URBAN PUBLIC HOUSING STRATEGIES IN

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

By-Patrick Wakely

Submitted By-
Shib Shankar(2019MURP003)
Aparna M.R ( 2019MEP019)
Meha Nair (2019MTPLM001)
 URBAN PUBLIC HOUSING STRATEGIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

By-Patrick Wakely

Summary

After 20th century there was a need to intervene the production maintenance and management
of urban housing earlier it was market based activities. This paper discuss about the range of
policy alternatives employed by state agencies and also discusses the public sector entry to
the urban housing market through the direct construction of public housing and transferring it
to low income group and also making distinction between public housing and social housing
strategies.

If we observe the housing strategy timeline discussed in the paper we will understand some
key aspects which is as follows.

1950s

• Government housing production were confined to the provision of accommodation for

military and some public sector civic employees for their service period.

• Housing production was clearly seen as an engineering function.

• Intervention was confined to attempts to control private sector and amenity by

imposing standards and rent and property-ownership controls were imposed.

After 1950s

• With increasing homelessness and slums – government started to intervene more

directly by establishing housing authorities, department or ministries or extending the
mandates of ministry of works , implementation of new policies and strategies were
observed.

Second half of 20th century

Design ,development, testing and institutionalising of alternative strategies for public sector
engagement , maintenance and management of urban housing , management of
environmental infrastructure came into existence.

Before the mid-20th century (1950s) government housing production was confined to the
provision of accommodation for Military and some Public Sector Civic Employees.
Government’s intervention in the housing was to control private sector initiative in the
interests of public health, safety and amenity.

In several countries attempts were made to increase the supply of affordable housing to lower
income groups and limit the exploitation of private sector landlords by imposing rent controls
on urban property. As a consequence of increasing urban homelessness and growth of slums
governments throughout the world started to intervene more directly in the urban housing by
establishing housing authorities, departments & ministries or extending the mandates of
ministries of works.

Informal housing procurement processes

There are two basic approaches for Informal development of vacant land those are –

 The informal sub-division, sale and development of vacant land.

 Land invasions and squatting of vacant or under-used central area.

 The informal sub-division, sale and development of vacant land.

It mainly occurs on the peri-urban fringes of cities and varies with the topographical,
economic and political characteristics of different societies. Common occurrence is the
unauthorised subdivision and sale of peri-urban agricultural land by its owners, as higher
financial returns can be made by selling small plots for development, which was officially
considered illegal for the following reasons.

(i) No legal registration for transfer of ownership.

(ii) Development for housing is against the official master plan land use zoning.

(iii) Plot sizes and building construction are not in accordance with planning and building
regulations.

 Common in cities of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly at times of
extensive rural-urban migration and periods of drought.

 Land invasions and squatting of vacant or under-used central area.

In this process land is occupied and developed unilaterally. No negotiation, agreement or

payment between the landowners. I take place in two forms-

(i) The mass invasion on large parcels of urban land by organised groups of households under
common leadership sometimes supported by formal political organisations.

(ii) The gradual take-over of land, plot-by-plot by individual households in some cities
gradually building up sizable squatter settlements.

These processes may take place on peri-urban vacant land or on inner-city empty plots or on
geologically unstable undeveloped land. An important characteristic of both these informal
development processes is the incremental nature of house building. The incremental
housing process has financial benefits that enable affordable housing for low-income
households.
SWOT Analysis of costs and benefits of informal urban housing processes

Costs and Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

Benefits
For Occupant Affordable, No Secure Formal Recognition Inappropri
Households and Socially title and that allow security of ate
Communities Acceptable. Threat of title. Governme
Evection. nt policies.
For City Low -income No planning An experienced Organised
Government and group housing at & Building proactive resource. Crime.
Administration negligible capital standards.
cost.
For City Society Accommodation Social and Development of stable Lack of
and Economy for the city’s Environment lower middle income appropriate
labour force. al enterprises. policies.
Degradation.

Construction of ‘conventional’ public housing

According to 1951 and 1961 census informal settlements had grown in and around towns and
cities throughout the developing world. Construction of ‘conventional’ public housing came
into existence. Many Latin American countries also launched their first public housing
policies and set up public housing authorities in the same period.

Table: paradigm, policy, programmes, projects 1950-1970.

Paradigm To access appropriately located housing and domestic services to lower

income-households.
Government’s involvement in the housing market.
Policy Subsidy to urban housing and the establishment and maintenance of public
housing authorities.
Programmes To identify ‘housing deficits.
Projects To design and build public housing on specific sites.

In many countries other sectors of the economy such as import-substitution industrial

development and national distribution networks became higher political priorities for the
investment of public resources in construction than urban low-income group housing. The
managerial and financial cost of maintaining became politically difficult to maintain. As a
result in many cities the relatively new public housing began to deteriorate rapidly.
Government and other housing agencies started researching about various ways this issue can
be tackled and came up with the idea of Non-Conventional housing strategies. The agencies
experimented with these non-conventional strategies on different locations and the
observations were studied upon based on various factors.

Support & non-conventional housing strategies

The Apparent inability of public housing agencies to meet targets for the construction of
subsidised ‘conventional‘public housing and to maintain them in use was to search for ways
to reduce construction costs and to off-load responsibility for the maintenance and
management of public housing and latterly to link access to housing more directly with wider
social policies for urban poverty reduction and the alleviation of its social impact.

A paper by John F.C. Turner and Rolf Goetze was delivered to a conference on Development
Policies and Planning in Relation to Urbanisation at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and
published by the United Nations in 1967 and expanded upon later in Turner’s book ‘Housing
by People’ ( Turner 1976).The government started testing Non Conventional practices to
solve the housing issues.

In this paper two non-conventional methods and their outcomes are discussed.

Organised (aided) self-help and Enabling supports - sites & services and informal
settlement (‘slum’) upgrading

By the late 1990s, sites and services projects had been declared “unsuccessful” and were
virtually abandoned by governments and international aid agencies, alike. To a large extent
this was due to their being ‘evaluated’ too soon.

Project-level problems compounded a more universal misunderstanding that in part led to the
discrediting and eventual abandonment of participatory ‘non-conventional’ approaches to
support incremental ‘self-help’ housing production in many cities.

This typically provides an important source of income to a new category of ‘subsistence

landlords’, who are often in the same low income group , or poorer, than their tenants.

This typically provides an important source of income to a new category of ‘subsistence

landlords’, who are often in the same low income group , or poorer, than their tenants.

The return to a new generation of ‘conventional’ housing strategies & incentives to

private sector housing market

• Last decade of 20th century saw the change from non- conventional participatory
approaches to the conventional housing with the re-emergence of government
sponsored / built public housing for urban low income groups.

• Conventional public housing continued to be the official strategic policy ,non-

conventional paradigm was one among the extra interventions.
• For example ,South African ‘Finance Linked Individual Subsidy Programme’
(FLISP), launched in 1997 as part of the national government’s ‘Integrated
Residential Development Programme (IRDP) for providing grants to low income. The
first-time-buyer-or-builder-households, who were eligible for a commercial loan but
could not afford it. Later in 2012 the upper limit of the eligible income category was
doubled. As a result of this government subsidy was redirected from the low-income
groups to low-middle income group and switched from individual householders to the
producers (real estate developers and bakers).

• Mexico and Brazil -the response to market demand for freehold ownership of
individual houses, albeit on small plots of land, as opposed to apartments in larger
blocks and at higher residential densities, has been the construction by private sector
developers of extensive low-density housing estates on the peri-urban fringes of many
towns and cities and in some cases several kilometres from the urban area

• Where Next ?

• The next generation of urban housing policies, and strategies for their
implementation, must embrace a range of different programme and project
approaches - ‘non-conventional’ as well as ‘conventional’.

• Low-income group housing policies and implementation strategies cannot be divorced

from policies and strategies for the development, planning and management of towns
and cities as a whole, as they have been, and still are, in many countries.