unpopular in Zimbabwe too. By 2014, 20 years after the attainment of democratic rule, any couple living together or household head with dependants with a total household income under R3,500 per month could apply to go on the waiting list for what had become known as RDP houses. These were named after the short-lived Reconstruction and Development Programme; this guided South African policy from 1994 but was replaced in 1996 by a much more market-oriented approach, to the dismay of pro-poor activists. When they reached the top of the list, a small, basic but serviced and legal house was assigned to them for free (i.e. their housing grant had been put towards it and they were now ineligible for a further grant). They could not sell this house for at least eight years. The concept of receiving a grant to put towards housing had been rolled up into straightforward but basic provision. There were 17 other subsidy programmes operating for different income groups by 2014, but the RDP projects were much the largest.9 However, accepting at the start that typical incomes meant that market-based solutions were not going to work for the majority was crucial. Despite many problems, between 1994 and 2014 the government built 2.84 million RDP houses and provided 903,000 serviced sites10 and had much improved the lives of the beneficiaries (see Box 2.1).
Box 2.1 The benefits of RDP houses in South Africa
Research in Durban and Johannesburg has found that ‘[r]esidents living in RDP housing, particularly those who had moved from informal housing, were near-unanimous in their joy over the improvement in their everyday quality of life. These benefits related in particular to protection from the elements (specifically rain), security of tenure, and access to water, sanitation and energy.’ Florence in Johannesburg told researchers how her RDP house ‘means everything … Yes. Because now … when it’s raining, I’m sleeping comfortably. It’s not like when I was in the shack, you know when it’s raining … I have to move the things that side or what, what. It means everything.’ According to her son, ‘The day we opened this house, she even cried to see how happy she is.’ Early RDP houses were often very small and did not give much extra space over previous informal shelters but newer ones were better. Siyanda in Durban explained, ‘I’m so happy to own the house as I’m living with my children only … the children have their own room to make noise. We have space for cooking and the children are able to study in their room. If I’m thinking back in the informal settlement … we were sleeping in one bed with girls and boys because we did not have the space.’
Source: Charlton, S. & P. Meth. 2017. Lived experiences of state housing in Johannesburg and Durban. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 93, 91–115.
Urban incomes and hard limits on housing expenditure
The Zimbabwean and South African examples demonstrate the hard limits set by typical urban incomes on housing solutions if those solutions are bound by the norms of free-market pricing and financing. When these limits are recognised, the logical necessity of thinking about what determines incomes as the first building block of understanding housing issues becomes apparent. This is a complex topic but the essential element in relation to housing affordability is that urban people are caught between two sets of markets. Labour markets determine what people are paid and housing markets determine what housing costs. Crudely speaking, across the cities of world, the pay rates for millions of jobs or types of work are simply too low for the workers involved to pay enough for the types of housing that can be provided by private-sector markets that comply with regulations and have legal tenure.
The existence of such hard limits for individual families set by their incomes and the requirement to meet certain basic needs in order to survive are fully understood by poverty analysts working in the GS when they are working on food security. Indeed, this is the starting point. Obviously people have to eat, and they should eat every day. Food costs money. It is fairly straightforward to calculate the cost of a basic food basket needed for adequate nutrition and compare this to incomes. Much of this sort of food security work is done in rural areas in the GS where most people are often poor or very poor. Most national poverty datasets show that the incidence of poverty is much lower in urban than in rural areas in GS countries. However, the way in which such data are analysed is problematic. First, fairly obviously, most rich people tend to live in cities and so do most of the ‘real’11 middle classes. The number of middle-class people in countries such as Brazil, India and China is now very significant. These skew the figures. However, if the typical livelihoods, real disposable incomes after all necessary urban living costs, and lifestyles of most people living in urban low-income settlements are compared with those in rural areas, the seemingly large gap in ‘poverty’ narrows. Indeed, the underestimation of urban poverty levels in the GS is a key data problem for really understanding cities in these regions.12 As anyone who has worked on livelihoods in urban Africa will attest, there are very many households living day to day and hand to mouth, who spend most of their money on food. When things are tough, meals are missed. As already described above, this is a situation in which an extra few per cent of income spent on rent will cause real reductions in household welfare. This is poverty. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, if you cannot significantly increase your income in such a situation, then you may have to house yourself informally because that means your housing expenditure plummets. This ‘magically’ increases your disposable income and, depending on the local politics of urban poverty datum line setting, may make you apparently non-poor.
But suppose that urban poverty datum lines were set differently and in accordance with the frequently asserted view that capitalist property norms, functioning urban land markets and ‘legal tenure’ are essential to the functioning of efficient, productive cities. Let us say that the basic urban household income required for people to be classified as ‘non-poor’ in any city across the world must include an allowance for, say, current market rents for the cheapest types of housing but in a legal, planned dwelling with secure tenure and legal connections to water and electricity. (Let it be remembered that current definitions used by UN-Habitat label any other type of urban housing as ‘slums’.) In essence, this is the situation in most of the GN. The immediate political argument that ensues is over space – how many rooms per person in the household are being factored in. Yet, however that were worked out, the basic principle would reshape our understandings of the incidence of urban poverty, which would shoot up in most of the cities of the GS. The corollary, of course, is that poverty rates in the GN would, apparently but absurdly, decrease were ‘cheap’ illegal slums to reappear at scale in the world’s wealthiest cities, and if their inadequacy were not factored in to poverty measurement.
This approach has been used for years by the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR), an organisation that, among other things, monitors prices and household budgets across the city of Lusaka in Zambia. At first they published food budgets based on the food needed for a family of six to keep them healthy. The diet is entirely in accordance with local norms, with mealie meal (maize) being by far the largest item. In 2002, the JCTR updated its budgets with the necessary other costs incurred in town, of which rent is by far the most significant. Information on the ‘basic needs’ basket is regularly used by trade unions and other groups when lobbying for wage increases. In the first quarter of 2002, the basic food basket cost 324,510 Zambian kwacha per month. The monthly ‘take-home pay’ of a selection of formal-sector workers could not cover this cost. For example, the lowest-paid secretaries, nurses and police officers at the time earned between K120,000 and K270,000. Even those at the top of their scales earned only K300,000 to K370,000. Primary school teachers could earn between K280,000 and K309,000, so even they could not afford the basic urban food basket. But this was only the start of the problem, because once other basic urban costs, including housing, were added, the costs rose to K823,510. Even secondary school teachers at the top of their scale earned only 60% of this
