Affordable Housing Institute : US

Lately, in the context of my work with Slum Dwellers International, I’ve been thinking about the problems of basic municipal infrastructure — water and sanitation (usually abbreviated W&S) — and along these lines, recently read a terrific paper by Jim Salzman of Duke. 

Jim Salzman of Duke

Thirst, a Short History of Drinking Water, chronicles humanity’s earliest efforts to assure clean water and to create rules to distribute it among people.  It’s a great paper, about which I’ll have quite a bit more to say in future posts.  Meanwhile, if formalizing slums is the greatest demographic issue facing the twenty-first century, and cities are going to be the nexus of intervention and change, then delivery of water and sanitation into established urban environments becomes the most important long-term priority for donor and governmental entities seek to help the global south advance.

 

Rooftops in Kibera, Nairobi

 

When I went off to India to explore the financing of low-cost affordable public-good infrastructure (which eventually became a lengthy paper, Meta-finance), I started rethinking exactly what a slum is.

 

Boston, 1923, aerial view of the North End: a hive of people

 

I’ve come up with yet another definition, the urbanist’s municipal definition:

 

A slum is an urban environment where informal housing has outstripped formal utilities

of which water and sanitation is the most primitive and most essential

 

Rooftop standpipe, public lavatory, Dharavi, Mumbai, India

 

This definition is consistent with others I’ve proposed:

 

Slums are spontaneous communities because they are formed by people who choose to move to a place — almost always in search of money income.

 

Slums are economically rational because they sustain themselves out of a stable set of bargains among tenants (who want to consume as little housing as possible, because that’s all they can afford) and landlords (who want to provide as little maintenance as possible, because that’s how they make money despite low rents).

 

Slums are a wealth-extraction machine because the effect of under-investment is wealth transfer from the very poor to the landed.

 

Slums have existed ever since humanity urbanized.  We find them in Ostia, in Rome, in Pompeii, in Herculaneum.  We always find them growing rapidly in rapidly urbanizing areas:

 

London, 1850, an outhouse in every back yard

 

Boston, North End, 1901

 

New York, five cent lodging, 1895

 

Mumbai, 2006

 

Mexico City, 2005

 

What formalizes a slum?  Reinvestment in both private space (home improvement) and public space (water and sanitation, usually funded by the municipality). 

 

London outgrew its slums.  Boston outgrew its: the North End is now yuppie heaven. 

 

Not cheap any more!

 

New York outgrew its slums: the Lower East Side is among the city’s more expensive neighborhoods.

 

In each case, somehow the municipal infrastructure was retrofitted into slum neighborhoods. 

 

Cobblestone street in Pompeii, built by the Caesars, 50 BC

 

Paved street in Jadibanagar, built by Mahila Housing Trust, 2007

 

Since London outgrew its slums, Boston its, New York its, I want to know how those cities retrofitted municipal utilities into slum neighborhoods – because those business models, low tech and small scale as they were, are probably better paradigms than global-north formalized systems.  Salzman’s paper echoes what I found in Bombay and Ahmedabad and what my paper dubs the Basic Model:

 

Basic Model.  Public sector funds capital infrastructure as a non-recoverable cost, for some larger civic or political purpose.  Thereafter, users pay the (modest) maintenance fees.  The basic model even has an insider-outsider twist: insiders (neighbors) get unlimited use via monthly subscription, outsiders are pay-per-use.

 

Municipal infrastructure, for low-cost water, two millennia old

 

Basic-Plus Model.  As an overlay to the Basic Model, which delivers a group-benefit quality of service (Basic Service), high-end customers can pay bonus fees (the premium) and get higher-quality, more personalized service. 

 

There are eerie parallels with the Basic and Basic-Plus Models when one looks at urban dense-living wi-fi as provided by municipalities, or in a slightly older technology, cable TV and telephony. 

 

Things evolve the same way, don’t they?

 

The Basic service is – well – basic, and most people pay the Plus premium.  One can also see Basic and Basic-Plus Models in, say, metropolitan transport, where subways and buses and trains offer steep discounts to volume users, who are conveniently residents rather than tourists.

 

Give me formal schooling and clean water and I’ll change the world

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