Affordable Housing Institute : US

Pull out the linchpin and it comes apart

 

Which is it to be, housing or urbanization?

The tension constantly crops up.  HUD, for instance, is the department of Housing and Urban Development  – two ideas combined in one acronym.  In the UK, the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships may yet combine (in 2009), because one handles housing, the other urban. 

 

The tension goes the other way too.  About a decade ago, the World Bank downgraded housing from its own area, distributing its functions elsewhere in the bank.  USAID has made a similar shift, moving housing into an activity indistinguishable from economic development.  Sorry to say, both such moves are bad ideas. 

 

 

Housing touches everything connected to urbanization

 

It is impossible to occlude housing out of other interventions, for the simple reason that, because people spend more than half of each day at home, any intervention one wishes to pursue will have an impact in the home.  Consider:

 

1.         Health.  Everyone’s day begins with ablutions, and that means clean water in the home.  If you haven’t got clean water in the home, you must venture out to get it.  If you haven’t got a clean place to evacuate, you must venture out to do so. 

 

Toilet (footprint style, not yet complete), Oshiwira II, Mumbai

 

Either way, without clean water and proper sanitation in the home, whatever one does outside the home is fighting against the odds.  What good is a vaccination if the child then drinks bacteria-laden water? 

 

Below-grade water tank, installed in slum infrastructure upgrading package, Ahmedabad, India

 

            2.         Education.  Who teaches us more than teachers?  Our family.  Who provides a learning environment, or disrupts it?  Why will parents sacrifice anything for their children?  Education begins at home.  Put electricity into a house and children can study at night.  Without a good home, it’s harder to get to school, it’s harder to stay in school, it’s harder to learn in school.  One dominant reason people move to cities is so their children can have a better life, and that begins with education. 

 

What we call homeschooling happens everywhere

 

            3.         Poverty and income.  Traditionally, home is where entrepreneurial businesses start.  In the global South, it’s also where a lot of informal income is earned.  In the home, one can sew, work wood, repair electronics, prepare vegetables, cook meals.  Put lighting into a house and women can make money at night (by, say, sewing or making clothes).  Better housing, in short, means more hours available for work, more ways to earn informal income, more income to the household.

 

A huge percentage of microfinance goes to women with children

 

Much of microfinance practice has emphasized businesses to the exclusion of housing.  This has to change.

 

            4.         Infrastructure: roads, utilities.  Infrastructure always has a large network component – highways, power plants, dams, reservoirs, plumbing and piping – yet that vast network can pass by whole neighborhoods unless the utility runs “‘the last mile” (or last hundred yards) into the neighborhood.  Traditional infrastructure finances stop at the site line, and even into the property itself.  Into the house – and in most places, homes are the biggest consumers of municipal infrastructure, which is why (in developed nations) the water/ sewer bill runs right alongside the real estate tax bill and is paid to the municipality.

 

There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure.  While the finance of site and home infrastructure relies on the household, its provision relies as well on the municipality.  Trunk infrastructure and site infrastructure must, literally, link up.

 

Not much use unless connected

 

            5.         Democratic society.  Society emerges when people are rooted to a place.  In rural areas, that is the farm or the pasture.  In cities, it is the home.  Even our word for it – neighborhood – means a place where people live together.  Villages don’t have neighborhoods.  Nor do rural areas.  Only cities do.  Housing, as I’ve written many times, is an immovable investment.  It’s the one asset you can’t take away.  If you want it to increase its value, you have to increase its surroundings. 

 

Make housing valuable, therefore, and you link people to cities.  That’s why homeownership is the hillside sod of society: it holds neighborhoods in place.  The more people value their homes — not just economic value, social value and network value too – the more they care about their cities.  Democracy flourishes when everyone’s home is an appreciating asset.

 

Standing in line to vote in South Arica’s first fully emancipated election

 

A linchpin is what holds a wheel on its axle.  It’s what keeps all the spokes in permanent relation to the vehicle.  It holds the vehicle together.  Housing is the same: it’s the axle around which all the other interventions revolve.

 

Cities are defined by their housing.  

 

Cities are homes plus jobs plus density (which means verticality). 

 

Without housing, there would be no cities – for what is a city without housing? 

 

All of these are parts of a city, but without housing, at night they are just so many dark shells.

 

Housing is what makes cities bright at night. 

 

It’s not their jobs that keep those lights on at night

 

When we think of cities, we think of their distinctive neighborhoods and characteristic housing.

 

Manhattan has its Upper East and West Side high-rise flats.

Boston has Back Bay and its brownstones. 

Paris has its boulevards and their Second Empire mansard flats.

 

Brownstones in Boston’s Back Bay

 

While every city has its landmarks, they are no more than beacons.  They go on postcards, and tourists visit them, but what draws people for permanent residence?  The quality of their residential neighborhoods. 

 

 

Though housing is inextricably linked with cities, none of this is meant to conflate housing and urbanization.  Though they have pervasive overlap, each is distinct.    That’s why it is a mistake for a multilateral or bilateral to eliminate housing as a distinctive specialty.  You can know everything there is to know about urban development and not know how to structure and finance housing.  You can know everything there is to know about structuring the financing of housing, but it will fall short unless it’s placed in an urban context.

 

AHI is the Affordable Housing Institute, yet over and over again, our work touches cities, involves cities, depends on cities, and changes cities.  By changing their housing.

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