“Slumification” of Consolidated Informal Settlements: A Largely Unseen Challenge

Abstract

Home ownership increasingly dominates the housing stock in most poor cities across the globe. Rental housing is in relative decline. Nevertheless, the numbers of tenants in most cities are usually increasing even though neither the state nor the commercial landlords are interested in creating rental housing. The vacuum has been filled by small-scale investors many of whom live in self-help settlements that now surround most poor cities. These landlords largely function outside the law and are invisible to most governments. Indeed, the lack of an explicit strategy for rental housing is surprisingly one of the great lacunae in housing policy in most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.