegal (14,000 plots at 150 m2) – 50 year $8m interest-free loan 1973 Dandora Sites & Services project, Nairobi, Kenya (6000 plots) 1974 Lusaka squatter Settlement Upgrading and Sites & Services project (17,000 dwellings upgraded + 4400 S&S plots).
6. The large Mogapair and Arambakam Sites and Services projects in Madras (Chennai).
7. In the income category US$320–645 of (R3500–7000) per month, raised in 2012 to $320–1385 (R3500–15,000) per month (RSA Citation2012).
8. For example, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Sri Lanka, all of which had major ‘non-conventional housing policies and programmes with strong social objectives in the 1970s and 1980s.
9. This defines six integrated components of any ‘non-conventional’ incremental urban housing (sites and services or slum-upgrading) project, each of them engaging several different agencies and/or departments of most municipal administrations: (1) Land and location; (2) Finance; (3) Infrastructure and services; (4) Site planning and building controls; (5) Community organisation and asset management; (6) Institutional development and strategic planning.
10. Recognition of the lowest effective (most appropriate) level of decision-making and authority.
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