Rental Housing - UN-Habitat

a better life; ownership always produces capital gains; no one invests in rentalhousing; renting is inequitable; poor quality accommodation should be removed;mobility is dangerous for tenants; and tenants are politically dangerous.Few of these arguments have much validity in most developing countries.7. Chapter VI argues that rental housing is a valuable tenure to virtuallyevery household at some stage in their lifetime and therefore shouldconstitute a substantial element in the housing stock of every society. Ofcourse, more and better quality construction is needed and the quality of theexisting housing stock needs to be improved. The chapter examines criticallyeight broad approaches to how the current rental housing stock might beexpanded and improved: persuading governments to recognize that rentalhousing really exists; creating a tenure-neutral housing policy; encouraginglarge-scale investment in rental housing; encouraging the self-help landlord tobuild for rent; improving the quality of the rental housing stock; the utility/disadvantage of rent control; providing tenants and/or landlords with subsidies;and finding ways to by-pass the expense and slowness of the judicial system.8. Chapter VII argues that nothing will be done to develop more andbetter rental accommodation unless the majority of governments are forced toconfront their obsession with homeownership. To do this, it is necessary first toput the rental issue onto the agendas of multilateral institutions from which inmost cases it has all but disappeared. If international housing loans and policyadvice at least recognized that not everyone wants to be a homeowner and thatmost people need rental accommodation at some point in their lives, this wouldhelp diffuse the message. Convincing more NGOs and social housing institutionson the benefits of rental housing would also be helpful insofar as few suchinstitutions currently support its development. At present, many NGOs seem tobe as hostile to rental housing as national governments. In changing attitudes, itis essential to show how an obsession with homeownership can generate manyhousing problems and that some countries with large rental sectors face fewerhousing problems than those with high levels of ownership.9. Chapter VII also considers the part that rental housing plays in theGlobal Campaign for Secure Tenure to guarantee that every person has ahuman right to adequate accommodation. Currently, the debate about securityof tenure and affordability requires more consideration for rental housing, andmore thinking needs to be done to mitigate the possible conflicts of interest thatmay arise between landlords and tenants as a result of the Campaign.10. Moreover, chapter VII also proposes a number of issues that requirefurther research before concluding with a call for a major initiative convincingmore governments of the benefits of tenure-neutral housing policies. Rentalhousing is not going to disappear. Indeed, in some of the rapidly growing citiesExecutive summaryxxi