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.
Mismatches between incomes and housing costs: a global condition
In 2016, UN-Habitat, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, produced its first global review of the world’s urban settlements: the World Cities Report 2016.1 Housing was identified, rightly, as being key to the future of cities. It was reported that, in 2010, 980 million people did not have decent housing and 600 million were expected to be added to that total by 2030. Between 2000 and 2014, the population living in slums, as defined by the UN,2 had increased to 881 million. While there had been improvements over the preceding 20 years in access to piped water and electricity in most countries of the Global South (GS) (although less progress with sewerage) and the share of the world’s urban population in slum conditions had fallen from 39% to 30%, these improvements have been geographically very uneven. Sub-Saharan African countries generally still have very inadequate urban infrastructure for the majority of their urban populations while many South American countries have achieved water, sewerage and electricity connections for most of theirs. The physical inadequacies of much urban housing across the poorer parts of the world are widely acknowledged and reported, so, in a sense, these aspects of the report were unremarkable. Most data in the report’s statistical annex relate to housing quality (exclusively in the cities of the GS) and economic indices such as inequality and poverty (again, only for cities in the GS, apart from data on some eastern European countries), urban gross domestic product (GDP), employment and pollution. However, although poor-quality housing may be an indicator of ‘broken cities’, it is not the same as unaffordable housing – indeed, unfortunately they are often inversely correlated – so data on the incidence of inadequate housing do not necessarily provide much insight into the struggles many urban households face over housing costs. Nonetheless, in a short two-page section of the 264-page report there is a strong argument made that:
affordability is the crucible of housing policies … In many developing countries, despite all efforts to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and improve design, basic formal sector housing is too expensive for most households … [the] time has come to recognize that, especially in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the main problem is not that housing is too expensive, but that incomes are too low to afford basic formal housing.3
This was radical and a step change from the broadly neoliberal and pro-market flavour of global agency analyses of urban housing problems over the past three to four decades. On the other hand, this section focuses mainly on the GS. Given the worldwide nature of the housing affordability crisis and the increasing prevalence of the issue in the largest cities of the Global North (GN), this uneven treatment is unwarranted. There is unquestionably a difference in the scale of the problems but the underlying issue of the mismatch between many people’s incomes and formal private-sector housing is the same. Reference to rising rates of housing unaffordability in New York is found in another section on urban inequalities, however, contextualised by the facts that one in five of the city’s population cannot afford to feed themselves without food assistance and that one in three of the children of New York live below the locally defined poverty level. The time might also be coming when tables on the incidence of slum conditions across the world should include data for GN cities, as more people find themselves in seriously overcrowded accommodation or faced with insecure tenure (either of these being sufficient to be classified by the UN as living in a slum). This would no doubt be highly contentious; such cross-country data are also always fraught with difficulties, given the different definitions used for parameters such as ‘overcrowded’ or ‘insecure’ and differences in the ways in which data are collected.
There are even more difficulties with measuring housing affordability, which, being a relationship between individual households, their incomes and their housing costs, makes the compilation of internationally comparative datasets covering all types of housing and income groups very problematic. The debates about the complexities of defining affordability in relation to housing are deliberately left to the concluding chapter as they are better understood once the historical and geographical parameters of the affordable housing dilemma have been established. Suffice it to say at this point that the comparative datasets available tend to focus on formally provided housing in the private sector and often fail to capture the income groups for whom housing costs are most onerous.
The purpose of this chapter is to set the scene with regard to the housing affordability crisis for the rest of the book. Case studies are used to introduce and illustrate key aspects of the housing dilemma. Drawing mainly on examples from countries in southern Africa and from London, it illustrates the scale and scope of the crisis as well as key policy aspects, especially the crucial importance of understanding affordability as a product of incomes rather than housing supply. The thorny issue of the influence of building standards (taken up in detail in Chapter 3) is introduced. It is shown how low-income housing projects are usually far too expensive for most of the households they were meant to help. Examples are given of common problems with ostensibly low-income housing projects, which are revisited in later chapters: how market forces cannot provide for the poor, how trends to involve the private sector in such projects make things worse, and how policies that are meant to assist the poor into formal housing – at least in theory – and that are often publicised as such can be hijacked by other groups or are simply unenforced. It is also shown how more realistic assessments of incomes and affordability can help produce a better understanding of housing affordability issues and therefore better policies.
In 1985 I conducted a survey of almost 1,000 migrant households in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city. This was the start of a long-standing research engagement with the country and the city. At that time, socio-economic conditions in Harare were among the best in urban Africa, with high rates of formal employment, rapidly improving social indices and falling poverty levels.4 By 2008, the entire economy had virtually collapsed and the country was experiencing hyperinflation – £1, worth Z$1.6 (Zimbabwean dollars) in 1985, was valued on the parallel market at Z$100 trillion. In the intervening period, Zimbabwe had implemented a full suite of housing policies, influenced by its own specific urban history and the zeitgeist of shifting global economic ideologies, including privatising public rental housing, maintaining high and expensive building standards, upgrading informal settlements, highly subsidised site-and-settlement schemes, and mass demolitions and evictions of ‘illegal’ informal housing. Due to its history as a white settler state until 1980, most urban and peri-urban land had been alienated and commodified, constraining the development of informal settlements. Along with the two other white settler states in the southern African region, South Africa and Namibia, it also suffered extreme forms of institutionalised racial discrimination and segregation. The political imperatives of the ruling white minorities meant that there were strict controls on migration to towns and on the nature of the housing stock, which distorted these countries’ urban demography. In large urban centres, high-income, low-density (and formerly exclusively white) suburbs, similar in many ways to those in cities of the GN, took up most of the space, with the majority black African population squeezed into smaller, segregated, high-density residential zones (‘townships’) of public
