hostels. These were legal and planned, characteristics that, along with the nature of urban land tenure, were atypical for colonial sub-Saharan Africa. When white settler rule finally ended (1980 in Zimbabwe, 1990 in Namibia and 1994 in South Africa), a wide range of new housing policies were introduced, partly reflecting the policy fashions of the times and also the need to address the racist legacies of the past.
As I travelled back and forth between southern Africa and Europe over the decades, it became increasingly apparent how key global trends in the ideologies influencing housing programmes and weaknesses in policy implementation were working their way through the cities in both regions. These processes, alongside its unusual mixture of housing types and a phenomenal series of changes in the nature of urban livelihoods and the scale of urban poverty, made Zimbabwe a compelling case study for housing research as the impacts unfolded of a very wide range of housing types and approaches and their interactions with income levels and household composition. Neighbouring South Africa also experimented with different types of housing policy after 1994. Its housing experiences include the mass (re-)emergence of informal housing in the last decade or so of white minority rule and a socially progressive attempt to address a severe urban housing shortage post-1994 via a major programme of state subsidies. However, other countries in southern Africa, such as Malawi and Zambia, had more typical colonial histories. Although their urban centres were influenced by racist and segregatory planning, there was less state control and land under indigenous tenure was often available, leading to housing outcomes more typical for countries of the GS, including mass informality. In sum, the southern African region provides an unusually wide range of housing policies and outcomes, shaped by different forms of land tenure, political imperatives, ideologies and policy fashions, making its experiences relevant to wider discussion and theorisation of global housing crises. For this reason, and also to demonstrate how such analysis can draw on cities in any part of the world, the following chapters frequently use examples from southern African to illustrate the causes and outcomes of the housing affordability crisis.
In Harare in 1985, after only five years of independent democratic rule, the legacies of almost a century of racist legislation were still imprinted on the urban landscape. The survey undertaken that year covered five low-income housing areas: Highfields, Glen Norah, Mabvuku, Kuwadzana and Chitungwiza. These were formal, planned and legal settlements with access to physical and social infrastructure such as roads, electricity, water, shops, schools and clinics. The vast majority of the city’s low-income residents lived in such settlements and only a small proportion in areas with illegal tenure. Squatting was rare, as the new independent African government maintained a vigilant battle against housing informality, as had its white minority and racist predecessor. These five areas represented very different phases of housing in the city. The first three were built by white minority governments to house African families. Africans were not allowed to own urban land or housing and the general policy was to discourage permanent settlement by Africans in the towns of Southern Rhodesia (as colonial Zimbabwe was called). Nonetheless, a constantly oscillating migrant labour force had its downsides as the urban economies matured since it restricted the availability of skilled labour. Thus, a limited number of family houses – for rent and not ownership – were built in ‘townships’ such as Highfields to allow an element of more skilled and permanent urban labour to emerge. At independence, the ownership of most of these small, one-storey houses was transferred to their main tenants. The history of the way in which this housing was costed to its main residents both before and after independence bore no relation to the forces of supply and demand; as such, it is discussed in Chapter 5 as an example of mass public housing provision. Chitungwiza and Kuwadzana were very different, both being site-and-service settlements where people were allocated land (called plots or sites in African housing parlance) and were then supposed to construct their own dwellings. These could then be connected to the water and electricity supply provided in the settlements; these supplies were metered, and households defaulting on their bills could be disconnected. Chitungwiza was begun by the white state in the late 1970s, just before independence in 1980. Kuwadzana (meaning ‘cooperation’) was begun shortly after independence with support from USAID. All the homeowners in these areas at this point had been significantly subsidised by the government or by aid programmes. Profit-oriented market forces had had little to do with their housing.
However, most interviewees in the survey were lodgers renting rooms from these homeowners. Their rents were set by market forces operating across the city and were completely unregulated, even though rent control legislation was on the books. The rents for one or two rooms were generally very similar, with some variation between settlements according to distance from the main employment areas of downtown Harare and its industrial zone. Many migrants were young, unmarried and lived alone in one room or shared with a friend. Married migrants usually lived with most of their immediate family in town for at least part of the year, in contrast to the situation before independence, but there was a significant proportion whose spouse and/or children were still living in the rural areas. Most of those divided from their families in this way aspired to bring their families to town and live together, but, as they often pointed out, the problem was money. They could not afford to support them in town, largely because their outlay on housing would increase or they would all have to live in one room together. This pattern of an entire household living in one room is common enough in the rental sector in African cities, but it is obviously neither desired nor desirable, being a response to the housing dilemma at the centre of this book.
When asked about their plans and aspirations for the future, it turned out (rather unexpectedly) that most of the migrants expected to leave the city eventually and return to rural areas, usually their birthplace, in a pattern similar to that previously enforced by racist legislation. There was no social security net in place and few had any expectations of a realistic pension. As they explained, what would they eat and how would they pay their rent if they became unemployed for any length of time or had to stop work due to old age or ill health? Staying in the city permanently, they argued, was possible only ‘for those with a house and a pension’.
The survey’s main aims had not included the issue of housing per se, but the key components of household budgets did emerge. And housing came up again and again during interviews, particularly in relation to family life and the risks of proletarianised life: unemployment, old age, illness. For this reason, during a subsequent survey in 1988, the residential area chosen was Glen Norah C: a new site-and-service settlement with access to water and electricity. Here, private-sector building societies had been brought in and incentivised via some new tax arrangements to provide loans to so-called ‘beneficiaries’ (homeowners). The shift from generous subsidisation of housing costs had begun, in line with trends across the world as the neoliberal phase of contemporary capitalism took hold. Precisely the same forces were at work in nearby Zambia and Malawi, for example. They were also in full swing in London.
In the hope of maintaining a reasonable rate of repayment from the new borrowers in Glen Norah C, a minimum income was set as a condition of eligibility for the scheme, as well as a maximum. This was in contrast to the situation in Kuwadzana in 1985, at which time only a maximum income was set, above which people were ineligible for the scheme. Kuwadzana was thus much more definitely a pro-poor housing scheme, although Glen Norah C was also promoted as such by the government and the World Bank. Applying a minimum income condition at Glen Norah C showed that it was realised that the poorest Harare households could not afford to service a loan for a basic site-and-service plot, let alone build anything on it. In other words, it was proof of the premise of this book: that it is impossible for the formal private sector to provide housing for the poorest urban groups. It is also proof that the World Bank knew this. The loans available at Glen Norah C presumed that most of Zimbabwe’s urban workers would not be able to pay more than 30% of their monthly income to pay back the building society over 20 years. This guideline of a 30% level of income as a maximum for housing costs for low-income households
