Читать книгу Broken Cities - Deborah Potts - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe dilemma of affordable housing and big cities
Generation Rent in London and divided families in South Africa; dormitory living in Shenzhen and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; squatters on the edge of Lisbon and cage housing in Hong Kong. What do these situations have in common? The answer is obviously that they are urban housing ‘problems’. But can they be understood as manifestations of the same underlying urban processes?
Much work by scholars and policymakers argues that the common problem is to do with a shortage of housing, sometimes linked to shortages of urban land for residential housing. This conceptualises lack of housing in cities across the world as a supply-side problem – the obstacles to the provision of housing for all are constraints on supply. If enough houses were built, prices would fall into line with demand: the magic of the market, of the invisible hand, would provide the solution.
The key argument of this book is that that approach looks at the housing crisis – which is manifest across the urban world, and most particularly in the largest cities, where economic opportunities are apparently greatest – from the wrong end of the telescope. The real problem is demand. This sounds strange, perhaps, since evidently nearly everyone ‘wants’ a home – a place of shelter and privacy, a place for family life and socialising. But that is not ‘demand’ in the sense that much contemporary policy across the world can currently handle. Instead, demand must be expressed in terms of money. So while it is universally accepted that people need housing, they can only live in what they can afford. Some discussions about housing ‘demand’ can be meaningless. One set of protagonists may be expressing their arguments with reference to the norms of modern urban societies, whereby demand for housing is basically expressed in neoclassical orthodox economic terms (prices). Others may instead be referring to evidently expressed needs or ‘wants’, which, confusingly, can also be termed ‘demand’. It helps when it is recognised that housing is not that different from other basic needs, such as food. Obviously, for example, there is no shortage of food in Britain, but, as has become increasingly the case since the financial crisis of 2008, many people even in that country cannot afford enough food. No one argues that this is a supply-side issue. Thus, there is a housing dilemma. This term, which is central to the arguments developed in this book, relates to the problem that housing demands from some income groups can be met by the market but that housing needs from many in poorer groups cannot.
The views about urban housing developed in this book are underpinned by specific premises about contemporary conditions affecting urban policies and processes. Fifty years ago conditions were different. The issue of affordability that related to monetary demand was less determinant in urban housing problems across the world, in part simply because there was far more provision of non-market housing for the poor. A fundamental reason was that there were different modes of production operating in different regions. The ways in which people got access to urban housing varied accordingly. In China, the USSR, eastern European countries and Cuba, communist modes of production and ideologies meant that housing was assured for most workers and provided by the state. It was generally affordable since the costs were not determined by market forces but set by the government in line with typical incomes. Furthermore, in wealthy capitalist societies in the Global North (or ‘the West’, as these were then labelled), there was usually some provision of social housing for urban low-income workers and their families. The rents in such housing were deliberately set at rates affordable for those on typical pay levels. This meant that they were usually well below market prices. Private rental sectors were also regulated in ways that helped control rent rises. When hundreds of millions of urban residents whose incomes were in the lower deciles of national income distributions were housed in these ways, the role of affordability in understanding housing crises was evidently far less dominant. But these conditions no longer pertain.
Based on current circumstances, there are five key premises that shape the arguments of this book. These are taken to underpin contemporary low-income housing problems in cities across the world. The premises are introduced below. They will be referred to frequently and developed further in later chapters, and it is helpful to set out at the start why they are felt to be of fundamental relevance to understanding these problems.
1. The global reach of capitalism
The first premise is the current hegemony of the capitalist mode of production across all global societies. This is not to say that there are not important variations in the way this is practised in different countries – this is absolutely accepted and is indeed a key reason why urban housing outcomes vary. But the fundamental elements of capitalism – the operation of market forces via the factors of supply and demand to determine incomes and prices, the protection of private property, the quest for profit and the related essential requirement for continuous geometric expansion of production and accumulation of surplus value – are broadly speaking now in place across the world. The ending of communism in the USSR and eastern Europe has brought those societies into the capitalist fold. South-East Asian countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia that also had non-market philosophies and economies have likewise become market-oriented. The most important outlier remains China, but there have been remarkable shifts here also. It has adopted many of the main principles of capitalism, including private property, and market forces increasingly influence the allocation of resources and patterns of production and incomes. However, China’s mode of production is still best described as state capitalism, rather than free-market capitalism, and its cities and housing patterns remain unusual and exhibit some features in housing provision that flout the ‘laws’ of market forces and profit-driven decision-making.
Notwithstanding some exceptionalism in China, the hegemony of capitalist principles is now sufficiently global for these to be understood as the underlying forces determining urban housing outcomes. This does make comparative analysis easier. This precept may seem obvious but the basic requirements of capitalism are often ‘forgotten’ by policymakers devising housing programmes. For example, tremendous efforts have been made in Global South urban housing programmes to involve ‘big’ capital – banks, building societies and large construction companies – in the mass provision of planned and legal (formal) low-income housing. But it rarely works. Sometimes the governments involved berate the private-sector actors for the failures; sometimes analysis is directed towards the idea that there must be some market imperfection. The inability of poorer groups in cities in the Global South to obtain housing finance from formal lenders is usually seen as ‘a problem’ that needs to be solved. But analyses of this sort ignore the basic precepts and these presumed solutions can never achieve their goals. The essential problem is more obvious: capitalist banks and building societies have to operate profitably – it is their raison d’être. And they have responsibilities to shareholders and savers. They can lend money only for houses that are formally built in planned locations with permanent, approved materials and full services, and with tenurial rights recognised by capitalist institutions. These are the conditions that allow the lender to foreclose if the loan is not repaid, resell the property and thus get all or some of their money back. But these are some of the very conditions that make housing expensive and unaffordable for the poor. The gap between the income needed to live in ‘decent’ legal housing and the typical incomes of the poorer groups governments and development agencies are so keen to see properly housed is very obvious to private financial institutions in many cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. So they do not lend to them because it would be exceedingly risky or very clearly would not be profitable. It is pointless to expect the large-scale private sector to lend money for housing to groups that it knows cannot pay that money back and/or whose tenure does not conform to the norms of capitalist private property. This is a circle that cannot be squared unless the iron rules of the market are set aside and the state intervenes with subsidies that make the processes profitable for the private-sector actors involved. This does work. However, it simultaneously proves the point: poor urban families cannot afford to be ‘formally’ housed under market conditions, and now that market conditions are globally hegemonic, this must be the starting point for all analyses of housing problems.
An objection may be raised to the argument that the capitalist private sector cannot deliver ‘affordable’ housing for low-income groups on the grounds that this is not so obviously the case in the wealthier societies of the Global North, and that the lending practices of financial institutions in the USA and Europe during the early years of the twenty-first century disprove the point that such capitalist institutions will not lend to poorer groups for urban housing. To the contrary, however, the absolute disaster that followed in 2007–08 with the global financial crash proves the point entirely. First, the iron rules of the market did eventually assert themselves and demonstrated in the most destructive fashion that lower-income groups even in the Global North could not afford private-sector housing. And second, the housing circle was, as usual, squared by massive intervention, at almost unimaginable levels, into the markets by the state sector in these societies. Trillions of tax dollars were poured into the financial institutions involved in housing loans. They were saved and a massive global depression was avoided, but the world has still not recovered from the colossal debts imposed on states and the austerity programmes that followed.
2. The impact of the neoliberal phase
In the 1980s a new phase of capitalism based on neoliberal ideology began to replace the more regulated and state-interventionist types of capitalism that had been typical in post-war Global North societies. The second premise is that this neoliberal turn exacerbated the urban housing issues that will always exist in a capitalist society. It should be noted here that a distinction is being drawn between the impacts on urban housing of the essential requirements of any variety of capitalism, as discussed above, and the conditions encouraged by neoliberal capitalist ideology. This is analytically helpful, as, quite rightly, urban scholars critique the idea that neoliberalism is at the root of all inequalities and urban problems, especially given that many of these pre-date the 1980s. In essence, the neoliberal turn promoted a much stronger reliance on market forces for determining how resources were allocated and a much reduced role for government. Public expenditure came to be seen as something to be cut wherever possible. Given the situation outlined above whereby it is largely inevitable that affordable formal-sector housing for poorer people is achievable only through state intervention in the market, the problems that neoliberal ideology create for urban housing are obvious. In both the rich and poor parts of the world the same processes emerged. Governments and development agencies of all types sought to find ways to impose full cost recovery on housing programmes for the poor at the very least, and preferably to shift the burden of provision to the large-scale private sector, which, it was argued, was more efficient and skilled due to the disciplines imposed by the requirement to make a profit. Unfortunately, that is the very requirement that simultaneously makes affordable low-income housing impossible for the private sector to provide. Functioning and long-standing public-sector large-scale provision of affordable urban housing – such as council housing in the UK – was also deemed to be inherently wrong under the new ideology because it was not market-oriented and was such a significant element of government budgets. As a 2017 EU report, The State of Housing in the EU, states: ‘In most cases policy responses at Member States level have been to decrease public expenditure for housing and … [to rely] on measures to increase the supply in the private sector or access to homeownership.’1 The gradual undermining and reduction of the public sector across the Global North has served to make the crisis of the shortage of affordable housing in cities very much worse. Recognition of the ideological underpinnings of this situation is crucial – the conditions are not inherent in the way that the profit motive is for capitalism as a mode of production – these are political choices about what is claimed to be ‘right’. Since subsidies are seen as inherently wrong, and somehow even dangerous, this has created a fundamental constraint on the types of affordable housing solutions deemed acceptable and limits the policy conversations that are possible.
3. Segmented housing demand
The simple logic of the rule that prices are set by supply and demand is the default mindset of most housing policymakers and housing analysts. But the understanding tends to be simplistic. The general argument made is that the more urban housing is built, the lower the prices will become, and that this means that eventually they will become low enough to be affordable for the poorer groups. This mindset relates to the formal, planned housing sector – the messy unplanned markets of informal settlements in the Global South are deemed to be ‘problems’ that might be alleviated by the achievement of affordable housing in the formal market system. For the sake of argument, it helps to set informal housing aside at this point. The focus for the moment is on the planned and legally constituted housing markets.
It is also understood by most analysts that because houses actually have to be located in particular places, unlike most other goods, then the provision of urban land for housing is an essential element of the supply and demand equation. Indeed, inadequate provision of planned land – lack of land supply – is often pinpointed as the reason why housing is unaffordable for so many urban families, shifting the focus to land rather than buildings. For pro-market protagonists, this also has the benefit of shifting the ‘blame’ onto governments, since these nearly always play key roles in determining which urban land can legally be used for new housing, and away from the constraints imposed by relying on private profit-oriented suppliers.
The land issue is important but it is not the panacea so often assumed. The problem is that it is quite possible – indeed it is common – to have land occupied by empty housing units, including new-build houses, across a city at the same time that many poorer groups cannot afford to buy or rent legal, planned housing. The issue that is insufficiently recognised in the simple supply/demand analyses, or possibly dismissed because it is an ‘inconvenient truth’, is that housing markets are segmented. Increasing the supply of most types of housing makes no difference to the housing problems faced by the poorer groups as they cannot afford ‘most types of housing’. This is true in poor and rich countries – the same processes play out whether you are in Harare, Zimbabwe or Haringey in London, places with which I am deeply familiar (as noted in the Foreword). Housing that is affordable for such groups is a different sort of housing with a separate set of market conditions. This makes the measurement and conceptualisation of what is ‘affordable housing’ deeply political.
The significance of segmented markets is well developed in studies of labour and migration to cities, especially international migration to global cities.2 It is obvious that there are different types of labour (skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled) and that, in any one city, demand for each type will vary. If internal labour migration cannot meet demands, then international migrants may fill the gaps. But the gaps are specific – the classic division being between demands for very low-paid service-sector workers (such as cleaners) because insufficient numbers of local workers will (or can afford to) work at these pay levels, and separate demands for highly paid skilled professionals (in IT or the finance sectors, for example) where a lack of domestic supply is ‘real’. As research on the associated migration streams demonstrates, these different groups are treated very differently in terms of immigration laws, etc. And just as there are segmented markets in labour, there are segmented markets in housing. In the same way that a plentiful supply of skilled financiers will not meet any unmet demand for poorly paid cleaners, increasing the supply of housing types that can be afforded only by those in the top income distribution bands cannot meet any unmet demand for cheap housing for those in the bottom bands.
4. ‘Decent’, ‘legal’ housing
Having argued that profit-oriented private suppliers cannot meet the demand for urban low-income affordable housing, it is now time to point out that, in fact, this is easily disproved! In most cities and towns across the world, informal markets provide millions upon millions of housing units, both for owners and renters. The market does work. But this is precisely the sort of housing that is so frequently labelled ‘a problem’. Often the argument outlined and criticised above – that the answer is to increase the formal supply of legal zoned land and thereby housing – is trotted out as the solution to this problem.
The mistake is to cordon off this ‘housing type’ analytically as something peculiar to, or inherent in, societies of the Global South and of no significance for urban housing studies in the Global North. For it is neither peculiar nor irrelevant. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European and North American societies had plenty of exceedingly poor-quality urban housing, usually in the rental sector. It certainly rivalled, and often exceeded, the worst housing conditions experienced in urban slums across Asia, Africa and Latin America today. But at the time the concepts of ‘informality’ and ‘legal standards’ in relation to housing (and indeed labour) were not current or were in the process of being formulated. This is why the premises outlined so far are scattered with these terms (‘informal’, ‘formal’, ‘legal’, ‘zoned’, ‘planned’), because these are key to understanding not only the differences between affordable housing issues in the Global North and the Global South, but also the similarities.
For very good reasons, as they grew wealthier and more democratic, Global North societies gradually imposed regulations and standards on housing quality and invested in major urban water and sanitation infrastructure. Their urban housing sectors were transformed, low-income people’s welfare as measured by health outcomes soared, and these ‘standards’ have become embedded as norms that are often underpinned by judicial obligation. Meeting these standards costs money. In the capitalist societies of the Global North, the norms of private property rights are also embedded, and this adds value to housing and therefore also increases its cost. These conditions are taken as read in most housing studies in the contemporary Global North. The question of what might occur if these conditions were not, or could not, be maintained is rarely factored in. The answer to that question would be that an informal housing sector would emerge which would provide affordable housing for low-income groups, just as in the cities of the Global South and just as in the cities of nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Such housing would replicate the ‘problems’ that the formal-sector norms were designed to address. In other words, the basic premise is that the market cannot deliver affordable housing for the poor if – and the following two points are the big ‘ifs’ – even very basic standards of space, privacy, services and health commensurate with local laws are met and housing delivery is presumed to be done by a regulated, legal, taxable building sector.
5. Social housing
The final premise is simple: if the conditions above are met, then ‘formal’ social housing (priced below the levels set by the market) has to meet the demand for affordable housing from low-income urban groups. This housing sector is the central ameliorating factor that addresses the mismatch between incomes and ‘decent’ housing in urban societies across the world, in the cities of both the Global North and the Global South. The type of provision (from built rental units to subsidised, legal, planned but empty plots for ‘self-building’) varies across time and space. But much of this has been squeezed in the neoliberal phase since the 1980s and with the global shift away from public-sector provision and subsidies and towards full cost recovery.
The terms ‘housing affordability’ and ‘affordable housing’ are used above and throughout this book because they are commonly understood to refer to the situation in which households are struggling or unable to pay for fairly basic housing. Nonetheless, they are not really straightforward and it helps to consider this issue before proceeding. Before the 1980s, for example, policy discussions might focus more explicitly on ‘low-income housing’, making clear the crucial link between housing problems and incomes. According to the late Michael Stone, Professor of Community Planning, Public Policy and Social Justice at the University of Massachusetts Boston, it was only in the 1980s that ‘the term “affordable housing” came into vogue as affordability challenges moved up the income distribution and as public responsibility for the plight of the poor was in retreat’3 – in other words, it can and has been used to obscure the issue. Nonetheless, as long as it is recognised that affordability is about a relationship between people and whatever they need to buy, rather than the ‘thing’ itself, the terms are useful, and they are very widely used by the public, academics, the media and advocacy groups in this sense.
Housing processes across time and space: recognising the links
These five premises about housing provision and outcomes relate to the sharp end of housing crises. There are sections of society that are wealthy, or have well- or reasonably remunerated stable employment, for whom private-sector, capitalist housing markets may work well enough. But there are scores of different societies across the world, and the proportion of housing demand that can reasonably be served in this way is highly variable between them. For those outside this segment of housing demand, relying on the market can lead to very negative outcomes or no housing at all (i.e. homelessness). And within each society, or country, there are many urban centres with highly variable patterns of income. The geographical expression of demand-side housing problems is therefore very varied, both between and within countries. There are also temporal variations. The situation can worsen or improve – there is no steady direction of change. Over time, there can be huge changes in the type of housing ‘allowed’ by governments and falls or rises in disposable incomes before housing costs are factored in. Such changes can significantly shift the proportion of urban households whose incomes are too low for them to meet their basic housing needs in the housing markets they face. A current example in England is the sudden steep rise in the numbers of adults living with their parents in the south-east, and particularly in London, as rents or mortgages have become increasingly unaffordable for people in income bands who, before the global financial crisis, were reasonably served by what the market provided.
The geographical variability of the scale of really chronic housing issues across the world and the obvious differences in the outcomes, particularly in terms of highly visible, large expanses of what are often labelled ‘slums’ in many cities of the so-called Global South, can easily divert attention away from the underlying processes at work. The influences on the nature of the supply of housing are indeed so variable that it sometimes seems impossible to make meaningful comparisons between regions. Modal (rather than average) income levels, the specific requirements of local financial institutions, land laws, car ownership, public transport, land values that encourage particular types of building (e.g. high-rise versus low-rise), culture, technologies, materials, the weather – these and many other factors all play a part. A further and crucial factor is the history of state interventions in housing markets. Yet a focus on the nature of housing itself – what is ‘supplied’ and its tangible qualities – often leads to an almost binary approach to the study of urban housing in the Global South versus the Global North. In the former, the focus is on so-called slums – although, in reality, this is better understood as the outcome of informality in housing provision of various types4 – and the problems tend to be cast in terms of ‘development’.5 Since these types of housing outcomes are far rarer in the Global North – at least in modern times – the focus in housing studies there is on the workings of formal, large-scale private-sector housing markets (e.g. new private housing provision or gentrification) and the role of the state in providing social housing at below-market rates. As the problems literally ‘look’ different, the analysis splits into separate camps.
However, when housing problems are recast primarily in terms of problems with demand, the seemingly vast differences between these issues in poor and rich countries – the cities of the Global South and the Global North – that frequently seem to prevent any realistic theorising become more manageable. The expanding field of comparative urban studies calls for urban theorising that is not based solely on the norms of cities of the Global North, and for insights developed from real situations in any part of the urban world to be tested for their theoretical applicability to broader global urbanism. Comparative urbanism also eschews the old binaries of Global South and Global North, developed versus developing, and helps lay bare the impacts of global structures of power and financial flows on cities while constantly also reminding us of the need to recognise the influence of local histories, politics and cultures.6 The use of the terms ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North’ throughout this book may be thought to undermine this. However, for the sake of brevity they serve as a useful device for referring to regions and countries with relatively low or high per capita incomes, which are a factor of key significance for the scale of the housing dilemma, if not the underlying structural causes. It is also a shorthand – though perhaps an increasingly unnecessary one – for societies that are towards the opposite outer edges of what might be described as the normal curve distribution of contemporary urban experiences and outcomes. As these increasingly blur, more and more cities cluster towards the middle of the curve, where these terms become less useful. Identifying and discussing such blurring with respect to housing is one aim of this book. Nonetheless, understanding the nature of the housing dilemma also requires a historical perspective, and the economic history of the cities of the Global North, from the emergence of mercantile capitalism centuries ago and through the subsequent centuries of imperialism and colonialism, is very different from most of those in the Global South. A key reason was the imbalance in political and economic power between them and the consequent unbalanced accumulation of surplus value in the urban Global North. Thus, the relative wealth of these regions, which has so influenced past urban processes, problems and possible policy solutions, is a product of their unequal relationships. The nature of the colonial encounter also determined many aspects of urban housing policies and outcomes in colonial cities, the legacies of which are still evident today. For all these reasons, these regional descriptors – hereafter GN and GS – will be used where they assist the analysis; they are also needed to demonstrate where common generalisations based on presumed differences between their urban housing problems can be challenged.
The arguments made in this book have also been influenced by long-standing research based in urban Africa, as explained in the Foreword. Three particular aspects of studying and teaching on housing in regions such as Africa have helped shape the perspectives underpinning this book. First, GS urban housing studies (and indeed research on many other aspects of societies in the GS) tend to focus on, or incorporate, poverty as a key factor in any analysis. Indeed, it can be hard to obtain funding for research that is not, at least ostensibly, pro-poor. This is often, and understandably, seen as a barrier between any insights and theorising based on such work being drawn on by the more powerful and established theoretical scholarship of the GN. After all, far fewer people in the cities of the GN are that poor, as, for the reasons discussed above, their societies are generally wealthier. Yet the focus on poverty can have its advantages. Much work in the cities of the GS starts from the position of understanding patterns of livelihoods and incomes in such cities. This provides a different perspective because it often demonstrates that the key to interpreting urban housing problems is affordability. People’s incomes determine what sort of housing they live in. For many – sometimes most – urban families, this means that formally built housing, of adequate size and construction type, in safe locations with reliable services is completely unaffordable. So they do not live in it, no matter what the conditions of supply.
These sorts of conditions are quite typical of much of urban sub-Saharan Africa. Also, as the shape and scale of very large urban settlements and their economies shifted in Africa and the world entered the phase of being mainly urban, it became increasingly clear that the most pertinent insight about housing problems in African cities was not about how they differed from those elsewhere, including in wealthier societies, but about recognising the similarities. A particular issue in Africa has been the profound lack of legal, planned housing (‘formal’ housing in development-speak) that both meets some basic requirements to allow healthy living, including adequate space, and is affordable for very significant proportions of the urban population. This brings us to the second way in which working in African cities forged insights that have wider application. This is the role of what is called ‘informal housing’, which, for the moment, can be taken to mean housing that is not legal or planned according to the laws and plans of the city authorities (even if it is widely perceived to be legitimate by local societies and on such a scale that it is unlikely to be demolished). Yet again, the presence of widespread ‘informality’ in the cities of the GS is usually felt to hinder comparisons with planned and regulated cities elsewhere. In the GN, it is assumed, slums and squatter settlements are things of the past and of little relevance to contemporary urban understandings. But the point is that they did indeed exist in the past. Classroom discussions about such housing types in Africa soon lead to discussions about why slums occurred in London or New York, or squatter settlements were found around Paris, or shack settlements around Chicago. The reasons were the same – the costs of decent and/or legal housing were beyond large sections of the population: their incomes were just too low. At the time, the laws and regulations that can be used today to label contemporary urban housing ‘informal’ may either not have existed or not been enforced, but the underlying mechanisms leading to people being housed in these ways were essentially the same as they are in the cities of the contemporary GS. Thus comparing across time rather than just across space puts the role of ‘informality’ in housing outcomes into clearer perspective.
Once it is recalled how badly most of the working classes used to be housed in the GN, the next logical step is to think about why and how these housing types are no longer prevalent. The answers involve a combination of changes that emerged over a period of time. The actions of the state and of private philanthropists (many of whom had made their fortunes from workers in the rural GS and the urban GN who were housed in very poor conditions) were crucial. Official slum clearances had complex rationales and were hardly pro-poor, but the development of model, subsidised inner-city housing estates by actors such as the Peabody Trust in London clearly were. GN societies also became wealthier, the share of the population who were extremely poor shrank and the size of the middle classes whose housing needs could be addressed by a modernising private sector expanded apace. In addition, the state provided more income support of various types such as pensions, child support, unemployment benefits, free education and eventually state-supported healthcare for varying proportions of the population. As poverty levels reduced, the share of the urban population who could manage rental costs for ‘decent’ housing (compared with nineteenth-century norms, at least) increased.
Nonetheless, significant proportions of urban people in the GN in, say, the 1960s and 1970s were housed in social housing, many in the private rental sector could manage only because of state interventions such as rent controls or housing support payments, and house purchases for some lower-income groups, particularly in the USA, were also only possible through state support. This brings us to the third and final comparative point that emerges from considering urban low-income housing characteristics in the GN from the perspective of urban housing situations in the GS. This is that it is only the availability of a segment of non-market-priced housing in GN cities that prevents mass recourse (again) to the sort of insecure and inadequate housing that is now sometimes assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the GS. In other words, the underlying conditions that can lead to urban people living in such housing are universal. And the problem lies in the workings of another set of market forces, this time in labour markets. Thus, in nearly all urban societies today, in both the GN and the GS, most people’s incomes are determined by the forces of supply and demand and for very many types of work in all cities the price for their labour is simply too low to cover the cost of formal-sector, ‘decent’, secure housing. What they can afford is informal-sector housing, but it is this sector’s very insecurity and frequent lack of properly functioning services, space and privacy that makes it cheap and affordable.
