rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_eab661d0-8c12-541b-9438-133ddf177335">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
