Who wins from a slum? Part 1, the actors
Why are slums so hard to eradicate?
Partly because we fight back!
As I’ve previously written, slums are economically rational, they are a wealth-extraction machine, and they are places where private investment (usually in housing) has outpaced municipal infrastructure. They cannot be bulldozed out of existence, much though some try. That they are durable proves that not only are they rational, they also have a systemic robustness, which means they self-repair, and that means there are people who want the slum to endure – those who are slums’ winners.
We don’t like to think that slums have winners, but they do, and like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, they come in varying shades of need, desperation, and culpability.
Slum exploiters not specifically listed
We need to know who wins from a slum, because they are, in one way or another, the forces that resist slum improvement. It’s hard enough to improve a slum when you have the policy and money behind you – when you have hidden or clandestine opponents, it’s even worse.
Allow me then, as your Virgil, to take you on a tour of the beneficiaries of slums:
This way, gentlemen
Before we set out, here’s the economic recipe for a slum:
A. Those who need to live in a slum
People move in to slums for a really cheap place to live, includes at least these three groups:
Railway at Kibera: the avenue by which you walk to your work
1. City-dwellers who have minimal rent-paying power. People move to cities to earn cash money (because city economies run on cash, not barter). Because urban land’s value rises with the city’s median income, the population’s bottom decile can never afford anything remotely like market quality.
Those who can pay the least move to slums.
(This also suggests that the most hideous slums will occur in the richest cities, because the gap between median income and bottom income will be the largest.)
2. People who cannot live formally. Some people live in the shadows. They are illegal immigrants, fugitives from the law, those whose income is not merely informal but also illicit. They cannot take the risk of living legally, so they find the shadow apartments, the slums inside. They will rationally pay a surcharge (in terms of too much rent for the quality of housing received) to a landlord who won’t turn them in to the authorities.
Alaye Ba, a 46-year-old Senegalese immigrant shows stacks of dried wood in the basement of his building, filled with African families waiting to be placed in public housing, in
Slum landlords, knowing this, exploit their residents by cutting back on maintenance, and the slum cycle strengthens.
3. Geographically separated families. When people move to cities, they do not move all at once – normally the breadwinner goes first. These single men – for most of them are men – live in close quarters, known as dormitories (
Corticos in
It should be no surprise that some of
Single-room occupancy, your own private dormitory
B. Who gains direct economic benefit?
So far we’ve identified people who need a cheap and minimally acceptable place to live. Who provides it to them are a lower level of humanity.
Going down
4. Landlords who own illicit structures. It’s too easy simply to conflate slumlords with landlords. It’s also wrong. Many landlords earn their living honestly by providing value for money at whatever price point they seek to serve.
Economically, what distinguishes a slumlord from the greater population of landlords is persistent refusal to reinvest in property. (I’ve written about this in Kibera, Africa’s biggest slum.) Such refusal is economically rational in either of two situations:
- You cannot get any more revenue from the tenants regardless of how nice the property is. (The ‘blood from a stone’ argument.)
- You dare not improve the property, because you do not own the land on which it sits. (The historical analog of this is Irish crofters, where the English landlords secured long-term leasing rights but did not own their land, so naturally they exploited whatever two- or four-legged creatures foraged upon it.)
Time and again, we’ve seen that slums, in addition to being sited on poor quality land, are usually sited on land that is not formally and clearly owned by the structure owner. It may be public land that has been invaded (as in
That disjuncture between land and structure ownership also explains partly why mobile home parks, if neglected, tend toward slums: because their owners can be really renters, who are shortchanged of normal legal rights regarding real estate transfers.
5. Power broker chiefs and headmen. Find a slum and you’ll find a strongman – someone who controls access, and who enforces what passes for order.
Sometimes he’s called the chief, or the headman. Sometimes he’s the superintended, or the manager for the absentee landlord. But he’s always there, and he extracts a little vig in exchange for giving residents ‘quiet enjoyment.’
Home-made wiring: somebody gets paid to look the other way
Among the benefit of clear land title is that resident, rather than having to rely on strongman protection, can avail themselves of law – which leads, unfortunately, to the next urban parasite.
For those who renounced protection of the law, a special circle
6. Protection rackets. Chiefs and headmen need law – of a kind. They need local law answerable to them. They pay for it, via bribes and protection rackets.
Would that it were so: Ministry of Lands and Housing,
Who better to provide protection than parts of the government? When I was in
With this sixth level of slums, we conclude our census of those who directly participate. But the slum owes its existence to more than just who lives there and who provides them shelter.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
Write a comment