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
