CHAPTER 6: HOUSING POLICY AND PRACTICE
6.5 Housing in the developing countries
on housing provIsion (Sutcliffe, 1981; Bullock & Read, 1985). Claims that planning would reduce land and infrastructure costs and produce better estate layouts and urban spatial structures were made. Again, for its principal theorists, the prime role of planning has been seen as directing the market rather than going against it, an approach which contains fundamental logical contradictions (Ball, 1983). The high cost of land has also been tackled in some countries at various points in time through taxation schemes, the cheap purchase of land for privileged uses or through the large- scale acquisition of land, the latter often being associated with the development of post Apartheid towns and suburbs.
In many West European countries shift is also observed in state intervention in housing. Although, the state still plays a key role by funding research and development in construction, but now the aim of housing intervention in Western countries is more a gradual, piecemeal transformation of the house building process. As Fuerst (1974) argues, the retreat, however, is not only a political and ideological one; it is also a severe defeat for a strong 'statist' version of the liberal-interventionist philosophy.
According to Headey (1978) the shift witnessed in state intervention is not seen as the bankruptcy of one form of intervention, but as denying the feasibility of any major initiative. Indeed, the ideology of West European countries believing in market forces looks contradictory with State intervention.
A conference of the International Labour office (ILO) had resolved in 1953 that
"adequate housing accommodations and related facilities are one of the essentials of a good life, one of the fundamental requirements of an efficient, satisfied labour force, and one of the foundations of satisfactory community life". The housing committee of the United Nations in 1970 adopted a resolution in the General Assembly that instructs the developing countries to take steps, to provide improved housing and rental facilities in both urban and rural areas, especially for low income groups. They urged that effort be made to expand low-cost housing in both public and private programmes.
Numerous studies such as Napier and Rubin (2005) show a strong correlation between a bad housing and environmental disasters and hazards. Since, strong relationships exists between bad housing and disease, delinquency and other manifestations of social deviance, developing countries are struggling to provide adequate shelter to every one as required by UNCHS Habitat II (1996).
Undoubtedly, housing the poor in the developing world is one of the major challenges of the 21 st century (UNCHS, 1996; Erguden, 2001). Currently, one of the most crucial issues facing developing countries is the shortage of affordable accommodation for the urban poor, who constitute the majority of the low-income group. Over the last three decades, most official housing programmes have failed to reach considerable portions of this group. According to Woodfield (1989), factors contributing to this failure undoubtedly include the inability of housing programmes to provide enough affordable dwellings for the urban poor.
It is almost impossible to determine the shortage of housing in the developing world, as not only is there insufficient data, but also there is little agreement between countries on the units of measurement or what constitutes adequacy. When dealing with people who are actually homeless, UNCHS (1996c) suggest that 100 million people in the world lack any shelter at all and sleep on pavements, in parks or shop doorways, under bridges, in transport terminals or in night shelters provided for the homeless. Specific characteristics indicative of housing shortage includes crowding, sharing of housing or multi-habitation, widespread squatting and high rents for even poor quality housing.
Adequate housing has important benefits not only for individuals and their families but for society as a whole. Housing, as a United Nations report put it, "is one of the major determinants of the social situation" (1975a, 235). Because housing conditions affect the health, wellbeing and personal developments of people housing policy has become an important field in social planning (Bookwalter & Dalenberg, 2004; Stewart &
Rhoden, 2006). Large increases in the urban population of developing countries have dramatically increased the demand for housing (Uytenbogaardt & Dewar, 1992) and the governments' responses related to the housing problem created by urban population growth are either inappropriate or ineffective. Indeed, as Dwyer (1975) noted, many governments have failed to deal with the housing problem in a coherent way. Instead, their response has been characterised by neglect, apathy, irrational bouts of destructive slum clearance and the occasional construction of symbolic housing schemes which do little to ease the housing shortage.
In South Africa, the failure to adequately deal with the issue of urban development led to severe housing shortage and the formation and expansion of informal settlements, with the major proliferation taking place from 1980 onwards (Mabin, 1992). The originality of South Africa compared to other developing countries to deal with the issue of urban development, more specifically the matter of migration from rural to urban areas, was the unjust law aiming to restrict the access of land for African people in urban areas. As it was difficult to prevent migration from rural to urban areas, consequently in the absence of any alternative to legally acquire land for housing, invasions of land and informal settlements seemed inevitable.
Many governments have accorded a low priority to housing because they believe that the expenditure on housing consumes funds required for productive investment in industry. Each country in the developing world has a seemingly unique set of factors, which have played a role in the history and development of urban housing and related policies (Hardoy & Satterthwaite, 1989). Although Western housing pOlicies are unsuited to the needs and circumstances of most developing countries, they have been widely copied, albeit in a haphazard fashion.
The most significant trend since World War II has been the emergence of a housing policy in many of the less developed countries. Many developing countries have been inspired by a large-scale public housing projects which were built in many European countries after World War II. Although a few, such as Mexico, has initiated government aids before the war, it is only since the late 1940's that the principle of public intervention was adopted more generally and housing programmes reached substantial magnitude (Burns, Greber, 1977). British housing policies were exported to many developing countries during the colonial years. For example, legislation enacted in Aden in 1948 replicated British housing regulations, the type of house which could be built, its size, amenities, external appearance and even the height of the fence, which could be erected (Abrahams, 1966).
In developing countries, formal housing is both scarce and expensive in relation to the average wage levels. Thus, low-income households have found niches for themselves in cheaper alternatives, often in single rooms in central city rented housing. Rooms in the city centre 'vecindades' are the norm for Latin American low-income households (Edwards, 1982). It is estimated that 35% of urban dwellings in Africa are single rooms (United Nations, 1987a), while in some cities the proportion of households living in single rooms rises above 70% (Peil & Sada, 1984; Malpezzi, Tipple & Willis, 1990).
Others have built houses in squatter settlements on peripheral or unused land, or found rented rooms in the squatter settlements (Amis, 1987).
The pervasive development of housing policies was also stimulated by the increase in the number of countries that were fighting off colonial rule. Only exceptional colonial administrations had concerned themselves with the housing and sanitary conditions of the native populations. With independence, the post Apartheid countries embarked on a search for post Apartheid methods of governance, which included social legislation patterned after programmes adopted in developed parts of the world through decades of trial and error. Large numbers of rural residents were relocated to the large cities, which has been the seed of colonial administrative and economic activities (Krausse, 1977). This form of urbanisation, however, was not typical of the process in the industrialising West. As Berry (1981) argues, in the West, the population movement was more incremental, moving in stages from smaller to larger cities since the population was concentrated in urban areas for a long time. Urbanisation in developing countries, however, is not an analogous process. Unlike these partially populated rural districts of most Western countries such as England where this early urbanisation and development took place, many developing countries have for centuries been characterised by dense populations.
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of housing policies in the less developed countries is a far clearer conceptual and practical integration of general economic development strategies that never existed in the now advanced nations. Housing policies in many of the less developed countries have emerged concurrently with the formulation of general development objectives and strategies and with the creation of governmental planning organisations, even though their effectiveness varies greatly from country to country (Lubove, 1962). The housing policies of the less developed countries show great variations in scope and method. The development levels and growth rates of many of the less developed countries differ sharply, and these differences affect the intervention of government in the housing market, such as the
rapid growth of Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Puerto Rico, which has placed these countries at development stages that are far ahead of nations such as Bolivia, Kenya and Turkey.
The housing policies of the less developed countries may be classified into two categories: One type of policy more or less emulates programmes of the advanced nations, though it adapts to local conditions such as Housing Finance. Access to housing finance for the urban poor remains a crucial issue in developing countries. In South Africa for example, it is widely believed that access to housing finance substantially contributes to improving the housing conditions of poor households (Finmark Trust, 2006a, 2006b; Tomlinson, 2007). Governments have sought to improve the financial structure supporting the housing sector by creating or strengthening public and private mortgage lending institutions.
In South Africa, beside the housing subsidy provided to low-income households earning an income up to R 3500 by the government, the Association of South African Banks are committed through the financial sector charter (FSC) to providing R 40 billion to people earning between R 1500 and R 7500 by the end of 2008 (Banking Association of South Africa, 2005; Tomlinson, 2005; Finmark Trust, 2006b).
Government guarantees of mortgage loans have been introduced in several variants in America, and public support has been given to the establishment of savings and loan associations, especially in Latin America. At the same time, less developed countries have embarked on social housing programmes funded and subsidised mostly by central government and based on various European models. In terms of standards and type of construction, the public housing projects usually represent a veritable leap into the future in comparison with the stock of dwellings available for the mass majority of the population (Burns & Greber, 1977). Public housing projects in many of the less developed countries have been integrated with urban development programmes of a scale unmatched in the advanced nations. An example is Mexico City, which provides large facilities and professional personnel to help migrants adjust to urban life and to teach them to use a city house properly, offers rich educational programmes for occupational training and the use of a variety of sporting facilities.
Another type of housing policy is more realistically geared to the economic and fiscal capacity of less developed countries. The policy has been developed after taking into consideration that the European models for government funded and subsidised housing had severe constraints. It became clear that low-income countries could not
provide improved dwellings for any significant part of the under-housed population, if their programs concentrated on projects built to the standards of advanced nations (Fischer, 1959). In view of the vast gap between worker's income and even the subsidised rents in post Apartheid standard housing, most projects benefited people who had an above average income.
One of the famous policies to emerge was 'autonomous housing' which let squatter groups construct their own housing with their own resources (Turner, 1976). The policy generally involved providing some basic resources to the residents of an area to improve their own housing. In almost all of the instances of this policy, governments altered their positions from 'slum clearance' to 'sites and services' schemes. Under this method, the government provides land, plans the layout of the site and circulation, secures land tenure for the occupants, and installs facilities for water supply and waste disposal. Provision is also made for playgrounds and other community requirements.
The building of the housing units is left to the residents, by whatever means available to them. In some cases existing units are dismantled and transported and handheld by foot from a cleared slum to a post Apartheid site regardless of their low structural qualities and amenities.
In Nigeria, the government's program to address the housing crisis, particularly the direct construction of housing units, has been associated with a number of flaws and as such, failed to achieve its intended objectives. For instance, as far back as 1960's, the World Bank criticised Nigeria's public housing programme as being "unsatisfactory because it produced too few houses and it also produced the wrong kind of houses"
(1965, 4). The houses built were too expensive, limited in number vis-a-vis the urban population, off undue high quality, and a big drain on government resources. The high overhead costs often associated with constructing public housing estates meant that such housing projects require massive subsidies to be replicable and affordable for the low-income groups, who were intended to be the original beneficiaries (Buckley et ai, 1993). Criticisms have also been levelled against the inability of housing projects to include the cultural diversity characterising the country as well as their failure to integrate income-generating components as part of the overall shelter design (Awotona, 1993; Arinah, 1994).
The Global Strategy for Shelter (GSS) to the Year 2000 (UNCHS, 1990), calls on all countries to develop realistic housing policies to enable them to make serious in-roads into the housing supply backlog and establish a policy framework, which will keep pace
with housing needs in the long term. In order to fulfil this, governments are encouraged to adopt an enabling approach, setting in place policies and fiscal arrangements that will enable the construction and maintenance of housing rather than providing it directly through government activity. In addition, GSS recognises that housing is a positive contributor to local and national economic development, where it is provided in a labour-intensive way using local building materials, small and medium sized contractors, and local labour. Housing provision can be an important provider of employment especially for poorest groups in the society (UNCHS, I ILO, 1995). In recognition of the continued scarcity of housing for most people in developing countries, the GSS calls for the scaling-up of housing programmes to encourage output.