Rental Housing - UN-Habitat

irrelevant. Despite arguments that property titles are the solution to formalizeillegal settlements and improve the human settlements conditions of the urbanpoor, 13 many in the housing field dispute this argument. 14A further complication in distinguishing between formal and informalownership is that most settlements in developing countries were once, orcontinue to be, illegal in one way or another. Even elite housing sometimesbreaks the rules and there are numerous examples of formal estates, even thatbuilt by the state itself, having been built on illegally acquired land. 15 At thelower end of the economic scale, much self-help housing lacks legal title but isbuilt on land that has been purchased. The purchase is illegal in the sense thatthere is no formal title, servicing is deficient, the development lacks thepermission of the planning authorities and no building licences have beenissued for the construction. The majority of low-income settlements in manyLatin American cities – such as Bogotá, São Paulo and Guadalajara – havebeen built in illegal subdivisions or illegally on communal land that has beenreserved for agricultural use, as on the ejidos surrounding Mexico City. Inmany West African cities, housing is often illegal in the sense that it lacks legaltitle but the owner has the permission to construct a home on tribal land. 16If academics and the authorities have difficulty in making sense of thiscomplicated array of housing forms, the majority of households in developingcountries have no such problem. They know whether or not they are owners,even when they may recognize that others will contest that claim. The keydistinction made in this report is between ownership and renting. Thosewho pay rent to live in someone else’s home are called tenants, those who donot pay a regular rent are sharers and those who hold some rights to live on aseparate plot of land are owners. Of course, these distinctions are not watertight.One area of doubt concerns households who own the structure but payrent for the land, a common situation in some cities in South Asia and parts ofthe Caribbean. In this case, owners of structures who have occupied the sameplot for a substantial period of time and therefore are unlikely to be evicted canbe properly considered to be owners. By contrast, the backyard settlers ofSouth Africa, who build their own home in someone else’s backyard, areprobably best regarded as tenants because it is recognized on both sides thatresidence is a temporary phenomenon. 17The quality of the structure is of no importance to whether or not aproperty is owned or rented. Owners may live in formally constructed andserviced housing or in flimsy self-help accommodation lacking any kind ofservices or legal rights. There is a continuum covering the most formal housingthrough to the least formal, which makes it difficult to draw a dividing line. Forexample, settlements that begin as flimsy huts gradually obtain services andChapter I: Introduction 5