[Editor's note: As the memory of Haiti's devastating earthquake fades, we are able to see that much of the tragedy was preventable – not the quake itself, but the toll in human lives.  And we can therefore see this cautionary tale from Shanghai as not merely comic but tragicomic. – Ed.]

A building at the Lotus Riverside complex in Shanghai’s Minhang district collapsed, nearly intact, on Saturday morning (Imaginechina via AP Images)

To be stable, how far down must a building go?  As seen dramatically in this story from last June in The Wall Street Journal’s China Reality Report, that depends partly on what happens to the ground on either side of it.

In the weekend’s more bizarre news, a nearly finished, newly constructed building in Shanghai toppled over, killing one worker.

Fortunately, no one else, as the building was unoccupied.

As can be seen in the photo below, the 13-story apartment building collapsed with just enough room to escape what would have been a far more destructive domino effect involving other structures in the 11-building complex.

Good thing the adjacent lot was vacant – or was it a good thing at all?

The development, known as “Lotus Riverside,” has a total of 629 units, 489 of which have already been sold. Now buyers are clamoring to get their money back, and authorities are making efforts to reassure them.

That’s hardly reassuring

Although the Lotus Riverside property was somewhat more substantial than Monty Python’s Mystico Towers, which stood so long as its inhabitants believed in it, the developer’s credibility has now vanished as if disappeared by El Mystico himself.

I can make your credibility … disappear!

The assets of the project’s developer, Shanghai Meidu Property Development Co., have been frozen and the city officials said the developer’s ability to repay homebuyers was secure, according to a statement on the municipal government’s Web site (in Chinese).

Oh really?  I hope they have really good insurance.

A hotline has been set up for Lotus Riverside buyers, and by Sunday afternoon, more than half of them had met with a group of lawyers and officials organized to help them negotiate with the developer, according to the statement.

‘Negotiate with a developer’ is an ominous phrase.  What’s to negotiate? 

Defense of property rights is an intrinsic function of government.  If government’s doesn’t defend my property rights – against fire, against robbery, against vandalism, and against shoddy or fraudulent construction – then what is it for?  What are building permits for? 

What are taxes for, if not to provide services on which consumers can rely?

Property rights are Tocquevillean – that is, they promote the development, strengthening, and integrity of civil and democratic institutions – because (a) their defense requires an equitable and honorable government, and (b) they are expected by demanding middle-class customers.  The clamor for restitution is a promising sign; so is its focus on the city government.

Meanwhile, the cause of the accident is under investigation and nine unidentified people from the developer, contractor and management company have been detained.

Have they fallen over too?

A representative of Shanghai Meidu could not be reached for comment.

There’s nobody here!

Particularly as the building which toppled appears to be no different from the adjacent buildings, whose apartments I presume have already been sold and are now being occupied.  Wouldn’t you want out of a condominium with some zero of falling over?

According to Shanghai Daily, initial investigations attribute the accident to the excavations for the construction of a garage under [They have to mean adjacent to and lower-grade than – Ed.] the collapsed building.

An underground garage was being dug on the south side, to a depth of 4.6 meters

It takes some never to decide to build a major subsurface garage after you’ve already put up a multi-story tower, for anyone with a fourth-grade knowledge of construction knows that vertical force translates into horizontal force when it is not properly and symmetrically buttressed.  That’s the sole purpose of buttresses and flying buttresses – to deflect lateral force and brace against it squeezing the cathedral walls out, collapsing the roof.

A decade or so ago, when Boston was excavating up and down the Central Artery in the Big Dig, those with property abutting the excavation areas demanded – and got – comprehensive and well collateralized indemnities against the possibility their building would shear, subside, or crack in consequence.

The excavated dirt was being piled up on the north side, to a height of 10 meters

Large quantities of earth were removed and dumped in a landfill next to a nearby creek; the weight of the earth caused the river bank to collapse, which, in turn, allowed water to seep into the ground, creating a muddy foundation for the building that toppled.

Any real estate person knows that water is property’s greatest enemy.  Aside from roof and building-envelope leaks, it rearranges the land, shifting buildings on their buildings.

The building experienced uneven lateral pressure from south and north

(I still remember a UDC affordable housing property in upstate New York that had an Edward Durrell Stone design – Howard Roark designing for the masses – that might have been fine on level ground, but was a catastrophe on a hillside.  Heavy snow plus melting plus grade meant that over a very few years, the buildings began glaciating off their pads, costing millions to fix.  You’d think somebody would have connected the dots.)

This resulted in a lateral pressure of 3,000 tons, which was greater than what the pilings could tolerate.

You absolutely cannot have a massive load-bearing structure that you then undermine on one side and overpress on another – the shear forces will be massive, and unrelenting.

As a result, the building fell over.

The South China Morning Post noted that the pilings used in the Lotus Riverside development, made of pre-stressed, precast concrete piles, are outlawed in Hong Kong because they aren’t strong enough to support the kind of ultra-high buildings that are common in Hong Kong.

And concrete, though immensely strong against compression, is immensely brittle.  The pilings appear to have had no steel reinforcing, as would be mandatory in a US development – or, for that matter, in Hong Kong, which – returning to our Tocquevillean theme – has a much sterong orientation to consumer protection.

Looking like nothing so mulch as rotted piers, all snapped off at the same place.

In mainland China, they are often used because buildings there are typically much shorter (subscription required).

Also because mainland China is still the land of the quick-buck real estate developer.

Not a developer in sight

The disaster could reveal some uncomfortable facts about lax construction practices in China, where buildings are put up in a hurry by largely unskilled migrant workers, and developers may be tempted to take shortcuts.

Oh, you think?

Holes where rebar should be

In the US, as in most developed nations, buildings will have a design architect – with professional liability insurance to cover just such design omissions as this – and then a supervisory architect, independent of the contractor, who makes sure that what is build conforms to the plans and specifications, and that there are no substitutions of cheaper/ inferior materials.  All those checks on developer short-term profit-taking appear absent in the Lotus Riverside.

The air costs nothing – and supports nothing

Quality problems have long plagued construction in China, though they seem to be more apparent in rural areas and smaller cities, not in major metropolises such as Shanghai and Beijing.

When school buildings were flattened by last year’s massive Sichuan earthquake, a number of parents faulted shoddy construction for creating “tofu buildings” that fell while other nearby structures were able to withstand the impact of the quake.

Disaster vulnerability reduction is thus not just an exercise in consumer protection, it’s also national risk mitigation. 

This couldn’t happen in San Francisco

We may grumble about earthquake reinforcement, or high-rise sprinkler systems, or lead-based paint/ asbestos removal – but each time these features are added to the building codes, we incrementally de-risk our cities, and that strengthens society.

More recently, state media reported that several new dams along the Yellow River are in danger of collapse, a situation attributed to:

Shoddy construction practices

Embezzlement and

Unqualified workers.

A winning trio!

We’d have been in fat city except for you unqualified worker!

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[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

“Do I have litigation exposure?”

“Only if you’re sued.”

Yesterday, according to the New York Times, it was raining water leaks.  Today it’s raining torts:

When a building is clearly out of compliance, talk quickly turns to lawsuits.

In spring, a young litigator’s fancy lightly turns to those of torts.

“The queen of torts

Filed in some courts”

Steven D. Sladkus, a real estate lawyer at Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, said that he represents an Upper East Side building where the developer put only one layer of wallboard between the floors, instead of the two layers required by city code to create a fire-resistant barrier. “The board knows that’s a serious code violation, and it’s prepared to do the work and sue the developer and hope for reimbursement,” he said.

What problem?  What water?

This condo board has a hideous problem.  The condition is present, it’s life-threatening (in a fire), and they know about it.  Worse still, selling any condo without disclosing the problem would be fraud, putting the seller and the condo association at grave risk.  The condo association is going to have to spend a great deal of money now, and hope it can recover something from the sponsor.

Mr. Sladkus said that the board hoped that the New York State attorney general’s office, which oversees condominium offering plans, would press the sponsor to do the work.

Good luck with that.

It will be expensive and disruptive, he added, since contractors will have to remove ceilings and recessed lighting to install the fire-stopping materials.

It’ll be a total mess.

At the Slate Condominium, a 12-story glass-walled tower in Chelsea where in 2007 one-bedroom apartments sold for as much as $1.4 million and two-bedrooms for as much as $1.9 million, the condo board filed a lawsuit in March accusing the sponsor, Chelsea Luxury Condos, of using defective materials and of not living up to promises made in the offering plan.

It leaks?  Not could it not leak?  Look at that curtain wall!  Doesn’t that slant shriek downspout at you?

Any manager will look at this and shudder

The complaint lists incomplete fire-stopping in hallways, and uneven floors and water damage in various places. Problems common to individual units include warped floors and balcony doors, nonworking electrical outlets, rusted kitchen faucets and water leaks.

Most people moved into the 26-unit building in 2007, and the apartment owners took control of the condo board in April 2008.

This condo board had barely constituted itself before it was confronted with a complex, expensive problem.  Who would want to be on such a board, knowing that on the one hand you will be litigating against the developer, and on the other some condo owners may take out their frustration by litigation against you.

Debra Guzov, the lawyer representing the condo board, would not comment on the case.

As a general principle – not always – the more a lawyer comments in the press, the worst her case.  Or she merely restates what’s already in the pleadings:

Anna A. Higgins, the lawyer representing the sponsor, said the sponsor had hired its own engineer to inspect the building, and “our position is that [a] the problems listed are mostly punch-list items and are not considered defects, but [b] things that are under warranty and therefore the responsibility of the subcontractors.”

A standard legal belt-and-suspenders defense:

If you don’t like these defenses, I’ve got more”

1. “Nothing to see here.”

2. “It’s not our fault.”

3. “Go blame somebody else.”

Go blame him

As misery loves company (in litigation defense anyhow), when one has been sued, it’s highly tempting to find others to join as defendants, first because you want more allies, and second because if a part (like a principal subcontractor) is excluded from the suit, and their defects were material, their exclusion from the suit leaves everybody else vulnerable.

The sponsor has, in turn, brought several of its building and electrical contractors into the suit as third-party defendants, charging they were negligent. “This is a reputable building and company,” Ms. Higgins [Attorney for the sponsor – Ed.] added. “And they take these matters very seriously.”

Multi-player games such as multi-defendant tort litigation can give rise to complex strategies.  There m ay come a moment when the sponsor settles with the condo association and then becomes a co-plaintiff against its former allies.

It’s not too late to join the winning side, is it?

The sheer volume of new buildings that went up during the condo construction boom is the main reason for the increase in defective buildings, lawyers and engineers said.

Somebody’s to blame for something

“It happens in every cycle,” Mr. Saft said. “At the beginning of the cycle, workers are underemployed, then suddenly they’re busy, and at the height, there are too many projects and not enough workers. Then what happens is shoddy workmanship, and when you have sponsors running out of money, they start to cut corners.”

Well said. 

Andrew P. Brucker, a real estate lawyer with the New York law firm of Schechter & Brucker, said that the boom had prompted people with no experience in real estate to start building condos. “When the market was hot,” he said, “anybody who had a couple bucks suddenly became a developer, thinking they’d get rich. When the market was strong, if you complained about something, sponsors would fix it, but then the market started to tank and brand-new buildings aren’t selling out, so there’s no money to do that anymore.”

As defects go up, so does buyer litigiousness.

The more unusual problems that Mr. Brucker has encountered include a building whose developer built an illegal pool and another whose developer put the building’s electrical system in a closet inside an apartment.  The pool, he said, was never approved by the Buildings Department and may have to be removed. The electrical closet may also be illegal, because it may not be easily accessible in an emergency. In both cases, the solutions will entail costly projects.

Yow and double yow!

That’s a lot of Yao

Filing a lawsuit is usually a last resort because it can be costly and take years to resolve. Lawyers say the condo board’s first course of action should be to try to negotiate with the sponsor, with a goal of having the sponsor make the repairs or pay a settlement to get the work done.

With real estate, the physical problem must always be solved first.  Everything else is secondary.  Settlement adds value because it5 shortens the time necessary to get started on solving the problem.

If that fails, lawyers said, a condo board can file a complaint with the attorney general’s office, which can help to mediate a dispute and press developers to make repairs.

Sure, but that seems unlikely to be much help.  The AG’s office has other things to do.

The office can, but rarely does, file its own lawsuit against a developer. But lawyers say that the attorney general has been inundated with complaints; it can take months just to find out if the office will take on a building’s case.

If you wsant something done right, do it yourself.

“The attorney general will look at life, health and safety issues and things like whether a temporary certificate of occupancy is current,” said Jeffrey S. Reich, another real estate lawyer at Wolf Haldenstein. “But it’s hard to get them motivated to roll up their sleeves on minor issues.”

It looked so minor when we started

They’re not a private pro-bono legal services agency.

Lawyers believe that the attorney general’s office is more likely to act on behalf of smaller buildings, because it recognizes that litigation could be prohibitively costly for buildings with relatively few unit owners.

Logical.

That presumption is well illustrated by one case in which Mr. Reich represents the owners in a large luxury building that he had hoped the attorney general would see to. But, he said, “the sponsor’s attorney went to the attorney general and said they should not take the case because the apartments are larger than regulation basketball courts and the owners are titans of finance who are fully capable of pursuing it in court.”

Sounds like a good practical argument – and an abuse of the attorney general process to have brought it in the first place.

Does this look like a job for the attorney general?

If a problem can be solved by money damages, why bring in the criminal side to clobber somebody?

The attorney general’s Web site states that when the office receives a written complaint about a building, “we usually demand that the sponsor provide a written response to the allegations. Sometimes, this alone causes the sponsor to repair the defects.”

Certainly that’s an easy enough thing to do.

At the Broadway Arms, a 12-unit building that opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in late 2004, the owners took control of the condo board fairly quickly.

They knew what they were doing.

By July 2006, the condo board had reached an agreement with the sponsor, Broadway Driggs Associates, to fix many of the problems the engineer had found. But Alan Winkler, the condo board’s lawyer, said that the work was never completed and that the board decided to sue the sponsor in late 2008 for failing to live up to the offering plan and the settlement agreement.

This condo board did it in the right order: recognize the problem, seize the problem, fix the problem, and then litigate afterwards, once the problem has been reduced to fixed money damages.

The sponsor denied the charges in court filings and has accused its building contractor of walking off the job. The contractor in turn has denied that in court papers and has claimed that the sponsor owes him $200,000.

What confession?  I deny that completely.

Many a property dispute ends in a similar squabble.

Five years after they moved into the building, the owners “would like to resolve this quickly,” Mr. Winkler said. “But they want to make sure they get the value they were promised for their units when they bought it.”

At the end of leaks, there is an endgame.  Everyone is out some money, and everyone’s disgruntled by that.  That’s the moment to recall that the bills are no longer piling up, the physical problems have been fixed, and the building no longer leaks. 

At that moment, share the misery and call it quits.

Wouldn’t you like to cut off our dispute?

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They’re called zabaleen, after an Arabic phrase meaning ‘garbage people’, and you wouldn’t want to be one:

Most of the inhabitants of Garbage City are Coptic Christians.

An estimated 60,000 – 70,000 Zabaleen live in an area known locally as Garbage City, and are mostly descendants of poor farmers from Upper Egypt who settled in the city in the 1950s. By virtue of their being Coptic Christians and of their occupation, the zabaleen are discriminated against, and face compounded hardships brought about by the pervasive corruption and kleptocracy of Egypt’s governance. Since they’re not Muslims, social services provided by Islamic organizations are not extended to them as well.

But their lives, which until four months ago were merely difficult, have now become even harder, for as the Boston Globe reported last June, the Egyptian government decided their mode of living represented a health hazard – a result which has had remarkable unintended consequences that tell us something profound about slums.

Zabaleen pigs, before they were slaughtered

CAIRO – A bent man walks with a sack of garbage draped over him, hiding all but his legs as he lopes up the hill toward women and children with quick hands and shrewd eyes for spotting things of value.

Trash trailing off him, he teeters around a corner and disappears into a parade of bent men. Sacks drop and flies gather in dark, humming whirls. Hands scrape plastic and rip cardboard, but a sound is missing.

The squeal is gone.

Pigs are not to blame for the so-called swine flu, which in any case has not been found in this hilltop slum, but trucks flanked by armed police have come anyway and hauled away the pigs.

Raised by Coptic Christian garbage collectors who fattened them with trash and sold them to non-Muslim butchers, the animals were among the 300,000 pigs the government ordered corralled and culled. Their silence means that what scant prosperity there was amid these cliffs has vanished.

A zabaleen boy and his family’s pigs, in the time before

As amplified in a later Boston Globe article (whose text is in burnt orange), the zabaleen were not only slum dwellers but a society of ragpickers:

For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city.  They collected the trash, sold the recyclables, and fed the organic waste to their pigs – which they then slaughtered and ate.

[In spring, 2009], President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the [H1N1] disease.

Bound for the slaughter

As I’ve previously posted, ragpicking in a slumdweller’s profession as old as slums. 

Manet, The Ragpicker, circa 1869

Informal professions have a few advantages:

They require little formal education.

They need no permits.

They reward initiative, enterprise, and a strong work ethic.

The law tends not to enforce against them, since they are peaceable and provide a useful service no one else wants to do.

One of 15 members of a ragpickers’ co-op, Sao Paulo

“Doing the jobs Americans won’t” has become a rallying cry for the immigration debate, and whatever one thinks about immigration, it’s certainly true that throughout history, some professions have been done only by those who could find no other.

In economic terms, everybody’s trash becomes somebody else’s job:

Distasteful though we might find it, it is a profession:

Man and donkey hauling trash back to Garbage City

“How will I feed my children now? I’ve lost 70% of my income,” says Ramzi Shawki, whose 120 pigs lived in a pen next to his house until they were driven away, slaughtered, and buried in trenches. “Our pigs are not sick. I can hold them in my arms. I’m 41 years old. I was born into collecting garbage and raising pigs. I’ve never been infected. But whoever doesn’t give up their pigs gets arrested.”

The Shawki clan and many of their neighbors in a cliffside neighborhood of Cairo survive by collecting garbage. They also raised pigs until the government ordered 300,000 swine killed amid concerns – now dismissed – that the animals spread the epidemic. (Asmaa Waguih for The Los Angeles Times)

Cairo’s Garbage City: note trash on the rooftops

Whatever the motivations, the government sought to provide compensation:

“The government gave me 2,500 pounds for my animals,” about $450, says Shawki, “but they were worth 18,000 pounds.”

That might not be our perspective, but people see what they expect to see.

“This is not a slum,” says one. “It is good up here, not like people say.”

Like many slums, it is also a hive of activity – low-skilled, low-technology, low-paying activity.

Sorting the trash into recycling

Like many slums, Garbage City was founded on low-value land:

They feel safe up here, though sometimes boulders shear off the brittle cliffs and smash rooftops below.

Safety is relative – Garbage City was the only land from which it was not worth displacing the poor.

Most of these men arrived in Cairo as boys decades ago from villages in southern Egypt.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  They gravitate to slums because that’s where the affordability is, and where the low-skilled jobs are. 

Sorting bottles for recycling of their plastic

Four months ago, their livelihood was wiped out by government action that smacks more of prejudice and fear than reason:

President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease when the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt.

Slander led to slaughter:

When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about flu, but about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.

I doubt that, for slum cleanup has been used as a code word for slum eradication for centuries – and as far as I know, the Egyptian government did nothing other than kill all the pigs who, though dead, are taking their revenge:

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

There is trash, which must be piled up, and there is garbage, which can be eaten

 “The problem is clear in the streets,’’ said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.’’

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring – in what public health specialists said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu – it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

It’s tempting to see slumdwellers as ‘those’ people, the more so when they have a different ethnicity, a different religion.

Zabaleen children, photographed by Melissa Leiter

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental, and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous state.

All those people, all that refuse

The health outbreak – a health-risk epidemic caused by a misguided attempt to address a health risk! – serves as proof of so many principles concerning the complexity and interdependence of slums.

“Everything’s connected to everything else”

It has exposed the failings of a government where:

Let’s count them.

[1] Markets move faster than governments

The power is concentrated at the top.

 [2] At AHI we believe that the best level of government to tackle slums is municipal, because municipal government cannot escape the slums on their doorstep.

Decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences.

[3] Slums are cities’ Cryptobiotica: ‘those’ people provide essential services at low investment and low labor cost.

Hard work, low pay

[Here is a good Zabaleen photo essay. – Ed.]

[4] Slums are resilient, both robust and change-resistant:

Where follow-up is often nonexistent

“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,’’ said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture.

[5] Markets will always find practical solutions when government doesn’t.

Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: the government system and the do-it-yourself system.

Want to guess which is more popular?

Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.

Pickup and dropoff, an informal service

A key blockage to slum upgrading and formalization is that entry into the visible, legal, electronic formal system swaps in a new form of inefficiency (bureaucracy) for an old one (corruption and baksheesh).  Just as means-testing can create an unwanted poverty trap, the ‘visibility surcharge’ is a huge drag on slum upgrading. 

Could he find a formal job?

California’s bureaucracy, for example, was recently estimated to be costing the state $500 billion a year, a sum so staggering it beggars the imagination.

“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety security or meet his needs,’’ said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.

Laila Iskandar Kamel

As I wrote in cryptobiotica, a slum is worthless only when seen from a distance:

Cities and slums are economic ecosystems, and just as a biological ecosystem has its biota, so to do all the active entities – that is, the companies, professionals, and individuals who operate within the ecosystem – comprise its ecota [my ungainly term].

From a distance, cryptobiotica looks like nothing much

Cryptobiotic soil is found throughout the world. In arid regions, these living soil crusts are dominated by cyanobacteria, and also include soil lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria.

In other words, what appears from our vast height to be simply dried mud is actually a complex interdependent community of organisms that have eked an existence out of an inhospitable and apparently empty environment.

Sort of like the people who live in slums.

Cairo and the Egyptian government didn’t realize that they needed the pigs; they needed the zabaleen; they needed Garbage City. 

Order out of chaos: value out of poverty

Now they’ve destroyed its livelihood, and it may be too politically embarrassing to walk back from that mistake.

What the Egyptian government did is understandable.  That doesn’t excuse it, nor make it wise.

Where will his work be?  Where his education?

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 [Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

Yesterday I described some basic insights from my two days in London, participating as one of about thirty practitioners in a Gates Foundation roundtable on the subject of WS&H: Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.

It’s good for you, and good for the world

[For more context, see my seven-part exploration of the economics of water: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and extracted essential principles, Part 1 and 2.]

6.         Urban and rural WS&H are distinctly different problems.  To oversimplify the case:

Rural WS&H problems are mainly technological, with the goal of finding a low-cost, low-maintenance solution.  Land is cheap and plentiful.  Many of the world’s urbanizing nations in the global south are low-lying coastal areas, where natural aquifers lie near the surface, and one can punch down into fresh water. 

A well and a drilled hole aren’t expensive

Similarly, with more ample land and a less densely populated landscape, some low-tech and organic sanitation solutions are viable.

Water-disposal toilet, Bangladesh: remarkably, it works well

There are challenges, as we heard in London.  In Bangladesh, after a nationwide and hugely successful mid-1970s campaign to drill tube wells, arsenic was discovered in unsafe concentrations, and millions of people were affected, many of whom died.  

Urban WS&H problems are mainly financial.  As I mentioned yesterday, for rural people, WS&H is a labor good.  You solve your problem by your own efforts: walking somewhere, carrying something, pumping something, digging something.  In an urban environment, WS&H is a money good – aside from having to get somewhere to find it, you pay money to obtain it:

Water vendor in Nigeria

Counter, membership and pay-per-use toilet, Dharavi, Mumbai, India

To be sure, the divide – technology in rural areas, financing in urban ones – isn’t quite that simple.  Even small-scale technology costs money, which must be sourced from somewhere.  (In rural, the amounts are so small that BRAC, among others, can offer microfinance loans that many very poor rural customers can afford and will repay.)  But the divide is material – the money cost to help one person or one family is much higher in urban environments.

7.         WS&H in urban environments is massively complex.  In other contexts, I’ve developed theories about urban complexity and interdependence:

The other problem of poverty is interdependence – every problem is related to every other problem, and there’s no way to isolate one.  Cities, being the most complex human constructions, are the most interdependent, one of the many reasons improving slums is such a challenge.

Cities get even more interdependent when we think about WS&H – which seems to be involved in every slum upgrading scheme I’ve seen, such as Cingapura and Guarapiranga in Sao Paulo,

Drainage channel added to favela, Cingapura project, Sao Paulo

Site regarding, drainage, and hookups: Jardim Iporanga, Guarapiranga project, Sao Paulo

or Parivartan’s neighborhood upgrading in Ahmedabad, India.

Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India: paving, drainage, and piping from the Parivartan program

The challenge is that urban land is scarce, and urban land has enormous and generally rising value.  On the one hand, you have the difficulty of clearing the land for WS&H infrastructure (a Gordian knot that is usually cut only by government with eminent domain or writing a big check. Because of this, you can’t crack WS&H in an urban environment unless you crack the financing.  Technology is the starting point, not the ending point, and not even the controlling variable. 

In short, we have to get the WS&H techno’s out of their silos.

8.         The best WS&H solutions involve housing.  To a houser, this is self-evident – the tough WS&H challenges are in personal consumption – getting the utility ‘the last hundred yards’, as I posted in there ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure.  It was less obvious to WS&H practitioners – many of whom regarded housers as curious aliens –

We come in peace — to provide homes

– and hard-headed financiers as downright untrustworthy aliens.

I’m an ethical financier and I’m here to help you

Still, as I posted in you are what you live in:

If you’re going to change something to help change people’s poverty, it starts with housing. 

You are what you live in.

Change your housing, change your self

Of the major slum upgrading programs I’ve seen, WS&H has formed a core element of improvement. 

Ahmedabad, household water tank

This isn’t surprising, since in terms of a municipal definition, a slum is a place where private investment (in housing) has outrun public investment (in infrastructure):

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

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. 

To fix a slum, fix its housing.  When you fix its housing, fix its water and sanitation.

Inner street, Jadibanagar, Ahmedabad: a little paving and it’s a proper neighborhood

9.         Cities must solve WS&H, because its externalities hit rich people.  If you want to get things done politically, leave aside the moral case except insofar as you can package it to appeal to self-interest: self-interest of voters, self-interest of elected officials, self-interest of administrators.

Ever since cities existed, the aristocracy and plutocracy have periodically fled them for country villas, whether Hadrian to Tivoli, or the Venetians to the Brenta Canal, or Charles II decamping to Richmond to sit out the plague. 

A good place to wait out the malaria

Though the rich could hide for a few hazy summer weeks, in our interdependent and ever-more-densely-inhabited world, unsolved WS&H has externalities that hit rich people (e.g. water contamination).  Guarapiranga in Sao Paulo, that city’s largest slum upgrading program, wasn’t undertaken by the housing ministry, but by the water company (SABESP) in self-defense, to clean up the reservoir. 

Water runs where it will; pestilence blows on the wind.  In an urban and global world, even those who might wish to cannot escape the reach of hygiene and disease.  Set aside your sense of right and wrong if you will; sublimate your sense of equity and your compassion.   

If we want a healthy world, we have to have a healthy poor. 

Though he’s describing the wrong liquid, Edgar Allan Poe had the right instincts in his miasmatic nightmare, the Masque of the Red Death:

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.

I am Prince Prospero, and the world cannot touch me

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself.

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

Comes a visitor:

“Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him –”who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him –that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!”

[…]  It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer.  There was a sharp cry –and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero.  

[…] And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

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Two days in the workshop

During June, I spent two days of vacation allowance (”it is well known that you have an unusual sense of fun,” as an Army buddy says to T. E. Lawrence early in the film) in London, participating as one of about thirty practitioners in a Gates Foundation roundtable on the subject of WS&H: Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.

It is well known that I have an unusual sense of fun …

Learning how to keep our homes clean

I was eager for the two days because, even as housing is the linchpin of cities, the more I think about slums in the global south, the more housing seems the central node in a network of linkages, of which the most urgent and most integrated is WS&H – a subject, blog readers know, that has been consuming me of late (see my seven-part exploration of the economics of water: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and extracted essential principles, Part 1 and 2).

Here’s what struck me over the course of two days:

I used my head both days

1.         Everybody solves their WS&H problems every day.  Water and sanitation are two problems that every one of us solves every day.  Every day we drink in enough water to keep us going, and we expel what we consume. 

Other than breathing, there are very few things we are certain to do every day.  Some days we don’t make money, some days we don’t go to work, some days we don’t travel.  Water is every day – for most of us, every few hours. 

That enforced frequency means everybody has a standby solution.  It may be a crappy solution (literally); it may be unhealthy or dangerous or expensive; it may have rotten externalities (a point to which I’ll return below); but everybody solves it. 

If only it were that simple

2.         Sanitation’s a bigger problem than water.  Around the world, roughly 1 billion people lack ready and affordable access to safe drinking water.  Most of these are in Africa, some in South and Southeast Asia.

Red is bad, green is good

Sanitation’s a bigger problem, with 2.5 billion people lacking access to ‘improved sanitation’

In 2003, the WHO estimated the capital backlog – the non-recoverable infrastructure cost – to connect up all these people was in the vicinity of $100-180 billion. 

3.         In poor rural areas, WS&H costs zero money.   I’m a city dweller; before that, I was a suburbanite; and all my life I’ve lived in developed nations.  To me – as, probably to you – water is something that comes out of a faucet, provided cheaply by a utility, and paid in a monthly bill. 

Immediate, and clear

Sanitation is clean, white, and ceramic; you just flush your problems away.

Doesn’t that say ‘clean’ to you?

 [Actually, not quite.  As I've mentioned in other posts, the house we lived in for twenty years had a clivus multrum on the ground floor and basement --

Turns out to be very important the pipes go straight vertical

-- so I've shoveled my share of post-composted shit … but this was a choice and a lark, not an obligation.]

The one in our basement was baby-blue fiberglass

In poor rural environments, you draw water from a water or stream or pond.  You pay for it with labor, not money.  You evacuate in a latrine or pit or outhouse.  You pay for that with labor, not money.

Dig it, reinforce it, use it

Take turns cleaning the latrine

Money enters the picture as people urbanize.  Water sellers and pay-per-use toilets are consequences of urban environments.

Hallway at a communal membership and pay-per-use toilet, Dharavi, Mumbai, India

4.         Hygiene has zero capital cost and high run cost.  We sometimes forget – at any rate, I sometimes forget – that hygienic habits are learned, and taught, and that the world is full of children who do not know them and have no means of learning them.  Products are great only if people know how to use them. 

We’ve seen this in the realm of finance.  Savings precedes borrowing; financial literacy is a literacy to be learned and taught.  Savings knowledge (what it calls ‘rituals’) is a cornerstone principle for Slum Dwellers International.  The same holds true for hygiene.

Pupils with hygiene kits, Mindinao, Philippines

In financial terms, hygiene is a service with zero capital cost but an ongoing operating cost.  Further, because it’s a soft cost, it tends to get short shrift – we think of the software not the documentation, the car not the service warranty, the toilet not the plumber.  When doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to overlook the ongoing cost of hygiene education, and to eliminate it, with the result that the capital cost – the toilet block, latrine, or well – get fouled and fails.

5.         There’s a philosophical schism: water as a human right versus water as a money good.  Declarations abound that water is a human right – and it ought to be one – but if you take that view, you conclude that all governments should provide WS&H for their people as part of their tax base.  And then you hit reality pretty quickly:

It’s up to them …

… whether humanitarian aid gets to these people

If water is a human right, economic discussions go out the window.

Take that, economics!

Water ought to be a human right.  Lots of things ought to be human rights.

Until that day, it’s a money good, and economics applies.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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