Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

Yesterday we saw that Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is about to be comprehensively redeveloped — wiped clean, as it were — and transformed.

 

All this is to come up, and high-rises are to go up

Why now? Why does this plan work? Where did Dharavi come from?

Here is Wikipedia’s (unverified) history:

 

Dharavi was not always a slum, and it is as old as Bombay[citation needed]. In the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island (1909), Dharavi is mentioned as one of the six “great Koliwadas of Bombay” – one of the city’s vast fishing communities. The original inhabitants of Dharavi were kolis, the fisherfolk, who lived at the edge of the creek that came in from the Arabian Sea. A dam at Sion, adjacent to Dharavi, also hastened the process of joining separate islands into one long, tapered mass. Thus began the transformation of the island city of Bombay. In the process, the creek dried up, and Dharavi’s fishing town was deprived of its traditional sustenance, but the newly drained marshes provided space for new communities to move in.

 

We think of land as immutable, but it changes, including its topography, and the presence or absence of clean water is a crucial element in urban success (which is why so many cities are built on rivers). Dharavi was always in urban Bombay, and as other parts of Bombay were built and filled, Dharavi’s sanitary viability plummeted. That dropped land values, making it a promising place for immigrants.

 

Time and again we see affordable housing — whether slum or almshouse or mobile home or public housing — situated in the worst physical land located closest to the urban core. ‘Worst land’ means lowest, dankest, softest, least serviced (by roads or water/ sewer or power).

Why do the poor come there?

 

For the same reason day laborers come to America

Because that’s where the money is, and they have to walk to their work.

 

The migrants could be roughly divided into two broad categories. The first were people from Maharashtra, and in particular from the Konkan coast, as well from Gujarat. Potters from Saurashtra were allocated land in Dharavi to establish what is still today called Kumbharwada. The other settlers were direct migrants to the city, many of them trained in a trade or a craft. Muslim tanners from Tamil Nadu migrated to Dharavi and set up the leather tanning industry. Other artisans, like the embroidery workers from Uttar Pradhesh, started the ready-made garments trade.

 

As National Geographic put it:

Until the late 19th century, this area of Mumbai was mangrove swamp inhabited by Koli fishermen. When the swamp filled in (with coconut leaves, rotten fish, and human waste), the Kolis were deprived of their fishing grounds—they would soon shift to bootlegging liquor—but room became available for others. The Kumbhars came from Gujarat to establish a potters’ colony. Tamils arrived from the south and opened tanneries. Thousands traveled from Uttar Pradesh to work in the booming textile industry. The result is the most diverse of slums, arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Mumbai, India’s most diverse city.

 

Dharavi is diverse only if your diversity metrics exclude income.

“Throughout the world slum dwellers are regarded as pests,” said architect Mukesh Mehta, who has championed the project for a decade.

 

You callin’ us slum dwellers?

Once the slum formed, it stayed:

The slum, once a marsh and rubbish tip, has stood in its current form for about 60 years with the third generation of families running businesses from workshops and yards.

It was known but forgotten.

What happened to change this?

So far I’ve counted a dozen reasons, most of them interconnected.

 

Everything’s linked to everything else

 

1. The land has become valuable. Slums exist because the land they possess has no little value it costs more to displace the poor than to allow them to squat. Just as slums form when urbanization meets declining land values, they may dissipate when land values rise:

The filthy and cramped 535-acre (214-hectare) Dharavi slum stands on prime building land in Mumbai … and has long been an embarrassment to promoting India’s economic capital as a global financial centre.

 

Familiarity first bred willful blindness, and now it breeds economic contempt: we don’t want ‘those people’ within walking distance of our shining city on the hill.

 

Back home to the slum for you

2. The location improved. The land’s value is driven by a sudden change in the location’s desirability:

… parts of which have some of the world’s most expensive real estate …

 

Once upon a time, cities were manufactories, warrens of low-rise structures producing low-value-added products, and hence with low incomes. Even New York’s Garment District, today the last vestige of the manufacturing city, was never terribly affluent, even in its heyday.

 

 

Fun and flamboyant but not wealthy

As building changed and steel replaced wood, sandstone, and cement, cities could go upwards. With electronics, especially of finance, propinquity became desirable, and the cities revived as social information networks. Suddenly the right location became spectacularly valuable, if put to the right physical configuration and the right use.

 

What’s going up in Mumbai

3. Slum dwellers have political land rights. With the land’s sudden reversal of value, we can expect it to be redeveloped. Slum dwellers are powerless against bulldozers; they will be brusquely displaced if they face a tyrant, whether a kleptocratic madman like Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe or merely a crude political thug. The arsenal of slum dwellers is solely moral and verbal, so if they are to have any standing, it is solely because the populace, through its government, recognizes their political rights.

 

“With this, the government of Maharashtra [the state that includes Mumbai] regards them as important human resources and assets,” [said Mehta]. “You can expect a very beautiful suburb that hopefully other people from around the world will want to emulate.”

Those rights translate into an in-kind benefit that has real economic value:

 

According to SRA norms, the slum dweller whose name appear[s] in the voters list as on 01.01.1995 & who is actual occupant of the hutment is eligible for rehabilitation. Each family will be allotted a self contained house of 225 sq.ft. carpet area free of cost. The eligible slum dwellers appearing in Annexure II certified by the Competent Authority will be included in the Rehabilitation scheme. Eligible slum dwellers will be given rehab tenement in Dharavi.

 

Jockin Arputham, president of Slum Dwellers International, who’s skeptical

That eligibility definition, granting homes only to those who have been citizens for a dozen years, is sure to create tension:

Only those registered on voter rolls in 1995 will be eligible for free homes.

 

4. Property law is enforced. None of this would be possible without property rights, both for the developers (who are about to sink huge sums into the soft marsh ground):

One of Asia’s most notorious slums went up for sale on Wednesday in a $2.3 billion project to raze thousands of ramshackle homes and create one of the world’s hottest building sites.

For the new owners’ rights to be respected, the old owners’ rights must also be respected, and that is happening in Dharavi, with the light touch of eminent domain for economic development

 

During the implementation of this project, Dharavi residents will be provided with transit tenements, in close proximity of Dharavi or in Dharavi itself.

Relocation during renovation is a common principle of urban redevelopment, with the further proviso that it is at no cost to the incumbent residents themselves.

The developer will bear the cost on account of rent of the transit tenements but the cost of expenditure of consumables like water, electricity, telephone etc. will have to be borne by the slum dwellers.

 

 

Proper sanitation will be worth something

5. The improvements can be financed from the land value itself, without cash. I’m sure every urban government would like to have its slums comprehensively redeveloped, with the developer bearing all the interim costs including relocation. Nor is that the limit of the developers’ largesse:

New schools, colleges, health clinics, a sports complex and a golf driving range are all slated to be part of the redevelopment due for completion within seven years, according to Mehta.

 

Where is this cash coming from? From the development finance itself:

For every square foot provided for rehabilitation, builders will be entitled to 1.33 square feet for sale making it a lucrative opportunity in the peninsula city where space is scarce.

 

Dharavi is thus a location-specific version of inclusionary zoning. Giving the developers permission to build much higher value uses, and protecting those post-development property rights adds tremendous value to the land. The state, on the residents’ behalf, does not collect that as land sale price; instead, it ‘reflects’ the land value gain into additional affordable housing.

 

6. Good government has taken an interest. Many governments choose to ignore slums (or, like Mr. Mugabe, to bulldoze them). At Dharavi, both the national and state government are active partners in the redevelopment:

Govt. of Maharashtra has accepted the proposal submitted by Architect, Mr. Mukesh Mehta for the redevelopment of Dharavi which, after suitable modifications, will be implemented through the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), according to the norms of S. R. Act of 1971.

Among government’s four essential roles, aside from the enabling environment for capital, government has to provide capital to close the cost-value gap. Here India’s government has been pump priming for municipal infrastructure. As The Hindi reported two years ago:

The Central Government has already announced a grant of Rs.500 crores [a ten-million, so 500 crores is Rs 5.0 billion — Ed.] for the project, which will go towards the infrastructure. “I would like to integrate Dharavi with mainstream Mumbai and convert it into a cultural, knowledge and business centre. The main idea is to convert the whole population into a middle income community by 2010,” adds Mr. Mehta.

 

India’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority, which is advertising the redevelopment, is also including the slum dwellers in its deliberation process:

After considering the redevelopment plan, a detailed plane table survey has been carried out to know the ground realities. Also, consent of the slum dwellers to join this project is being obtained.

 

The SRA’s FAQ are unclear how this consent will be obtained, and who will constitute a quorum.

Each developer is required to explain his development strategy in his sector and obtain objectives & suggestions from the residents before starting the development process.

 

Resident participation is very common; it’s also very interactive and complicated. Developers quite naturally want to deal with a single counterparty, so they eagerly embrace anything that looks like a duly constituted resident council. Very frequently the tussle of the right to represent the tenants gets fierce and political, with the vocal leadership feathering their own nests at their constituents’ expense.

 

After obtaining suggestions & objectives from the public for the revised development plan, the same will be finalized by Govt. For each sector a detailed sectoral plan will be prepared by the selected developer in consultation with SRA. This will be placed before the public for suggestion/objectives and then finalized after due amendments.

That’s half a dozen reasons; there’s another half-dozen more.

 

One handful of reasons … another tomorrow

Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

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