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Chapter 3

Affordable urban housing and the role of basic standards

Housing standards: the necessity of a double-edged sword

In 1910, infant mortality rates in the slum area of Cowgate in Edinburgh were 277 per thousand,¹ far higher than anywhere in the contemporary world (the highest current rate estimated is 82 for the Central African Republic).² This shocking statistic needs to be kept in mind when considering the complexities of the relationships between housing standards and affordable housing. There is no denying that regulations that enforce decent standards do increase housing costs. Therefore, ceteris paribus, they make housing more unaffordable for the poor. For those opposed to the impacts of government regulation on free markets, it is all too easy to conclude that the ‘way in which quality enhancements can make those with low incomes worse off is perhaps most vivid when minimum standards price the poorest households out of the market and increase the number of households that are homeless’.³ This sort of analysis is simplistic. It is also literally dangerous.

Acknowledging that housing standards are a double-edged sword for the poor is reasonable. However, there is no doubt that they are necessary – the experience of early industrial urban Europe and North America is proof enough of that. Regulations about other necessities for human life, such as the quality of water or food, are generally accepted as requirements in the contemporary world – few economists dare to argue that poor children should be ‘allowed’ to drink dirty water since it is cheaper. Yet the impact of poor housing on death and serious illness rates in Global North (GN) cities in the not-so-distant past is forgotten by many today. It needs to be remembered, which is why this chapter begins with a brief review of those conditions.

Since obviously inadequate urban housing is now mostly, although far from only, found in the cities of the Global South (GS), there is a tendency in housing studies to assume this type of housing is not relevant to understanding low-income housing issues in the GN. This is a mistake. If we confine ourselves to the capitalist era, up until the early to mid-twentieth century, there were many residential areas in European and North American cities with shocking housing conditions. Private-sector landlords provided the sort of rooms for rent that the poor could afford – so, in that sense, the market worked. However, this meant that the rooms were often dangerously inadequate for the maintenance of health and family life and households mostly lived in one or two rooms, just as they do in so many low-income settlements in the GS.

In many cities across Europe and North America, the outcomes of these housing conditions, which followed on from their occupants’ poverty and lack of monetary demand for anything better, were appalling. In the contemporary age they would be regarded as catastrophic. Morbidity and mortality rates were phenomenally high, way above those typical of low-income settlements in the cities of the GS today. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, because urban deaths exceeded births, the pace of urbanisation in the GN would have been glacially slow, or negative, had there not been such a steady supply of in-migrants from rural areas (driven out by enclosures of their land and other agricultural changes). Without the opportunities for emigration to North America and the colonies, the demography of the Industrial Revolution’s ‘urban penalty’ in Europe would have been much worse. Life expectancies were higher in rural than in urban areas – in antithesis to the usual patterns in the GS since urbanisation began to pick up pace there.⁴ Certainly not all these circumstances were due to poor housing alone. The conditions of poverty tend to combine in deadly ways: people who cannot afford decent housing may also have poor nutrition because they cannot afford proper food. More importantly, the engineering solutions (and the required public investment) to the deadly water and sanitation conditions in low-income housing areas in Europe’s and America’s industrialising cities did not emerge until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Mass vaccination against childhood diseases and antibiotics came much later, in the twentieth century, but they were in time to make a difference to health in the cities of the GS and help explain their relatively positive demographic outcomes during the twentieth century compared with those of the GN in the nineteenth century.

Box 3.1 Dickens’ slums

Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery … that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever … Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish.

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Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three – fruit and ‘sweet-stuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics … a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one – filth everywhere – a gutter before the houses and a drain behind – clothes drying and slops emptying from the windows …

Sources: Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852–53; Sketches by Boz, 1836.⁵

The conditions in which the majority of the urban population in the GN were housed contributed significantly to their poor welfare. They were described in the literature of the time: for the UK that of the revolutionary left (e.g. Engels’ classic study The Condition of the Working Class in England),⁶ of academics (e.g. Charles Booth’s classic mapping of poverty in London in the nineteenth century),⁷ and in fiction. Dickens’ novels about London are full of descriptions of poor people living in overcrowded, unhealthy rooms, of the fear and reality of evictions because of being unable to pay the rent, and frequent deaths as a result (see Box 3.1). Indeed, this was deliberate, as he partly wished to shock society into recognising how unacceptable these situations were. In Edinburgh in 1862 it was common for households to share one room: one survey found 1,530 rooms with occupancy rates of 6–15 people per room.⁸ Due to Edinburgh’s topography, there were some multi-storey tenements with essentially subterranean conditions in which families were sharing rooms without any natural light. Rickets were common. The shocking conditions could be found across Europe. In Moscow and St Petersburg, for example, workers often lived in bunks in factory dormitories, and one estimate for 1900 suggested that about one in six Muscovites were renting corners of rooms rented to others.⁹ In 1912, on average there were eight people living in each apartment in these two cities.¹⁰ A central feature of Frank McCourt’s best-selling autobiography Angela’s Ashes is his description of the series of cold, damp, pest-ridden rented rooms that were all his family could afford in New York and Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s, and, worst of all, the associated deaths of three of his siblings as well as his own near fatal typhoid and his mother’s pneumonia. At one point, assessors deciding whether the family deserved charity admitted that their housing conditions were similar to the slums of Calcutta (see Box 3.2).¹¹ Policies to address such conditions in GN cities emerged rather slowly but eventually appeared to have consigned tragic outcomes such as these to the past (see Chapters 6 and 7). Cowgate’s infant mortality rates were exceptionally shocking in the nineteenth century but they were high in Edinburgh as whole, at around 130. They fell only slowly to about 115 in 1915 and then steeply to 20 in 1950; today they are around five deaths per thousand.¹²

Box 3.2 Desperate slums in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s

Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door … People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain … One night there is a knock on the door and Mam sends me down to see who it is. There are two men from the St. Vincent de Paul [Catholic charity] and they want to see my mother and father. I tell them my parents are … [u]pstairs where ‘tis dry …

They want to know what that little shed is beside our front door. I tell them it’s the lavatory. They want to know why it isn’t in the back of the house and I tell them it’s the lavatory for the whole lane and it’s a good thing it’s not in the back of our house or we’d have people traipsing through our kitchen with buckets that would make you sick.

They say, Are you sure there’s one lavatory for the whole lane? I am …

They tell Mam and Dad … the Society has to be sure they’re helping deserving cases … They want to know why we’re living upstairs. They want to know about the lavatory … Dad tells them the lavatory could kill us with every class of disease, that the kitchen floods in the winter and we have to move upstairs to stay dry … I have to go downstairs again and show the men where to step to keep their feet dry. They keep shaking their heads and saying, God Almighty and Mother of God, this is desperate … upstairs, that’s Calcutta.

Source: McCourt, F. 1997. Angela’s Ashes. London: Flamingo, pp. 113–14.

Students from countries in the GS doing urban studies in Britain are sometimes astonished to learn that the housing problems with which they are familiar from their own societies were so common across the urban GN, and that, as demonstrated by Angela’s Ashes, these were sometimes still occurring within living memory. This is usually because, in tune with so much of the housing literature, they have been taught to think that the urban housing problems of the GS are separate, with different underlying causes, from those of the GN. When they recognise that the starting point is that people can only be housed in the sorts of accommodation that they can afford, no matter where you are, they swiftly realise the significance of the hard constraints of typical incomes for the lower-paid members of any society. Often they suggest that the difference must be that the state mediates the situation in the GN by enforcing proper standards. However, when it is pointed out that this inevitably means that the cost of the cheapest housing will rise, making it unaffordable for many residents for whom there is nowhere else to go, the true nature of the global housing dilemma at the heart of this book begins to become clear, as does the double-edged sword of standards in a market economy. The solution of tackling the gap between the market-determined prices of labour and decent housing through the state boosting low incomes with housing allowances or providing subsidised housing is the next logical step in the discussion.

In real life, in most societies the situation is far messier than the logical conclusions of discussions such as these. Urban housing outcomes depend on the locally specific interaction between the incomes set by the labour market and housing costs set by housing-market conditions, overlaid by variable and only partial types of intervention to try to address the inevitable affordability dilemma. In this complex mix, housing standards are only one part of the subset of conditions influencing housing costs. Yet their importance for human welfare makes them central to an analysis of the housing dilemma. Their implications are not a simple binary: higher housing costs versus health and social welfare. Although, in general, striving for decent standards must be the right thing to do, there are ways of doing this that reduce possible negative side effects for the poor. Housing standards can be inappropriate or used punitively, and this has to be avoided. The following sections start with an example of GN housing standards legislation from the UK as a template for the crucial welfare issues these address and also to understand their limitations. An analysis of the pros and cons of building standards follows, using examples from The Gambia, Zimbabwe and Texas.

Housing standards in the Global North: UK example

The types of housing standards implemented in the cities of the GN could be illustrated with reference to almost any country, from Australia to Austria, Italy to Ireland. Each would include elements of local idiosyncrasies but the key point is that they would demonstrate the complexity and breadth of the regulations found necessary to prevent market forces throwing up housing that is dangerous for its occupants (albeit possibly affordable). The example chosen here is the situation in the UK.

There are two main sets of housing standards regulated in the UK: the types of new houses that can be built and the conditions within housing deemed acceptable for particular types of residents. Familiarity with the very different types of housing typical in low-income settlements in the urban GS and those in the GN suggest at first that a key difference, because it is so visible, is the type of materials used, and that therefore the use of cheap building materials such as soil bricks and corrugated iron is forbidden in the GN. In the UK, this is not necessarily the case; instead, what is required is that all building work should use materials that are ‘adequate and proper’ for the purposes intended and that the work is done in a ‘workmanlike manner’.¹³ In theory, a soil brick house with a corrugated iron roof of the sort millions of people in African or Asian cities inhabit is possible. You can even build a house largely of straw bales.¹⁴ However, there is a host of regulations about what else is required for a house in which people are going to live. These cover structural safety, fire safety, resistance to contaminants and moisture, toxic substances, resistance to sound, ventilation, sanitation, hot water and water efficiency, drainage and waste disposal, heating and appliances, protection from falling, conservation of fuel and power, access to and use of buildings, glazing safety, and electrical safety. Also, most houses in large cities in the GN are more than one storey, even when they are occupied by only a single household, and frequently most residents live in multi-storey apartment blocks. Many building materials (such as unfired or even fired mud bricks) that are widely used in poor settlements in the GS are only adequate for one-storey houses as they cannot hold up a second floor. The load-bearing properties of building materials is thus a crucial issue. Resistance to moisture is another. Again, mud bricks can work if they are carefully plastered and the roof extends well beyond the walls to provide good protection from rain. Indeed, some of the large one-storey houses in the formerly ‘white’ segregated suburbs of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, were constructed in this way in the early parts of the twentieth century, even though their current occupants may not know this. So, of course, are many cottages and old rural houses across Europe, even if their thatched roofs have been replaced. However, even the best-built mud-brick house in most low-income settlements in cities of the GS is unlikely to comply with all the other regulations listed above, including having hot water, bathrooms and toilets within the house and safe electricity, and being well insulated against heat and cold. The visible outside of the house, therefore, reveals only the beginning of the impact of housebuilding regulations.

Current housebuilding regulations in the UK, or anywhere in the world, can, of course, affect only new housing stock. This is why in any long-established town across the world there is usually such a mixture of housing, and much privately owned old housing may not comply with regulations that did not exist when it was built. The incentive to maintain and update such housing largely derives from homeowners’ desire to live in reasonable comfort and safety and to maintain the value of their asset, although local authorities can enforce certain repairs if the condition of the house threatens others nearby. When such houses are sold, if the new owners have to borrow from housing finance institutions, the lenders will also insist that the house is (or is made) structurally sound, because they also have a vested interest in its value.

However, standards for what are deemed acceptable living conditions for residents are laid out for existing rental housing in the UK. Tellingly, the relevant guidance is termed ‘A Decent Home’.¹⁵ Thus, two key terms that are central to the arguments in this book are up front. ‘Decent’ is explicitly a normative term: there is no possible objective definition and (in a housing context) it implies value judgements that are made about what a society collectively feels is right, what conditions within a house should be for the people living there, and what conditions are unacceptable because they cause too much physical and mental distress. The use of the word ‘decent’ in any legislation is extremely important because it implicitly recognises that ‘indecent’ conditions arise when market forces are unregulated.¹⁶ It is significant, for example, that debates about work and incomes across the world, led by the International Labour Organization (ILO), refer to ‘decent’ work or jobs. Again, the normative aspect is explicit: it is about work that is reliably paid, has safe and non-exploitative conditions and includes elements such as pension and health rights. The other word, ‘home’, is of equal significance because it is not the word ‘house’. It immediately signals that the issues are not seen as purely technical and that there is a recognition of the abstract and emotional aspects of dwelling in a specific building, of issues such as privacy, safety and the need for family life. The related UK Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) states that its purpose is to regulate how ‘the dwelling as a whole, and each individual element in the dwelling has an effect’ on the ‘basic physical and mental needs for human life and comfort’.¹⁷

The Decent Homes guidance has four main elements. These are that the home must be in a reasonable state of repair: this includes external walls; the roof; windows and doors; chimneys; central-heating boilers; gas fires; storage heaters; plumbing; and electrics. It must also have facilities and services that are ‘reasonably modern’: these include a kitchen with adequate space and layout to contain all the required items (e.g. sink, cupboards, cooker, worktops); a main bathroom and an indoor toilet (with a nearby washbasin) that is not accessed through a bedroom; adequate insulation against external noise, if needed; and, in blocks of flats, adequate size and layout of common areas. Another requirement is for effective insulation and efficient heating so the home is warm enough to be reasonably comfortable. The most complex element of the guidance is that a decent home ‘meets the current statutory minimum standard for housing’. This is measured against 29 criteria in the HHSRS (Table 3.1) with a scoring system depending on the perceived likelihood of the hazard actually causing harm to the people in the home. High scores mean that the hazard must be remedied. The conditions that led to the appallingly high mortality and morbidity rates in urban housing in the GN in the not-so-distant past are all listed in this table. These are 1 and 2 (damp and mould growth, and cold); 11 (crowding and space); and 15, 17 and 18 (domestic hygiene, pests and refuse; personal hygiene, sanitation and drainage; and water supply). It is worth noting that hazard 11, relating to overcrowding, is understood to go beyond tangible physical criteria and includes other crucial aspects of a home (rather than a house), as it also accounts for ‘the psychological needs for both social interaction and privacy’ (emphasis in the original).

Table 3.1 England and Wales 2006 Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS): potential influences on ‘The basic physical and mental needs for human life and comfort’

There are further conditions about housing that relate to these issues about privacy and social interactions. There are ‘national bedroom standards’ that determine how many bedrooms a family should have. Separate bedrooms are theoretically required for a couple living together as partners, single adults aged over 21, and children of different sexes aged between 10 and 21. A bedroom can be shared by any two children of the same sex and from the same family, although a young adult who is not a family member needs a separate bedroom. If a woman is pregnant, it is understood that this will soon affect the number of bedrooms required.¹⁸ There are also standards about space requirements per person; these were set out in 1935 as a response to ‘overcrowded conditions in the private rented sector before the Second World War’, but they are very rarely enforced and data are rarely collected.¹⁹

These standards evidently have enormous implications for housing costs for families with children. Thus, it is these households, who are at the heart of any sustainable society and to whom politicians tend to refer constantly as a symbolic touchstone for the values and norms that they wish to represent, who in reality are seen as a costly strain on the urban system in Europe and North America. In the UK, as shown in Chapter 2, there are millions of urban families who do not earn anywhere near enough money to buy housing and who cannot afford to rent the decent housing that their societies, with all too recent histories of shocking rental housing conditions, rightly deem is required. Only government subsidies make their homes possible. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this point for contemporary cities and their future prospects – it is possible that the future of the family in the world’s biggest cities is bound up with questions of housing affordability. This point is returned to in Chapter 9.

As already noted, the housing standards encompassed by the UK’s ‘Decent Homes’ and HHSRS relate only to rental housing. Moreover, their enforcement is mainly focused within the social housing rental sector – that is, where non-market, subsidised rents are being paid either in old-style ‘council housing’ or in the many, newer variants of social housing run by the non-profit sector with various government subsidies to keep rents down. It is obviously easier to enforce anything with parties that are reliant to some extent on financial support from the enforcement agency. However, the private, market-oriented rental sector is a very different problem. In a neoliberal capitalist society, interference with private property and profit tends to be seen as a difficult matter and the political ethos is that it is to be avoided where possible. This view is also fostered by the various extremely powerful and well-resourced lobbying groups from the private-sector building and rental sectors which do their best to encourage legislation that improves their profits and to discourage any that might constrain them. Local authorities are not actually empowered to take action about some poor housing conditions in the private rental sector, because it is private; nor are the expectations that local authorities will act as strong as they are in the social housing sector. Indeed, the ‘Decent Homes’ guidance states that, in the private rental sector, tackling poor standards should rely on ‘a range of assistance, advice and encouragement to homeowners … using enforcement powers only as a last resort’. Only when so-called Category 1 hazards – conditions listed in Table 3.1 as type A, B or C – are so serious that the severity score for the risk to the occupants is high do they theoretically have to be dealt with via enforcement. When the score is lower, enforcement is discretionary.

Once the enforcement of laws is discretionary, their impact will vary according to local and national political factors such as ideology and budgets. These also vary over time as elections come and go and as national and global economic changes affect budgets. In 2016 in England, for example, there was a Conservative government ideologically opposed to welfare payments and ‘red tape’, an austerity budget had led to deep cuts in central government grants to local authorities, the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis were still reverberating through the economy, and the newer negative impacts of the UK’s impending exit from the European Union (Brexit) were beginning to emerge. Taken together, these meant that factors influencing whether regulations are implemented – political will and capacity – were acting to reduce the frequency with which housing regulations were effectively imposed, particularly within the private rental sector. As a consequence, poor conditions involving risks to health – slum conditions, in other words – were becoming more common.

Informal housing and building standards

Regulations about housing standards are not peculiar to the cities of the GN – substandard housing in the GS is not due to a lack of legislation. Nearly all societies have plenty of regulations on the books. In ex-colonies these may still be partly derived from the town-planning laws handed down by the former colonial power. For example, they could be modelled on British, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese ‘norms’. However, they are much less likely to be enforced. In 1990, during a field trip with undergraduate students to The Gambia, one student project was on housing in Serrekunda, the country’s largest urban settlement. The students diligently interviewed various ‘key personnel’ in the urban council offices in Serrekunda, returning with photocopies of regulations relating to building standards. These included the usual array of requirements about types of building material, distance between buildings, room size, windows, and minimum water and sanitation standards. These were all ‘modern’ and were drawn fairly directly from British legislation of the 1940s and 1950s. The students suggested that this meant Serrekunda had been ‘planned’. However, a moment’s observation of nearly all the residential built environment in the settlement demonstrated that the regulations had not only been honoured mainly in the breach rather than the observance, but in fact entirely in the breach. To a significant extent, Serrekunda was constructed of corrugated iron sheets. Many households were renting and living in one small room in buildings often built and rented out by the owners of the rural land plots onto which the settlement had encroached and sprawled. These buildings did not conform to any urban plan or regulation; neither did their tenure. Many obtained their water from wells, just as previous rural populations had done. The case of Serrekunda demonstrates that, as with all laws, it is not the existence of the legislation that really matters but whether it is implemented. Leaving aside the issue of affordability, standards can only lead to improved housing if there are two key things: the political will and authority to enforce the regulations and the institutional capacity to implement and monitor that enforcement. The example of the UK above has already suggested that political will can ebb and flow.

The housing dilemma as defined in this book, whereby there is a mismatch between low incomes and the costs of housing provided by the private sector, is specific to situations in which housing is decent because certain standards are enforced. However, if they are not, the private sector can deliver housing that is cheap enough for most people. Some of this will be in true slums, but not all of it. The informal housing that is so widespread in the GS is cheaper than formal housing not only because it may skimp on physical quality. Often, an important reason why it is affordable to the poor is that the land used at the time of building was cheap. This might be because it was originally occupied by squatting. However, the tenure may simply be non-capitalist. Hundreds of millions of informal private-sector residential units, both for owners and renters, are found in the urban areas of the GS (see Chapter 4). The meaning of the term ‘informal’ is often contested,²⁰ but here, in relation to housing, it is defined as housing that does not conform with government planning, zoning, tax regimes, regulations and standards. By definition, therefore, this crucial housing sector does not comply with housing standards. However, improving this situation without causing worse health and suffering is tricky. As the next chapter will explain, removing such housing because it is poor quality is not the answer. This merely treats a visible symptom of poverty without doing anything about the causes. Invariably, those displaced simply have to adopt other informal solutions, and these are often worse for their welfare. The answers have to lie with assisting and encouraging upgrading of housing in situ – which generally happens anyway where occupiers are also homeowners, their incomes allow and they feel secure – or with providing state-subsidised decent alternatives.

Housing standards in the Global South: Zimbabwe example

The outcomes of adherence to inappropriate housing standards and ill will on the part of governments that punish poor people living in informal housing have been well illustrated in the cities of Zimbabwe. Yet this also shows how complex the situation can be, since political attitudes and incomes are not fixed but change over time. The fixation with standards evident in this case also helps demonstrate how differences between the GN and GS may be less marked than supposed.

As explained in Chapter 2, the cities of the countries of southern Africa that were once ruled by white minority regimes are all of colonial origin and are premised upon a crucial difference between them and the urban colonial experience in many other societies, except in Latin America: that is, usually nearly all the land on which they developed and their surrounding areas were alienated from the original occupants and either owned by the state or held privately. In both cases, the norms and legal underpinnings of capitalist property were dominant, backed by the necessary institutions. In this regard, cities such as Harare, Windhoek and Pretoria are more like American or European cities than they are like other cities in much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where pre-capitalist tenurial arrangements remain significant.

These circumstances made it easier to control residential housing developments and to exclude Africans from ‘white’ cities. Although these controls broke down towards the end of liberation struggles to end white minority rule in all three countries (Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa), and squatter housing on private and public land emerged, in Zimbabwe most of what was a fairly limited amount of such housing was removed after independence in 1980. Crucially, at that point many of the occupants were moved into highly subsidised new site-and-service schemes and not left to fend for themselves. This left Zimbabwe, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, with an essentially planned and regulated residential urban landscape by the mid-1980s. In other words, cities such as Harare and Bulawayo were more like London or Birmingham in terms of land tenure, property rights and regulated housing than they were like Dar es Salaam or Lagos or Kinshasa. And the government was determined to keep it that way.

Over the next 20 years, up until 2005, Zimbabwean urban housing projects ostensibly targeted at low-income groups varied somewhat in their characteristics, particularly in terms of the degree to which state or donor subsidies were provided to make housing more affordable for the poor. These shifts were in line with global neoliberalism and the shift to more market-oriented policies generally; some of the outcomes for affordability have already been discussed in Chapter 2. On the whole, most planned urban housing had been delivered through site-and-service schemes and the official focus was almost entirely on homeownership, as is common throughout the GS. In such schemes, residents purchased a plot and then built a house, hiring their own builders and/or using their own labour. However, they had to comply with a host of building standards. Throughout the process, the housing built was closely regulated and monitored by local officials. Key regulations included the conditions that the plans were approved by the municipality, the houses were fully serviced with water and sanitation, and they had proper foundations, a concrete slab floor, and walls of fired brick or cement blocks. The roof had to be asbestos, metal or tiles. In theory, homeowners were meant to construct a four-room unit and ablution facilities within 18 months, although often they could not afford this and a blind official eye was usually turned as long as some progress was occurring. As explained in Chapter 2, many of the poor could not afford to be allocated a plot at all. Some who did manage to convince schemes that they could afford the costs then found them too much to bear.

In Zimbabwe in the first decade or so after independence, there was the political will to maintain regulated standards. The government also managed to maintain a situation where there was very little squatting. In any case, it was not generally possible to build urban homes in the immediate rural hinterland by taking advantage of non-capitalist tenurial arrangements (although this constraint was to change when fast-track land reform began in the twenty-first century, reshaping the city’s residential geography in significant ways). This feature meant that it was possible to believe that urban housing processes could be controlled, in contrast to the situation across other parts of the GS. In addition, due to a curious mix of a positive desire for poor urban residents to live in decent housing and an official compulsion to exert control via planning, the vast majority of Zimbabwe’s urban residents did not live in ‘slums’ (as defined by UN-Habitat) by the turn of the twenty-first century. They mostly had on-plot access to sanitation and clean water and accessible clinics and schools. There was no pretence that the private, market-oriented, large-scale housing industry could possibly provide affordable housing, given local incomes, and, as shown for the case study of Glen Norah C in Chapter 2, efforts to bring in private loans for self-builders on already subsidised land had made even these schemes problematic. But Zimbabwe’s urban housing situation was bursting at the seams. The maintenance of building standards made even low-income schemes too expensive for a large sector of the population. They could only afford to rent; homeownership was simply beyond them. Thus, many of the rooms in the new ‘homes’ in the housing schemes and in the older townships of the colonial period were rented out. The ideal of one family per house, which fitted with the decent home concept, was fairly rare, especially in the high-density suburbs closer to city centres.

In fact, in many houses the norm was more like one household per room, just as in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Edinburgh or St Petersburg. Overcrowding was rife. And adding to the density of population, there was such a huge demand for rental housing that many plot-owners took to increasing their incomes by building backyard shacks. These were extensions or freestanding units built in any spare space on the plot behind the house: each had a household living in it or some were shared between lodgers. Complex subletting arrangements developed. In the areas most accessible to work, such as Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, shacks were sometimes eventually also built in front yards, in the gap between the house and the road. In most cases the homeowner also lived on-site, but there was a significant minority of absentee lessors. Besides the overcrowding, the insides of houses were often very poorly finished (no ceilings and unplastered walls, for example) as this was not regulated and had no structural implications. This did, however, undermine the comfort of the tenants.

Planning regulations made it clear that backyard shacks and unplanned extensions were illegal. So why, given its success in preventing squatting, did Zimbabwe allow the backyard shack situation to develop? The answer lies in a complex mix of national and city politics, with different city governments taking different attitudes over time. One factor was a gradually developing degree of pragmatism in the 1990s as the housing affordability problem became increasingly acute. Household incomes took a steep dive and fewer new subsidised housing schemes were built after structural adjustment policies were introduced in 1991. There was an element of genuine concern about increasing urban poverty at the time, and the backyard shacks ‘helped’ by providing affordable, if problematic, accommodation. Unless the state had been in a position to allocate to their residents subsidised houses in new site-and-service schemes, it was hard to see a ‘humane’ alternative. However, at the same time, and often in the same official circles, there was outright opposition to this ‘informal’ type of housing solution, which evidently undermined Zimbabwe’s aspirations for planned and tidy urban landscapes. In other words, the commitment to holding the line against backyard shacks fluctuated, and in periods of relative laxity and few demolitions, tens of thousands were built.

Given income levels and the mismatch between the supply and cost of affordable housing and the demand and need for it, inevitably some squatting did occur after independence, here and there. In Harare, for example, there were various small-scale occupations, usually on public land. These were never allowed to last for long, however. Once demolished, some of their residents were moved to ‘holding camps’, usually on the edges of the city and sometimes on agricultural land. Over time, these sometimes took on their own community identity, but their residents’ lives were made terribly difficult because the government would often move them on again, sometimes to another holding camp.

Tragically for Zimbabwe’s urban poor, the forces already in existence in official circles that were opposed to the slippage in housing standards were suddenly given free rein and full central government backing in 2005 when ZANU (PF), the party in power since independence, lost both a referendum on constitutional change and nearly every urban constituency in a national election. Furious that the urban electorate had not ‘recognised’ its obligations to the party, which, despite its inner convictions, had allowed backyard shacks to develop to ‘help’ the poor, the government unleashed Operation Murambatsvina (‘Clear Out the Trash’) with virtually no warning. Every single backyard shack and unplanned house extension in low-income urban suburbs across the country was demolished within a few weeks, using bulldozers. Informal-sector activities were also targeted. It was estimated that 650,000 to 700,000 people were either made homeless or lost their jobs, or both.²¹

There was an international outcry and the UN sent a special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, to investigate. Understandably, the political punishment angle was frequently highlighted in subsequent analysis. Yet, while this was relevant, it helped obscure some other aspects of the campaign that only made sense in terms of understandings about private property, housing standards and urban planning regulations. First, the campaign did not touch planned and legal private or rented properties, which also housed many of the ‘ungrateful’ urban electorate. Throughout the country, the legal home on the urban plots affected was left standing, surrounded by the rubble of demolished extensions and shacks. Thus, the legal property of low-income urban plot-owners and homeowners was respected. Second, in the ‘holding camps’ such as Hatcliffe Extension on the north-west edge of Harare, the houses demolished were generally those built without local authority support, meaning that services had not been laid on and they were not connected to the networks for sewerage, water or electricity. According to the regulations, this made them illegal. For the international media that were soon on the spot, these issues were not visible (pipes being underground) but the demolition of what were often freestanding small houses constructed of permanent materials such as brick or cement blocks was very evident and understandably condemned. To complicate matters further, unlike backyard shack residents, some in the holding camps had title deeds to their plot of land that local politicians had made available during electioneering periods. Again, the media and many other analyses made much of this, taking it to mean that legal private property had been destroyed.²²

The Zimbabwean government defended itself on the grounds of planning and building standards. It pointed out, correctly, that backyard shacks were illegal and if homeowners could show that they had received planning permission for extensions, those extensions were not demolished. They compared the upholding of housing regulations with the situation in cities across the GN. They also explained the nuances of the planning and standards issues that led to so many unserviced and improperly planned and regulated houses being demolished in the holding camps, even if they had been built on land with legal title. None of this cut much ice with the various media, campaigning and agency reports that followed, which was not surprising. The extent of suffering that was caused was catastrophic: no provision was made at first for anyone made homeless, people were scattered across the country and some were forced to take up cross-border peripatetic lifestyles. Many people died.²³

Nonetheless, the UN report on the campaign, which rightly decried the suffering and the lack of timely warnings of the demolitions (which was illegal), did note that the government was right on the legal points about standards and planning. Nearly all the demolished dwellings had been illegal. Thus, this infamous Zimbabwean example provides insights into how complex the relationship can be between housing standards, residential planning laws and the availability of affordable housing. Earlier it was argued that housing standards are a double-edged sword, but this example shows how there can be even more sharp edges to their impacts. They can be used as a weapon by governments to evict those whose housing is ‘not up to standard’ if and when the state deems it expedient.

Housing standards and the colonias on the borders of Texas and Mexico

Along the border between Texas and Mexico there are many small residential settlements termed ‘colonias’ that house urban people on the US side. These have had somewhat ambiguous status, including whether they are rural or urban, under whose jurisdiction their management should fall (the ‘rural’ counties or the cities), and the legality of many of the plots and houses on them more generally. On the Mexican side, there are many larger colonias, but their existence is relatively ‘normal’ there. These settlements are an exceptionally useful example of the issues under discussion: the impact of housing regulations, standards and embedded societal expectations on the cost (and therefore affordability) of housing. Furthermore, they provide an unusual comparative GN versus GS example that helps to further illustrate the arguments proposed in this book about the similarities in key processes underlying housing affordability issues in rich and poor countries across the world. They also challenge any presumption that, besides the difference in wealth between these regions, housing outcomes in the GS are worse because their institutions, accountability and capacity are inherently more problematic than in the GN.

These settlements have been extensively studied by Peter Ward of the University of Austin in Texas.²⁴ Most of his work has been on housing processes in Latin American countries, which helps provide depth to his comparative analysis and a critical perspective on North American norms. On both sides of the border, many houses in the colonias have (or originally had) questionable ‘legality’ in much the same way as many of the houses in the peri-urban ‘holding camps’ of Harare in Zimbabwe. While on the Mexican side some colonias involved illegal invasions onto land, both in Mexico and Texas their first residents more often occupied subdivided land provided via some sort of deal, often done by intermediaries, with local landowners. In many parts of the GS this might be tolerated. However, for the American authorities, it was a significant problem that this land was not zoned as being part of the nearest town. Services such as water, sanitation and electricity, as well as compliance with various urban building codes, tend to be required for houses to be accepted as legal in the American urban context. Since these settlements did not comply, the houses built fall short in terms of acceptable standards and can be deemed ‘illegal’, just as in Harare.

By the mid- to late 1990s, there were over 1,500 colonias along the Texan border, housing around 368,000 people. In 2018 it was estimated that about half a million lived in this type of settlement.²⁵ The residents were there because of the housing dilemma: their incomes were insufficient for them to occupy legal housing within the city. Taking up subdivided land on farms in the hinterland – even if its tenurial status was uncertain and they knew they were being exploited by dodgy developers – and gradually building homes, even if these were non-compliant and had no piped water or electricity, was all they could afford and allowed for some sort of family life. On the Texas side, most of the residents are Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. As Ward explains, ‘Few Mexicans or first-generation Mexican-Americans working on the Texas border earn enough to afford housing at market rents or qualify for traditional home financing … many of these workers [at the end of the 1990s] earn as little as between $5,000 and $10,000 a year.’²⁶ He also explicitly links the issue of (important and necessary) ‘standards’ and the unaffordability of housing. Thus, residential land within a Texan town must have ‘paved roads, curbs, drainage, and hookups for water, sewer, and utility services … These requirements, while beneficial to public health and safety, have the effect of excluding low income people from the urban housing market.’²⁷ Similarly in Mexico, the laws and regulations governing urban land development and housing mean that ‘almost without exception’ the market price of urban land is ‘beyond the reach of most poor families’.²⁸

When the Texan colonias first began to emerge, the subdivision and sale of farming land close to border cities was legal enough as the local ethos in Texas, possibly more than almost anywhere else in the world, would be to support the rights of landowners to do as they wish. By selling subdivided plots, farmers could get at least double their value as agricultural land but still sell at prices ‘that very-low-income people could afford’.²⁹ Often the farmers sold to developers who then sold the plots on. The conditions of sale were highly exploitative at first, under the terms of the ‘Contract for Deed’ system that was widespread in the USA. This meant that, although initial payments to start the contract could be extremely small, the land could be forfeited back to the seller at any point if any payments were missed, even if the buyer had been paying regularly for years. Land title was available only once the full purchase price had been paid. This could not be regarded as ‘security of tenure’. Several improvements began to be introduced after 1995, however; for example, once 40% of the price or 48 monthly instalments had been paid, the contract conditions changed to those for a proper mortgage, with far more protections for the purchaser. Originally, the plots were also sold without any services – ‘unimproved’. This was also legal at first, and anyway, rural counties, under whose jurisdiction the colonias fell, had few powers to enforce building codes. However, again in 1995, there were legal changes in some counties where colonias were developing, which meant that developers had to get county approval for subdivisions and, crucially, had to supply water, sewerage and drainage to them. This ushered in the double edge of the sword of decent, regulated standards because, of course, this would have made any new plots too expensive for the poor people who were the only ones ‘interested’ in buying in these distant spots that remained unintegrated into the towns. Indeed, ‘stopping the proliferation of new colonias’ was the aim of the new laws.³⁰

On the Mexican side of the border, colonias were very much larger, much more common and representative of low-income urban housing ‘solutions’ across the country, although at root caused by the same issue of unaffordability – it was just that the scale of the problem in a country with much lower typical incomes was very much larger. As Ward argues, they ‘respond to a common logic’.³¹ However, in line with processes across much of urban Latin America from around the 1970s, gradually they tend to be integrated socially and politically into the nearby municipalities, crucial infrastructure (water, electricity, etc.) is extended to these areas, and tenure is regularised. In many ways, local authorities and political processes are much better at dealing with colonias in Mexico than in Texas, and the outcomes for their residents are more positive in terms of addressing the issue of housing affordability. One key difference between the two sides of the border – one that is of special relevance for the theme of this chapter – relates to approaches to and understandings about the significance of building standards. Colonias, with their lack of ‘proper’ infrastructure for clean water, sanitation and electricity, and their often poor-quality housing that did not meet urban standards, were an embarrassment in Texas, representing ‘Third World conditions in a First World country’.³² In Mexico they are seen as an ordinary, if not ideal, housing solution for the working poor and it is assumed ‘that the government is required and expected to provide water and sewer services’.³³

In common with historical colonial attitudes to low-income settlements around the ‘European’ cores of the main cities of Africa and Asia that ruled and channelled the products of European colonies, Texas saw colonias in terms of a ‘sanitation syndrome’³⁴ and as hazards. And, again in a historically similar process, the settlements were largely ignored and not perceived as a responsibility of ‘the city’ (which had financial implications) until ‘health problems bred by unsanitary living conditions in the colonias threatened to spread to non-colonia populations’.³⁵ The responses tended to be technical – to address water issues, for example. However, the entrenched norms of monitoring and implementing building standards and sticking to regulations, as in the UK, were actually hindrances to improving the situation. As Ward notes, where there was non-compliance with various housing planning regulations and standards, or with environmental and health rules, ‘Texas regulations prevent[ed] service provision’.³⁶ By the 1990s, legislative change provided public funds to improve water provision in the colonias, because of health concerns, but this had been predicated on new laws to prevent further colonias developing. Also, houses could not get new gas or electricity services unless they complied with water and sewerage regulations. Ward made the logical recommendation that housing in the colonias would improve faster, because house consolidation by inhabitants and infrastructural upgrading would be easier, were minimum standards temporarily reduced either for these settlements only or even for ‘certain submarkets of housing production statewide’. The issue of building standards in this debate has been existential, in a sense, for both the residents and the regulators: in 1999, had the various codes relating to the construction of houses been enforced, ‘most colonia homes … [would have been] subject to demolition’.³⁷ But accepting lower standards means that officials have to think about why this is happening, which swiftly leads to an acceptance of the highly uncomfortable truth (for American officials) that market forces and private enterprise are incapable of housing many members of society. And, if lower standards are regarded as anathema, then the next realisation is the need for mass public-sector housing programmes, which, in the US today, are also anathema. As in many other parts of the world, it is therefore easier to stick to a technocratic response, which ignores the ‘root cause of colonias’ [or any informal settlements’] creation in the first place: poverty’.³⁸

What standards are appropriate?

It has been established that housing and building standards are key elements of the affordable housing dilemma. However, it is important to keep in mind that they are not the root cause, unless it is argued that there should be a return to the urban death and disease rates of the nineteenth century. There are some ways in which fiddling with standards may help affordability and instances where local legislation may be inappropriate for income levels or climatic conditions. Even a seemingly objective measure as per capita space requirements can be adapted to local circumstances. The impact of overcrowding on residents is affected by a variety of factors, including architecture, but important aspects are the prevailing weather and the availability and nature of outside space. Sleeping in a crowded environment is hazardous to health, but if many other household activities can often occur outside the physical building where people are accommodated, the stress and discomfort of overcrowding are mitigated and requirements about light in rooms are less important. On the other hand, in cold climates or tall apartment blocks, the physical confines of the available built living space become hard limits. The availability of electrical power is a wonderful thing for any home but may be far from the top-ranked need for poor households. Yet it is close to existential for those in high-rise apartments: if the lifts and water-pumping arrangements do not work, an informal one-storey home may seem more comfortable and far less stressful. Thousands of years of architectural design experimentation to reduce indoor temperatures and keep air circulating in homes in cities where temperatures get very high, such as in North Africa and the Middle East, may be ignored by the imposition of ‘modern’ standards that are often shaped by Eurocentric climatic norms. Rather obviously, with climate change making heat a major hazard in far more cities, housing standards need to learn from these adaptations. Standards also need to consider local cultural norms; these may be reflected in the way homes are constructed, such as having rooms looking inwards onto central courtyards, away from roads and alleys, as was traditional in many Islamic cities. Indeed, households lucky enough to be allocated public-sector housing in many cities in the GS often reshape their internal arrangements so that they reflect their needs more closely, although some of this relates to squeezing in extra bedspace.³⁹

There is much research and experimentation all over the world to find cheaper building materials, sometimes with a second objective of trying to reduce the environmental impacts of housebuilding. Sometimes laws need changing to allow these to be used in towns. Cement, for example, is a significant source of greenhouse gases during its production, is used in commercial house bricks and blocks, and is expensive. As already noted, mud bricks, which are often used in rural areas, can be used for one-storey houses, and the use of fired (kiln-baked) mud bricks in urban Zimbabwe was legalised in the late 1990s in one attempt to reduce building costs. Stabilised soil bricks use a fraction of the cement of normal bricks and use compression to make them structurally strong, rather than firing. This is another way of reducing the economic and environmental cost of wall construction, while interlocking varieties also reduce the cost of cement for mortar to hold bricks together.⁴⁰ Various materials using bamboo are another environmentally sound and cheaper way to build.⁴¹

However, although the promotion and legalisation of cheaper materials such as these may help, they will only reduce at the margins the numbers of people in any urban society who are caught in the housing affordability dilemma. After all, standards in the UK allow for the possibility of building a house using straw bales for the walls, but this has evidently not addressed the housing affordability issue there. This is because the cost of the walls of a home in a city is only a very small fraction of its total costs over time. It is even a fairly minor element of the cost of the materials for the house per se. The costs of floors and roofs, windows and doors are all significant, and once the house goes beyond a single storey, cheaper wall materials may not work structurally – they definitely do not work for a high-rise building.

Another way of recognising the limitations of a focus on the costs of building materials is to realise that households may be able to afford to build solid, decent homes in rural areas using conventional, modern building materials but cannot afford to do so in the urban area where they need to be to earn a living. There are various reasons why. A significant one is the much higher cost of legal urban land, which is why there is so much emphasis on ‘providing’ such land in analyses of urban housing shortages. Certainly, if urban land were available at the same cost as remote, rural land, housing costs would fall sufficiently to allow very many more to afford an urban home. But, as previously pointed out, this only serves to prove the key argument: that urban housing costs set by formal-sector private, market forces are unaffordable for large swaths of urban populations. There are also the costs associated with energy, water and sanitation service infrastructure and, what is sometimes forgotten, the recurring costs of using these services. The density of urban populations – and density is a defining aspect of urbanity – may make many low-cost solutions such as wood fuel, pit latrines or wells problematic or downright dangerous, although they can work in some circumstances. There are some good reasons why urban housing standards are different from rural ones. Urban local taxes or rates to pay for other crucial services such as roads, street lights or policing add more costs.

Also, some of these issues about ‘inappropriate’ standards affect homeowners but are of less relevance to renters. The proportion of people who rent varies greatly across the world, with no clear pattern between the GS and GN, but broadly speaking it is more prevalent among poorer people (partly, of course, because they cannot afford to buy). As already explained, many of the regulations about housing in the UK are about rented accommodation because that is where the most flagrant and dangerous conditions tend to occur – the historical background to the development of ‘standards’ legislation needs to be remembered. But in much of the GS, renters have very little protection and are faced with dangerous and demoralising housing conditions. More regulations, not fewer, might help them. In Zimbabwe, in the planned low-income areas where the main targets of demolitions in 2005 were backyard shacks, most of those rendered homeless were tenants, while plot-owners and homeowners were left untouched (although they lost a significant income stream from forfeited rents).

While each element of ‘standards’ can be debated and possibly adapted to local circumstances, this can miss the point that the costs of a legal, formal, urban home that is located so that it is realistically possible for its inhabitants to be part of the city’s economic and social fabric are an assemblage of many market-set prices for different elements. In the end, once it is accepted that standards are necessary to keep people alive or healthy, it makes more sense to start with the issue of affordability and the profiles of disposable incomes (i.e. after tax and other deductions, and after basic needs such as food, water and clothes are taken into account) that are typical for the society in question. These can be used to create the housing affordability curves discussed in Chapter 2, which provide an indication of how many urban citizens cannot ‘afford’ formal-sector, market-priced housing. Where, as is common, there are significant differences in such profiles and housing costs between cities in any one country, with the capital city often far more expensive but also with very significant proportions of very poor people living alongside the country’s wealthiest, then separate affordability curves are needed. If these, for example, show that 50% of households in any one city cannot afford to pay the upfront and recurring costs of the cheapest, legal urban home, then it becomes apparent that reducing the costs of wall materials, or whatever, may help only a small proportion of these people and that the scale of the problem requires a different approach.

The bemoaning of inappropriate standards in housing in relation to the GS also has to be treated with some caution, as, although there are historical links to European standards, there have also been sensible adaptations in many countries. Furthermore, as noted earlier, implementation regimes, rather than laws themselves, are really more important. The vast majority of homes that do not meet standards across the GS – and also many in the GN – are not under threat. Knocking down unplanned extensions, as happened in Zimbabwe, is usually a GN issue. A bigger threat often arises over tenure – where homes are built on land under arrangements that are not seen by city officials as legitimate, particularly where the land occupied has, or has come to have, high value that more powerful interests want to obtain. Legislation about standards in the UK, for example, does not mention this: that is, there is no ‘rule’ in the statutes which says that rented or owned houses must have legal title to the land they occupy. It is largely taken as read, but for housing standards in the GS, it is quite often the ‘big issue’.

So what types of urban housing have been and are being produced in the world’s large cities? How affordable have they been and how affordable are they today? What makes houses more or less affordable for ordinary urban residents? How have all the hundreds of millions of urban households in the lower bands of national income groups managed to house themselves? What forms does their housing take? The answers to these questions involve a complex mix of private- and public-sector actors, trends in political economic ideologies, changes in the share of national income accruing to working people and those too old to work, key historical moments that create space for progressive outcomes previously constrained by powerful vested interests, and the history of past and current modes of production that underpin the ways in which urban land is owned and transacted. These are the topics of the next five chapters.