There are further conditions about housing that relate to these issues about privacy and social interactions. There are ‘national bedroom standards’ that determine how many bedrooms a family should have. Separate bedrooms are theoretically required for a couple living together as partners, single adults aged over 21, and children of different sexes aged between 10 and 21. A bedroom can be shared by any two children of the same sex and from the same family, although a young adult who is not a family member needs a separate bedroom. If a woman is pregnant, it is understood that this will soon affect the number of bedrooms required.18 There are also standards about space requirements per person; these were set out in 1935 as a response to ‘overcrowded conditions in the private rented sector before the Second World War’, but they are very rarely enforced and data are rarely collected.19
These standards evidently have enormous implications for housing costs for families with children. Thus, it is these households, who are at the heart of any sustainable society and to whom politicians tend to refer constantly as a symbolic touchstone for the values and norms that they wish to represent, who in reality are seen as a costly strain on the urban system in Europe and North America. In the UK, as shown in Chapter 2, there are millions of urban families who do not earn anywhere near enough money to buy housing and who cannot afford to rent the decent housing that their societies, with all too recent histories of shocking rental housing conditions, rightly deem is required. Only government subsidies make their homes possible. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this point for contemporary cities and their future prospects – it is possible that the future of the family in the world’s biggest cities is bound up with questions of housing affordability. This point is returned to in Chapter 9.
As already noted, the housing standards encompassed by the UK’s ‘Decent Homes’ and HHSRS relate only to rental housing. Moreover, their enforcement is mainly focused within the social housing rental sector – that is, where non-market, subsidised rents are being paid either in old-style ‘council housing’ or in the many, newer variants of social housing run by the non-profit sector with various government subsidies to keep rents down. It is obviously easier to enforce anything with parties that are reliant to some extent on financial support from the enforcement agency. However, the private, market-oriented rental sector is a very different problem. In a neoliberal capitalist society, interference with private property and profit tends to be seen as a difficult matter and the political ethos is that it is to be avoided where possible. This view is also fostered by the various extremely powerful and well-resourced lobbying groups from the private-sector building and rental sectors which do their best to encourage legislation that improves their profits and to discourage any that might constrain them. Local authorities are not actually empowered to take action about some poor housing conditions in the private rental sector, because it is private; nor are the expectations that local authorities will act as strong as they are in the social housing sector. Indeed, the ‘Decent Homes’ guidance states that, in the private rental sector, tackling poor standards should rely on ‘a range of assistance, advice and encouragement to homeowners … using enforcement powers only as a last resort’. Only when so-called Category 1 hazards – conditions listed in Table 3.1 as type A, B or C – are so serious that the severity score for the risk to the occupants is high do they theoretically have to be dealt with via enforcement. When the score is lower, enforcement is discretionary.
Once the enforcement of laws is discretionary, their impact will vary according to local and national political factors such as ideology and budgets. These also vary over time as elections come and go and as national and global economic changes affect budgets. In 2016 in England, for example, there was a Conservative government ideologically opposed to welfare payments and ‘red tape’, an austerity budget had led to deep cuts in central government grants to local authorities, the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis were still reverberating through the economy, and the newer negative impacts of the UK’s impending exit from the European Union (Brexit) were beginning to emerge. Taken together, these meant that factors influencing whether regulations are implemented – political will and capacity – were acting to reduce the frequency with which housing regulations were effectively imposed, particularly within the private rental sector. As a consequence, poor conditions involving risks to health – slum conditions, in other words – were becoming more common.
Informal housing and building standards
Regulations about housing standards are not peculiar to the cities of the GN – substandard housing in the GS is not due to a lack of legislation. Nearly all societies have plenty of regulations on the books. In ex-colonies these may still be partly derived from the town-planning laws handed down by the former colonial power. For example, they could be modelled on British, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese ‘norms’. However, they are much less likely to be enforced. In 1990, during a field trip with undergraduate students to The Gambia, one student project was on housing in Serrekunda, the country’s largest urban settlement. The students diligently interviewed various ‘key personnel’ in the urban council offices in Serrekunda, returning with photocopies of regulations relating to building standards. These included the usual array of requirements about types of building material, distance between buildings, room size, windows, and minimum water and sanitation standards. These were all ‘modern’ and were drawn fairly directly from British legislation of the 1940s and 1950s. The students suggested that this meant Serrekunda had been ‘planned’. However, a moment’s observation of nearly all the residential built environment in the settlement demonstrated that the regulations had not only been honoured mainly in the breach rather than the observance, but in fact entirely in the breach. To a significant extent, Serrekunda was constructed of corrugated iron sheets. Many households were renting and living in one small room in buildings often built and rented out by the owners of the rural land plots onto which the settlement had encroached and sprawled. These buildings did not conform to any urban plan or regulation; neither did their tenure. Many obtained their water from wells, just as previous rural populations had done. The case of Serrekunda demonstrates that, as with all laws, it is not the existence of the legislation that really matters but whether it is implemented. Leaving aside the issue of affordability, standards can only lead to improved housing if there are two key things: the political will and authority to enforce the regulations and the institutional capacity to implement and monitor that enforcement. The example of the UK above has already suggested that political will can ebb and flow.
The housing dilemma as defined in this book, whereby there is a mismatch between low incomes and the costs of housing provided by the private sector, is specific to situations in which housing is decent because certain standards are enforced. However, if they are not, the private sector can deliver housing that is cheap enough for most people. Some of this will be in true slums, but not all of it. The informal housing that is so widespread in the GS is cheaper than formal housing not only because it may skimp on physical quality. Often, an important reason why it is affordable to the poor is that the land used at the time of building was cheap. This might be because it was originally occupied by squatting. However, the tenure may simply be non-capitalist. Hundreds of millions of informal private-sector residential units, both for owners and renters, are found in the urban areas of the GS (see Chapter 4). The meaning of the term ‘informal’ is often contested,20 but here, in relation to housing, it is defined as housing that does not conform with government planning, zoning, tax regimes, regulations and standards. By definition, therefore, this crucial housing sector does not comply with housing standards. However, improving this situation without causing worse health and suffering is tricky. As the next chapter will explain, removing such housing because it is poor quality is not the answer. This merely treats a visible symptom of poverty without doing anything about the causes. Invariably, those displaced simply have to adopt other informal solutions, and these are often worse for their welfare. The answers have to lie with assisting