Broken Cities. Deborah Potts

some of their residents were moved to ‘holding camps’, usually on the edges of the city and sometimes on agricultural land. Over time, these sometimes took on their own community identity, but their residents’ lives were made terribly difficult because the government would often move them on again, sometimes to another holding camp.

      Tragically for Zimbabwe’s urban poor, the forces already in existence in official circles that were opposed to the slippage in housing standards were suddenly given free rein and full central government backing in 2005 when ZANU (PF), the party in power since independence, lost both a referendum on constitutional change and nearly every urban constituency in a national election. Furious that the urban electorate had not ‘recognised’ its obligations to the party, which, despite its inner convictions, had allowed backyard shacks to develop to ‘help’ the poor, the government unleashed Operation Murambatsvina (‘Clear Out the Trash’) with virtually no warning. Every single backyard shack and unplanned house extension in low-income urban suburbs across the country was demolished within a few weeks, using bulldozers. Informal-sector activities were also targeted. It was estimated that 650,000 to 700,000 people were either made homeless or lost their jobs, or both.²¹

      

      There was an international outcry and the UN sent a special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, to investigate. Understandably, the political punishment angle was frequently highlighted in subsequent analysis. Yet, while this was relevant, it helped obscure some other aspects of the campaign that only made sense in terms of understandings about private property, housing standards and urban planning regulations. First, the campaign did not touch planned and legal private or rented properties, which also housed many of the ‘ungrateful’ urban electorate. Throughout the country, the legal home on the urban plots affected was left standing, surrounded by the rubble of demolished extensions and shacks. Thus, the legal property of low-income urban plot-owners and homeowners was respected. Second, in the ‘holding camps’ such as Hatcliffe Extension on the north-west edge of Harare, the houses demolished were generally those built without local authority support, meaning that services had not been laid on and they were not connected to the networks for sewerage, water or electricity. According to the regulations, this made them illegal. For the international media that were soon on the spot, these issues were not visible (pipes being underground) but the demolition of what were often freestanding small houses constructed of permanent materials such as brick or cement blocks was very evident and understandably condemned. To complicate matters further, unlike backyard shack residents, some in the holding camps had title deeds to their plot of land that local politicians had made available during electioneering periods. Again, the media and many other analyses made much of this, taking it to mean that legal private property had been destroyed.²²

      The Zimbabwean government defended itself on the grounds of planning and building standards. It pointed out, correctly, that backyard shacks were illegal and if homeowners could show that they had received planning permission for extensions, those extensions were not demolished. They compared the upholding of housing regulations with the situation in cities across the GN. They also explained the nuances of the planning and standards issues that led to so many unserviced and improperly planned and regulated houses being demolished in the holding camps, even if they had been built on land with legal title. None of this cut much ice with the various media, campaigning and agency reports that followed, which was not surprising. The extent of suffering that was caused was catastrophic: no provision was made at first for anyone made homeless, people were scattered across the country and some were forced to take up cross-border peripatetic lifestyles. Many people died.²³

      

      Nonetheless, the UN report on the campaign, which rightly decried the suffering and the lack of timely warnings of the demolitions (which was illegal), did note that the government was right on the legal points about standards and planning. Nearly all the demolished dwellings had been illegal. Thus, this infamous Zimbabwean example provides insights into how complex the relationship can be between housing standards, residential planning laws and the availability of affordable housing. Earlier it was argued that housing standards are a double-edged sword, but this example shows how there can be even more sharp edges to their impacts. They can be used as a weapon by governments to evict those whose housing is ‘not up to standard’ if and when the state deems it expedient.

      Housing standards and the colonias on the borders of Texas and Mexico

      Along the border between Texas and Mexico there are many small residential settlements termed ‘colonias’ that house urban people on the US side. These have had somewhat ambiguous status, including whether they are rural or urban, under whose jurisdiction their management should fall (the ‘rural’ counties or the cities), and the legality of many of the plots and houses on them more generally. On the Mexican side, there are many larger colonias, but their existence is relatively ‘normal’ there. These settlements are an exceptionally useful example of the issues under discussion: the impact of housing regulations, standards and embedded societal expectations on the cost (and therefore affordability) of housing. Furthermore, they provide an unusual comparative GN versus GS example that helps to further illustrate the arguments proposed in this book about the similarities in key processes underlying housing affordability issues in rich and poor countries across the world. They also challenge any presumption that, besides the difference in wealth between these regions, housing outcomes in the GS are worse because their institutions, accountability and capacity are inherently more problematic than in the GN.

      

      These settlements have been extensively studied by Peter Ward of the University of Austin in Texas.²⁴ Most of his work has been on housing processes in Latin American countries, which helps provide depth to his comparative analysis and a critical perspective on North American norms. On both sides of the border, many houses in the colonias have (or originally had) questionable ‘legality’ in much the same way as many of the houses in the peri-urban ‘holding camps’ of Harare in Zimbabwe. While on the Mexican side some colonias involved illegal invasions onto land, both in Mexico and Texas their first residents more often occupied subdivided land provided via some sort of deal, often done by intermediaries, with local landowners. In many parts of the GS this might be tolerated. However, for the American authorities, it was a significant problem that this land was not zoned as being part of the nearest town. Services such as water, sanitation and electricity, as well as compliance with various urban building codes, tend to be required for houses to be accepted as legal in the American urban context. Since these settlements did not comply, the houses built fall short in terms of acceptable standards and can be deemed ‘illegal’, just as in Harare.

      By the mid- to late 1990s, there were over 1,500 colonias along the Texan border, housing around 368,000 people. In 2018 it was estimated that about half a million lived in this type of settlement.²⁵ The residents were there because of the housing dilemma: their incomes were insufficient for them to occupy legal housing within the city. Taking up subdivided land on farms in the hinterland – even if its tenurial status was uncertain and they knew they were being exploited by dodgy developers – and gradually building homes, even if these were non-compliant and had no piped water or electricity, was all they could afford and allowed for some sort of family life. On the Texas side, most of the residents are Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. As Ward explains, ‘Few Mexicans or first-generation Mexican-Americans working on the Texas border earn enough to afford housing at market rents or qualify for traditional home financing … many of these workers [at the end of the 1990s] earn as little as between $5,000 and $10,000 a year.’²⁶ He also explicitly links the issue of (important and necessary) ‘standards’ and the unaffordability of housing. Thus, residential land within a Texan town must have ‘paved roads, curbs, drainage, and hookups for water, sewer, and utility services … These requirements, while beneficial to public health and safety, have the effect of excluding low income people from the urban housing market.’²⁷ Similarly in Mexico, the laws and regulations governing urban land development and housing mean that ‘almost without exception’ the market price of urban land is ‘beyond the reach of most poor families’.²⁸

      

      When the Texan colonias first began to emerge, the subdivision and sale