Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday’s post explored cryptobiotica, the small small-moving life to be found in the soils of America’s southwestern deserts, which I likened to slums in its ability to form a spontaneous community and to stabilize neighborhoods.  As the U. S. Geological Survey phrased the ecology:

 

Cryptobiotic Soils: Holding the Place in Place

 

Cryptobiotic soil crusts, consisting of soil cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses, play an important ecological role in the arid Southwest.  Cryptobiotic crusts increase the stability of otherwise easily eroded soils, increase water infiltration in regions that receive little precipitation, and increase fertility in soils often limited in essential nutrients such as nitrogen and carbon.

 

Shhh … stabilizing ecosystem at work

 

Cryptobiotic life provides three benefits to the desert ecosystem, as listed by the Desert Foothills Land Trust

 

This living ground cover is the key to increasing (1) water retention and (2) soil fertility, which in turn (3) reduces soil erosion, three necessary ingredients to a healthy desert.

The organisms in the crust move through damp soil secreting a sticky mucilage, which literally glues the soil particles in place.  Mosses and lichens in the colony are stationary, putting down tiny roots that bind the soil. 

 

As the desert rains, heavy and sporadic, finally come, the crust prevents runoff and absorbs up to ten times its volume.  Then it releases the moisture slowly into the soil.

I think all these functions have their economic analogies in slums:

 

1.         Water retention.  Slums provide domiciles for people who would otherwise be homeless.

 

Pavement dweller family, Mumbai

 

2.         Soil fertility.  Slums enable people to start home-based businesses.  The room may be tiny, the space may be dank, but it is a place where a woman can sew, or a DVD can be repaired.

 

DVD repair shop/ stall in Dharavi

 

3.         Reduced soil erosion.  Slums enable people moving to the city to form their own communities.  They thus serve as a landing point for immigrants.  It’s no coincidence that New York’s most dense slum ever, the Lower East Side, was only a short walk from the Ellis Island ferry.

 

Quite possibly the densest human habitation ever recorded

 

4.         Water capture.  It’s heartless to say but true: slums provide a vast ready and willing labor supply to take up increased demand. 

 

Please understand, I am not praising slums as places for people to live.  They can be and often are wretched.  Nevertheless, slums are economically rational, they serve a natural market purpose within cities.  To see them as the byproducts of evil landlords or shiftless residents is to miss the point.  Slums will disappear only when the conditions that make them sensible disappear, and that is a function of government plus time.

 

And they serve a purpose, most particularly the purpose of forming urban society.

 

This is the central discovery of microfinance.  A conventional bank originates a loan to a person who has a formal job, a birth certificate, a bank account, a known address, a credit history … all the accoutrements of our formal world.  Ask a banker to make a loan to someone with none of those things, and he cannot do it. 

 

Yet a microfinancier can, and can make a profit doing it. 

 

How?  By harnessing the wetware credit bureau, the slum community’s distributed intelligence and knowledge.

 

The ladies of savings co-operative Mahila Milan (Women Together)

 

Once upon a time, banks were local; everybody knew everybody.  The credit decision was based on your personal history, because you knew your banker and he knew you.  That was inefficient and costly, but it was effective in credit terms.

 

As the global north formalized, we expanded our span and scale.  We used papers and proofs as transferable substitutes for personal knowledge.  This is a good thing, not a bad thing, but as we did it, we distanced the credit decision from the borrower.  Human contact went by the boards because it was not needed.  Gradually, generations of bankers learned to kowtow to the paper and treat the people as abstractions. 

 

The end state of this distanced approach to underwriting can be seen in the subprime mess, where the value chain – the origination sequence – enabled bad loans to be made by bad lenders, and people to fib about their income while their originator looked the other way.  All because we had taken the human element out of underwriting.

 

Slums, whatever else they may be, elevate the human element above all other considerations.  Slums are people living together in unbelievable proximity, knowing about each other and holding that knowledge inside themselves.

 

Slum dwellers, Dublin, 1901

 

Urban renewal, if done badly – and it was mostly done badly – destroys that knowledge.  The community is blasted, and the results echo those in desert areas, as described by the U. S. Geological Survey:

 

Loss of soil also means loss of site fertility through loss of organic matter, fine soil particles, nutrients, and microbial populations in soils (Harper and Marble, 1988; Schimel et al., 1985). Moving sediments further destabilize adjoining areas by burying adjacent crusts, leading to their death, or by providing material for “sandblasting” nearby surfaces, thus increasing wind erosion rates (Belnap, 1995; McKenna-Neumann et al., 1996).

 

In other words, if you trample it, it dissolves into nothingness in an instant, and you cannot put it back together again.

 

That’s why people like Jane Jacobs were so passionate about defending neighborhoods, why they were so vitriolic towards the modernist architects who believed we could all live in concrete sky boxes.

 

De Bijlmer, Amsterdam

 

Those who uprooted whole communities, clear-cutting the neighborhood and redepositing it elsewhere in the city, overlooked the intangible, wetware community.  They saw the slum’s exterior manifestations – the dirt, the overcrowding, the ill health, the poverty – and that blinded them to its assets – the tightly knit community, the aggregated and distributed knowledge.  So Robert Moses could cut a swathe through New York with his Cross-Bronx Expressway, oblivious that when he did so, he killed that chunk of Harlem for forty years. 

 

Open-heart surgery on a neighborhood

 

Hartford could sever Asylum Hill from its downtown with I-84 and be astonished when, over the ensuring two decades, what had been a solid middle-class neighborhood became Hartford’s drug and crime redoubt.  Next to the dying neighborhoods I imagine the ghosts of the urban planners hovering, mouthing the words, But we meant well.

 

Desert cryptobiotica gets crushed because it cannot speak. 

 

Beware the wrecking ball, my son.

 

Unlike cryptobiotica, people can speak. 

 

They’re against displacement

 

Slumdwellers can speak; in the voting booth wealth disappears.  People who live in slums are just as smart as any of us.  Even though individual slumdwellers are as nothing politically, when they join together and take control of their vote bank potential, they become a force that the highest officials respond to.

 

Sometimes the voice is anger and destruction. 

 

Watts, 1965

 

Many date the fall of apartheid from the Soweto riots.  Here in the US, Watts led directly to the National Housing Act.  In Mumbai, when Jockin called out the slumdwellers, they stopped the airport from running. 

 

 

It was a demonstration of distributed network intelligence, and it worked.

 

Just as government is a factory that produces two products (money and laws), politics is a game with two counters, money and votes.  Individually, slumdwellers can be ignored; they are effective only when collective.

 

We’re voters too!

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