Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

86 PLANET OF SLUMS
Even as metro Cairo has doubled its area in five years and new
suburbs sprawl westward into the desert, the housing crisis remains
acute: new housing is too expensive for the poor, and much of it is
unoccupied because the owner is away working in Saudia Arabia or the
Gulf. "Upwards of a mjJlion apartments," writes Jeffrey Nedoroscik,
"stand empty ... there is no housing shortage per se. In fact, Cairo is
filled with buildings that are half-empty."52
"Dhaka, the world's poorest megacity," explains Ellen Brennan,
"has seen intensive urban land speculation. An estimated one-third of
expatriate remittances have gone for land purchases. Land prices have
risen about 40 to 60 percent faster than prices of other goods and
services and are now completely out of line with income levels."53
Another South Asia example is Colombo, where property values
increased a thousandfold during the late 1970s and 1980s, pushing large
numbers of older, poorer urban residents into peri-urban areas. 54
Overcrowded, poorly maintained slum dwellings, meanwhile, are
often more profitable per square foot than other types of real-estate
investment. In Brazil, where much of the middle class serves as
landlord to the poor, ownership of a few tenements (porticos) leverages
many professionals and middle managers into Copacabana lifestyles.
Researchers for UN-HABITAT were surprised to find that "portico rent
price per square meter in Sao Paulo is around 90 percent higher than in
the formal market."55 In Quito wealthy landowners sell off parcels of
land in foothills and steep ravines - usually above the 2850-meter city
limit, the highest level to which the muncipal system can pump water
- through intermediaries (urbanizadores piratas) to land-hungry ' immigrants,
letting the residents later fight for city services. 56 Discussing
Bogota's "pirate housing market," land economist Umberto Molina
claims that speculators are developing the urban periphery at
"monopoly prices" and enormous profits. 57
52 Nedoroscik, The City f the Dead, p. 42.
53 Brennan, "Urban Land and Housing Issues Facing the Third \X'orld," p. 76.
54 Dayaratne and Samarawickrama, "Empowering Communities, p. 102.
55 Fix, Arantes, and Tanaka, "Sao Paulo, Brazil," p. 18.
56 Glasser, "The Growing Housing Crisis in Ecuador," p. 151. For Quito, see also
Gerrit Burgwal, Caciquismo, Paralelismo and Clientelismo: The Histmy 0/ a Quito Squatter
Settlement, Amsterdam 1993.
57 Umberto Molina, "Bogota: Competition and Substitution Between Urban
Land Markets," in Baken and van der Linden, p. 300.
ILLUSIONS OF SELF-HELP 87
In her book on Lagos, Margaret Peil explains that "there has been
much less squatting ... than in eastern Africa or Latin America because
the low level of government control over construction meant that
legitimate houses could be easily and profitably built: housing the poor
was good business ... the safest investment available, producing a quick
return on capital."58 Wealthier Lagos landlords prefer to lease rather
than sell land so that they can retain control of profits in a rapidly
appreciating land market. 59 As in Kenya, politicians, along with traditional
chiefs, have been prominent amongst the larger-scale speculators
in slum housing.60
Nairobi's slums, meanwhile, are vast rent plantations owned by
politicians and the upper middle class. Although most of the private
rental development "has no formal legal basis ... property relations
and ownership [thanks to a corrupt political system] exist in a de facto
sense."61 In Mathare 4A, where 28,000 people - the poorest of the
poor - rent 9-by-12-meter mud-and-wattle hovels, the absentee landlords,
according to a researcher for the :Ministry of Roads, are
"powerful, forceful behind the scenes and are often prominent public
figures, those connected to them or very wealthy individuals or
firms."62 "Fifty-seven percent of the dwellings in one Nairobi slum,"
write UN researchers in another study, "are owned by politicians and
civil servants, and the shacks are the most profitable housing in the city.
A slumlord who pays $160 for a 100-square-foot shack can recoup the
entire investment in months."63
Land speculation, as these Nairobi cases illustrate, can thrive even
where the land involved is officially in the public domain - Egypt,
Pakistan, China and Mali offer other egregious examples. In metro
Cairo, writes architect-planner Khaled Adham, "the selling-off of
58 Margaret Peil, Lagos: The City Is the People, London 1991, p. 146.
59 Margaret Peil, "Urban Housing and Services in Anglophone West Africa," in
Hamish Main and Stephen Williams (eds), Environment and Housing in Third World Cities,
Chichester 1994, p. 176.
60 Drakakis-Smith, Third World Cities, p. 146.
61 Amis, "Commercialized Rental Housing in Nairobi," p. 245.
62 Patrick Wasike, "The Redevelopment of Large Informal Settlements in
Nairobi," Ministry of Roads and Public Works, Kenya, nd.
63 Cited in Davan Maharaj, "Living on Pennies," part four, Los Angeles Times, 16
July 2004.