Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

Yesterday’s post laid out as a hypothesis, and then proved as a syllogism, that: 

Urbanization implies Formality

Und it has been proofen!

 

 

In today’s global south, cities expand because slums – whether you call them favelas, gecekondu, shanty towns, squatter settlements, informal settlements, or spontaneous communities – create housing that rapidly outgrows the city’s infrastructure.  For that matter, the same thing occurred 150 years ago in America, in Boston’s North End and New York’s Lower East Side; and 250 years ago in London’s East End and elsewhere.  Yet those places never disappeared; in fact, over time they became not just part of the city but actually its richer and higher-income residential neighborhoods.

 

From then …

 

… to now

 

The slums were not eradicated, they were subsumed.  Comparing these places before and after, we see infrastructure, formalized status, business generation, and richer people.  The changes occurred over decades, and the elements are interconnected, so from our retrospective it’s hard to identify which led what. 

 

In rural environments, slums can exist outside the formal system for very long periods of time.  The tacit bargain is mutual ignorance:

 

People crowded together can stil ignore each other

 

The city takes no action to eradicate the slums.

The slums make no infrastructure demands upon the city.

 

The bargain is sustainable because (a) rural houses can be self-built, (b) rural water can be obtained from a local inexpensive well or free from a questionable natural sources, and (c) rural sanitation can be solved by a latrine remote from the whole.

 

Not big deal to go outside

 

As we saw in yesterday’s post, none of those conditions is possible in a city, because density pressure forces formalization.

 

As AHI blog readers know, AHI is financial advisor to Slum Dwellers International, helping them implement the International Urban Poor Development Fund, a revolving multi-country facility designed to provide cash to lever other resources and be catalyzed back into the fund.  We grapple with which initiatives should be funded, what criteria define them, and what outcomes we are seeking.  In that, one essential element is changing the local environment – political, policy, intellectual, financial – by using the funds to create pilots that in turn demonstrate a strategy or prove a concept, even if at small scale.  (Every pearl starts with a bit of grit as seed.)

 

It started from a bit of grit

 

“Urbanization requires formality” gives an important clue: we have to use the capital to do a transaction that requires local government to take a step toward formalizing the slum environment.  It may be as modest as giving each home a street number and committing to deliver mail to it, or as ambitious as granting the slum-dwellers title to the land on which they currently, illegally, reside. 

 

Mailboxes in Cingapura project, Sao Paulo, Brazil

 

Address number painted on favela home, Cingapura, Sao Paulo, Brazil

 

Vende se esta casa: House for Sale, Gurapiranga, Sao Paulo

 

Anywhere along that continuum may do, but I have come to believe that our action must be accompanied by some response/ recognition by government, however slight that might be.  Government must take that first step toward acknowledging the slum dwellers’ existence and the validity of their tenure in the city, else the pilot’s transformative value will be wasted.

 

The best step, to be sure, is any commitment by government to bring infrastructure, even if minimal or incomplete, to the slum.  Once government has acknowledged the slum dwellers as customers of civic services, that is difficult to repudiate, as it requires reversing a political precedent.

 

At least I think that’s right.  We’re going to find out!

 

The truth is out there

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