Broken Cities. Deborah Potts
should not have families if they cannot afford to house them ‘properly’ and such people should remain ‘single’,21 living endlessly in cheap, shared lodgings. Well, that is precisely what happens in the GS. Whole families often do have to sleep in one room, no matter the mix of generations and sexes. And often everyone in the family – often including children and old people – does have to go out to work, no matter how exploitative or dangerous the conditions, and bring back cash at the end of the day or the week. Furthermore, these sorts of conditions were typical of the cities of the GN in the nineteenth century. But these were and are the conditions of poverty, and for a few lucky generations in the GN national wealth and public policy combined to determine that these conditions were unacceptable. In the absence of proper sanitation, the outcomes of such conditions can be epidemics, which have had a very definite impact on housing policies. But beyond the public health situation, decisions have been made in the past about what standards of housing are commensurate with the desired norms of a wealthy and safe society in which it is possible to live as a family.
These points bring up two key issues explored later in this book. The first is the role of policies on housing standards: both the type of house that can be built and expectations regarding a safe and healthy living environment for residents. This is the topic of the next chapter. The second is that the housing situation deemed acceptable for children is a very important influence on the outcomes of such policies. Children cost money, take up space and affect the kind of work, if any, that their primary carer can do. All these things in turn affect how the housing dilemma works out for different types of households.
It is important to note that none of the arguments made above deny that the supply of housing provided by the market is important. For those able to afford such housing a shortage will increase prices or rents, meaning that some will have to buy less housing than they otherwise might have bought. However, from the perspectives of those in the housing dilemma – the focus of this book – as they were already unable to afford such housing, what difference does it make? For those in the income decile closest to affording some type of decent housing, however, it does make their aspirations less realisable. For those in the decile just above, they may be driven down into the housing dilemma. As housing activists point out, cities frequently have empty housing and some live in houses with far more bedrooms than their household needs while many are unable to afford adequate accommodation or are homeless. Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, in his book on the housing crisis in the UK, All That Is Solid: the great housing disaster,22 suggests that one solution would be somehow to reallocate excess accommodation to those in need. In theory, this could help; in practice, contemporary political realities make it impossible. Vigorous policies to reduce speculation on housing and land would help remove an egregious source of supply limitation. However, even politicians can be implicated in this.23 In sum, for most in the housing dilemma, only non-market or informal market solutions are likely to help.
It would be possible to outline the parameters of the sorts of housing dilemma detailed above for Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK for most urban societies across the world.24 Yet so far the examples given here have been mainly about the rental sector. In nearly all cases the dilemma is greatly magnified for house purchasing, where costs tend to be much higher. In all countries and in both the rental and homeownership sectors, the essential element is the mismatch between earnings (the labour market) and rents or mortgage payments (the housing market). In most cases, the households unable to meet the housing payments include working adults.25 In other words, the problem is not one of unemployment, although that makes it worse, but pay levels that are incommensurate with the ‘requirements’ of contemporary, formal housing markets. These markets are influenced by the usual economic factors of supply and demand; they set the cost of housing. Additionally, as market forces determine the wages and incomes of urban workers, they in turn influence the pensions that older citizens might command (see Chapter 5), although in many poorer countries in the world pensions are non-existent for most and utterly inadequate in relation to urban living costs for many lucky enough to receive them. And those market forces, in almost every city across the world, not just in the GS, determine that some proportion – often a very significant proportion – of the city’s workforce and its older citizens are not paid enough to ‘demand’ the housing that the city’s formal housing market can supply. In other words, there is an inevitable and serious mismatch that is an outcome of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces in the late twentieth and current twenty-first century. This is true whether you are in London or Lagos, Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles or Shenzhen.
Affordable urban housing and the role of basic standards
Housing standards: the necessity of a double-edged sword
In 1910, infant mortality rates in the slum area of Cowgate in Edinburgh were 277 per thousand,1 far higher than anywhere in the contemporary world (the highest current rate estimated is 82 for the Central African Republic).2 This shocking statistic needs to be kept in mind when considering the complexities of the relationships between housing standards and affordable housing. There is no denying that regulations that enforce decent standards do increase housing costs. Therefore, ceteris paribus, they make housing more unaffordable for the poor. For those opposed to the impacts of government regulation on free markets, it is all too easy to conclude that the ‘way in which quality enhancements can make those with low incomes worse off is perhaps most vivid when minimum standards price the poorest households out of the market and increase the number of households that are homeless’.3 This sort of analysis is simplistic. It is also literally dangerous.
Acknowledging that housing standards are a double-edged sword for the poor is reasonable. However, there is no doubt that they are necessary – the experience of early industrial urban Europe and North America is proof enough of that. Regulations about other necessities for human life, such as the quality of water or food, are generally accepted as requirements in the contemporary world – few economists dare to argue that poor children should be ‘allowed’ to drink dirty water since it is cheaper. Yet the impact of poor housing on death and serious illness rates in Global North (GN) cities in the not-so-distant past is forgotten by many today. It needs to be remembered, which is why this chapter begins with a brief review of those conditions.
Since obviously inadequate urban housing is now mostly, although far from only, found in the cities of the Global South (GS), there is a tendency in housing studies to assume this type of housing is not relevant to understanding low-income housing issues in the GN. This is a mistake. If we confine ourselves to the capitalist era, up until the early to mid-twentieth century, there were many residential areas in European and North American cities with shocking housing conditions. Private-sector landlords provided the sort of rooms for rent that the poor could afford – so, in that sense, the market worked. However, this meant that the rooms were often dangerously inadequate for the maintenance of health and family life and households mostly lived in one or two rooms, just as they do in so many low-income settlements in the GS.
In many cities across Europe and North America, the outcomes of these housing conditions, which followed on from their occupants’ poverty and lack of monetary demand for anything better, were appalling. In the contemporary age they would be regarded as catastrophic. Morbidity and mortality rates were phenomenally high, way above those typical of low-income settlements in the cities of the GS today. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, because urban deaths exceeded births, the pace of urbanisation in the GN would have been glacially slow, or negative, had there not been such a steady supply of in-migrants from rural areas (driven out by enclosures of their land and other agricultural changes). Without the opportunities for emigration to