affordability is the crucible of housing policies … In many developing countries, despite all efforts to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and improve design, basic formal sector housing is too expensive for most households … [the] time has come to recognize that, especially in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the main problem is not that housing is too expensive, but that incomes are too low to afford basic formal housing.3
This was radical and a step change from the broadly neoliberal and pro-market flavour of global agency analyses of urban housing problems over the past three to four decades. On the other hand, this section focuses mainly on the GS. Given the worldwide nature of the housing affordability crisis and the increasing prevalence of the issue in the largest cities of the Global North (GN), this uneven treatment is unwarranted. There is unquestionably a difference in the scale of the problems but the underlying issue of the mismatch between many people’s incomes and formal private-sector housing is the same. Reference to rising rates of housing unaffordability in New York is found in another section on urban inequalities, however, contextualised by the facts that one in five of the city’s population cannot afford to feed themselves without food assistance and that one in three of the children of New York live below the locally defined poverty level. The time might also be coming when tables on the incidence of slum conditions across the world should include data for GN cities, as more people find themselves in seriously overcrowded accommodation or faced with insecure tenure (either of these being sufficient to be classified by the UN as living in a slum). This would no doubt be highly contentious; such cross-country data are also always fraught with difficulties, given the different definitions used for parameters such as ‘overcrowded’ or ‘insecure’ and differences in the ways in which data are collected.
There are even more difficulties with measuring housing affordability, which, being a relationship between individual households, their incomes and their housing costs, makes the compilation of internationally comparative datasets covering all types of housing and income groups very problematic. The debates about the complexities of defining affordability in relation to housing are deliberately left to the concluding chapter as they are better understood once the historical and geographical parameters of the affordable housing dilemma have been established. Suffice it to say at this point that the comparative datasets available tend to focus on formally provided housing in the private sector and often fail to capture the income groups for whom housing costs are most onerous.
The purpose of this chapter is to set the scene with regard to the housing affordability crisis for the rest of the book. Case studies are used to introduce and illustrate key aspects of the housing dilemma. Drawing mainly on examples from countries in southern Africa and from London, it illustrates the scale and scope of the crisis as well as key policy aspects, especially the crucial importance of understanding affordability as a product of incomes rather than housing supply. The thorny issue of the influence of building standards (taken up in detail in Chapter 3) is introduced. It is shown how low-income housing projects are usually far too expensive for most of the households they were meant to help. Examples are given of common problems with ostensibly low-income housing projects, which are revisited in later chapters: how market forces cannot provide for the poor, how trends to involve the private sector in such projects make things worse, and how policies that are meant to assist the poor into formal housing – at least in theory – and that are often publicised as such can be hijacked by other groups or are simply unenforced. It is also shown how more realistic assessments of incomes and affordability can help produce a better understanding of housing affordability issues and therefore better policies.
In 1985 I conducted a survey of almost 1,000 migrant households in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city. This was the start of a long-standing research engagement with the country and the city. At that time, socio-economic conditions in Harare were among the best in urban Africa, with high rates of formal employment, rapidly improving social indices and falling poverty levels.4 By 2008, the entire economy had virtually collapsed and the country was experiencing hyperinflation – £1, worth Z$1.6 (Zimbabwean dollars) in 1985, was valued on the parallel market at Z$100 trillion. In the intervening period, Zimbabwe had implemented a full suite of housing policies, influenced by its own specific urban history and the zeitgeist of shifting global economic ideologies, including privatising public rental housing, maintaining high and expensive building standards, upgrading informal settlements, highly subsidised site-and-settlement schemes, and mass demolitions and evictions of ‘illegal’ informal housing. Due to its history as a white settler state until 1980, most urban and peri-urban land had been alienated and commodified, constraining the development of informal settlements. Along with the two other white settler states in the southern African region, South Africa and Namibia, it also suffered extreme forms of institutionalised racial discrimination and segregation. The political imperatives of the ruling white minorities meant that there were strict controls on migration to towns and on the nature of the housing stock, which distorted these countries’ urban demography. In large urban centres, high-income, low-density (and formerly exclusively white) suburbs, similar in many ways to those in cities of the GN, took up most of the space, with the majority black African population squeezed into smaller, segregated, high-density residential zones (‘townships’) of public rental housing and migrant hostels. These were legal and planned, characteristics that, along with the nature of urban land tenure, were atypical for colonial sub-Saharan Africa. When white settler rule finally ended (1980 in Zimbabwe, 1990 in Namibia and 1994 in South Africa), a wide range of new housing policies were introduced, partly reflecting the policy fashions of the times and also the need to address the racist legacies of the past.
As I travelled back and forth between southern Africa and Europe over the decades, it became increasingly apparent how key global trends in the ideologies influencing housing programmes and weaknesses in policy implementation were working their way through the cities in both regions. These processes, alongside its unusual mixture of housing types and a phenomenal series of changes in the nature of urban livelihoods and the scale of urban poverty, made Zimbabwe a compelling case study for housing research as the impacts unfolded of a very wide range of housing types and approaches and their interactions with income levels and household composition. Neighbouring South Africa also experimented with different types of housing policy after 1994. Its housing experiences include the mass (re-)emergence of informal housing in the last decade or so of white minority rule and a socially progressive attempt to address a severe urban housing shortage post-1994 via a major programme of state subsidies. However, other countries in southern Africa, such as Malawi and Zambia, had more typical colonial histories. Although their urban centres were influenced by racist and segregatory planning, there was less state control and land under indigenous tenure was often available, leading to housing outcomes more typical for countries of the GS, including mass informality. In sum, the southern African region provides an unusually wide range of housing policies and outcomes, shaped by different forms of land tenure, political imperatives, ideologies and policy fashions, making its experiences relevant to wider discussion and theorisation of global housing crises. For this reason, and also to demonstrate how such analysis can draw on cities in any part of the world, the following chapters frequently use examples from southern African to illustrate the causes and outcomes of the housing affordability crisis.
In Harare in 1985, after only five years of independent democratic rule, the legacies of almost a century of racist legislation were still imprinted on the urban landscape. The survey undertaken that year covered five low-income housing areas: Highfields, Glen Norah, Mabvuku, Kuwadzana and Chitungwiza. These were formal, planned and legal settlements with access to physical