WorldDevelopment Vol. I, pp.
1017-1022
Pergamon Press Ltd. 1979. Printed in Great Britain
Housing Policy in Developing Countries:
Two Puzzles
LISA PEATTIE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This exploration of issues in housing policy
in developing countries will centre around two
puzzles.
Puzzle number one is: Why is there a housing
problem?
By this I do not mean the sort of thing
which is intended when it is said - usually in a
rather rhetorical spirit - Why do the richest
cities in the world have their slums? Why are
government programmes for housing the poor
ridiculously inadequate to the need?, etc. Such
questions imply the existence of the housing
problem, and ask why nobody has yet solved it.
I mean by my puzzle something different: Why
does the housing problem exist as a part of the
social construction of reality?
One notes that the deficiencies and in-
equalities characteristic of the housing sphere
exist with respect to food and clothing as well;
indeed, their existence is nowhere denied.
People more frequently die from lack of food
than from lack of housing. Nor do we have to
get to the starvation level for these things to be
important. Differential distribution in both
clothing and food has consequences which are
not only the immediately experienced depri-
vation of those on the short end, but the lower-
ing of their social status. The contrast between
Snow White and the dwarfs was presumably a
story-teller’s version of the contrast in tra-
ditional societies between the squat peasantry
and the taller ‘aristocratic-looking’ upper class.
Even in England at the turn of the century, a
survey found a 5411. difference in height be-
tween 12-yr-olds from the public schools used
by the elite and the State schools serving the
working class.’ Yet the feeding problem and
clothing problem nowhere attain the social
standing of the housing problem on the agenda
of policy concerns. There is bound to be a Min-
istry of Housing - but where is the Ministry of
Feeding?
The special standing of the housing problem
does not seem to emanate from what ‘show biz’
calls overwhelming popular demand or an ap-
1017
praisal of household priorities. A study of per-
sons sleeping on the pavements in Bombay
found that many had resided in the city in this
manner for many years, and were not particu-
larly anxious to change their living arrange-
ments;2 they had no housing, but not, relative
to their concerns, a housing problem. A survey
of squatters in Nairobi found that funds for an
improved standard of shelter came ninth on a
list of priorities; it was preceded by, in order of
frequency, food, housing at the standard of
shelter current at the squatter location, school
fees, clothes, money to buy land, money to
contribute to the extended family, money to
extend a business, money to build an additional
room, perhaps for rental. After all these came
‘money to rent or buy a better house or room
to live ir~‘.~
When one begins to take the existence of the
housing problem as itself problematic, it may
also appear anomalous that the housing prob-
lem as a social construct is set in cities. Es-
pecially in developing countries, rural housing is
notoriously rudimentary, yet disquisitions on
the housing problem in such countries almost
invariably begin with an alarming account of
the rapid pace of urbanization out of which the
housing problem is seen to arise.
We may thus come to suspect that the hous-
ing problem is not so much a natural object, as
a social institution. Taken in this light, it may
be investigated in the way that an anthropol-
ogist or sociologist might investigate any other
social institution, by identifying the functions
and meanings which place it within a social and
cultural system. I shall certainly not offer here
such a complete investigation, much less an
analysis or theory, but will put forward some
beginnings towards a more complete analysis.
What are the areas in which housing acquires
function and meaning within society?
Housing is of course in one of its aspects the
‘dwelling unit’, the behaviour setting within
which the household members live and interact,
and which they pay for in order to carry out
1018 WORLDDEVELOPMENT
daily life. Dwellings acquire in this aspect all
kinds of personal associations and private sym-
bolisms; as seen in the resistance of old people
to move into some more ‘efficient’ unit. The
contrast between the formal ‘parlour’ where
guests are received and the kitchen where ordi-
nary familial interaction goes on becomes a way
of ,defming the boundary between the family
group and outsider guests. ‘Bedrooms’ become
important elements in structuring the socially-
approved degree of propinquity and distance
between family members. Such elements of
private, domestic life enter into housing policy
as they come to constitute elements of the con-
ventionally acceptable standard of housing; not
for nothing does American housing legislation
add the term ‘decent’ to ‘safe and sanitary’ in
identifying what the goal of policy should be.
As ‘standards’ these spatial rituals of domestic
life and the interest in their maintenance then
come to enter into the housing problem.
Housing is also for the users a position of
access to the urban economy; in this respect,
the expenditures on housing can be regarded as
a kind of ‘cover charge’ entitling those who pay
it to be rhere among the resources of the city.
Actually, of course, a standard dwelling unit is
not the only possible mode of access to the
urban game. The function can be rendered by a
mat unrolled on the pavement, a sleeping bag
unrolled on a friend’s floor or by a bench in an
unpoliced railway station. In the cities of the
developing world, millions of people live in
improvised shelters under viaducts, in gullies,
even along railroad right-of-ways with the
shacks neatly calibrated to clear passing trains
by a few inches; these rudimentary dwellings,
scandalous, illegal, as ‘substandard’ to those
who inhabit and defend them as to the bureau-
crats who deplore them, represent the struggle
for economic ascent in societies where the op-
portunities are concentrated in space, and in
which only those whose claim on resources is
well established socially can afford to be sep-
arated spatially from the place where they are
to be struggled for.
For this aspect of the interest in housing, in
contrast to the preceding one, ‘standards’ are
almost irrelevant; it is tenure which is the criti-
cal element. But of course the two are not
wholly independent; the gradient between the
sleeper on the railway station bench, the squat-
ter in his shack in the gully below the big hotel,
the legal tenant and the householder is not
merely one of residential standard, but also one
of entitlement to be there. The process of con-
solidation in squatter settlements, in which
people who start with provisional structures of
mats or scrap gradually build in permanent
materials dwellings of conventional standard, is
also a process in which a hold on the location
is acquired; governments frequently bulldoze
shacks, but rarely houses.
For Engels, and following him most mod-
em Marxists, the housing problem arises from
the need of urban workers for housing if they
are to continue to provide labour, and of the
attempt by employers to minimize housing
costs so as to minimize wages. This is certainly
an important, a critical, element in the social
constitution of the housing problem. But I be-
lieve that the housing problem as an institution
could hardly be understood if this were all.
Indeed, in the recent interchange between Rod
Burgess and John Turner in this joumal,5 Bur-
gess, I believe, much advances the level of de-
bate by incorporating into the discussion the
interests - rather shorted by Engels - derived
from the valorization of land and the valoriz-
ation of capital via the construction industry.
Because housing is locational, the housing
problem also incorporates complicated interests
around rent - and who gets it. There is specu-
lation around this at all levels, from the large
real estate entrepreneur, to the smallest squat-
ter. Because in developing cities land values are
continually rising, and because these rises incor-
porate large elements of monopoly rent, people
with any control over housing - legal or de
facto - will tend to take this into account, both
in investment and personal use. This issue in
turn links housing to other urban interests and
rules, for rent is a socialeconomic phenomenon
par excellence, dependent on legal and custom-
ary systems of tenure, government building and
zoning regulation, policies of expropriation,
policies of building control, systems of trans-
portation and the like.‘j Those with an interest
in the housing problem from the perspective of
rental profit may want to put a finger into any
of these.
The housing problem also represents a set of
interests around the construction of dwellings.
Who builds and who profits? The housing codes
of cities in industrialized countries are closely
connected with the success of organized build-
ing trades workers in excluding non-union
labour from construction; from this understand-
ing it is hard to escape the suspicion that one
element in attention to the housing problem in
developing countries is an interest by construc-
tors and building materials suppliers in selling
to a market - low-income families - which
would otherwise be inaccessible. Indeed, I have
developed the view elsewhere’ that the sites-
and-services projects which are currently the in-
 HOUSING POLICY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
goodcurrency solution to housing the poor in
developing countries have as a perhaps uncon-
scious function that of organizing a market
which previously dealt with fly-by-night con-
struction workers and small cheap materials
sellers into one which can use the services of
social workers, standard materials sellers and
large builders of core units.
Housing is also, for low-income people in
developing countries, not merely part of the
consumption package but of productive capital.
For example, a recent study of a low-income
neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince underlines the
importance of private shelter ‘to sustain trade
and manufacturing activities’ through consti-
tuting the space to store and transform goods.*
People not only sell off part of their dwelling in
the form of rental rooms or apartments, they
mount shops, manufacture goods, sell services.
From this perspective, one might view the de-
canting of squatters into government apart-
ments as an urban version of that process which
has historically separated people from the
means of production and converted them into
proletarians dependent on the sale of their
labour to others.
Finally, housing has aspects of social presen-
tation. The house is the public face not only of
individuals and families, but of governments.
For a government in search of legitimacy, a con-
spicuous attack on the housing problem through
the building of dwelling units is a uniquely ap-
propriate vehicle, combining as it does the pub-
lic building’s high visibility with the implication
of a lively concern with the daily problems of
ordinary people. For governments, it permits
the exercise of patronage towards specific’tar-
get groups’ in a context socially defined as one
of general betterment.
This aspect of things creates some oper-
ational problems for housing policy. Sites-and-
services projects, touted as the way to solve the
housing problem of the poorest, have tended to
suffer an upward drift in standards and costs,g
pricing them out of the reach of these, in re-
sponse to the accusation that government
should not be building or even promoting slums.
The Allende government’s commitment to a
housing programme beyond its resources to
achieve was no doubt not the most serious diffi-
culty of the beleagured socialists, but it was not
the least of these either; and it was, in turn,
made almost inevitable by the need to do at
least as well and hopefully better than the Frei
government preceding it - which had also tried
to win the workers through housing.
Do all these considerations answer the ques-
tion, Why is there a housing problem? Perhaps
I019
not, but they at least suggest the number of
interests which are involved in it as a going in-
stitution. It may at least carry us far enough to
leave puzzle one for puzzle two.
Puzzle two is: Why is government housing
policy in developing countn’es so characteristi-
cally odd? Or, to put it more specifically: Why
do the governments of capitalist developing
countries so characteristically behave, in the
housing field, in a way which seems counter to
the interests of the capitalist employing class?
The usual story is this. The developing
country is proceeding with a pattern of devel-
opment which is ‘uneven’ economically and
spatially. Government policy may be to en-
courage decentralization or it may not; but in
any case, in practice, the new and growing
enterprises are mainly located in the largest
cities where they find the appropriate services
and infrastructure, not to mention proximity
to government, and where newly-establishing
firms benefit from linkages to the already-
settled. Pricing policies often work against agri-
culture: in any event, both wages and oppor-
tunities - as for education - are better in the
city than in the countryside. People flock in to
cities from the rural areas in search of those
opportunites. Despite the attempts of labour
organizations to keep wages up, the presence
of this large labour reserve helps dampen the
pressure for wage increases, with, presumably,
helpful consequences to enterprise profitability.
The municipal goverment complains about the
cost of extending water and sewer lines to the
new squatter settlements - but actually, as it
works out, this new urban labour force is
mainly making do with a minimum of public
services. Meanwhile, by assembling their own
housing one way or another on the cheap, they
are saving both the State and their employers
from the burden of doing anything about it.
Liberal architects, inspired by the lectures of
John Turner, see astonishing vitality in the
popular ‘self-help’ architecture of the squatter
settlements, and acclaim these as ‘not the prob-
lem but the solution’.1° Meanwhile, the Marxist
Left quotes Engels and says that the squatter
settlements are simply getting employers off
the hook and contributing to super exploitation,
while at the same time spreading all sorts of
false consciousness among workers as to where
their interests really lie.
Support for this view of the process might
be derived, oddly enough, from the peculiar
circumstance that the Soviets have reproduced
many of the major elements of the situation in
capitalist countries. The mechanism in the
USSR appears to be not so much squatter settle-
1020 WORLD DEVELOPMENT
ments as restrictions on migration to cities. This
policy, combined with a capital-intensive, physi-
cally concentrated pattern of economic growth
much like that in the capitalist world means
that, as in the capitalist cities of Latin America,
there is a substantial portion of the work-force
which cannot get access to the regular or ‘stan-
dard’ housing stock. In the larger cities as much
as a quarter of the workers live in inferior hous-
ing in the rural areas outside the city limits and
commute in to work, the surplus produced by
their labour then being appropriated by the
State and applied in part to the production of
standard apartments for the more favoured
members of the system.”
But now, returning to the capitalist world,
we see that a strange thing happens. Evidently
the capitalist class has not read or not assimi-
lated the Marxist-liberal debate on squatters,
for the local government now embarks on a big
campaign of clearing substandard shacks. Ig-
noring alike tears and threats of the residents,
and the arguments of the Marxists as to how
the settlements served the interests of capitalist
growth, they send in the bulldozers. Some part
at least of the displaced residents are now re-
housed in subsidized dwellings which, while
lacking charm and being usually in inappropri-
ate locations with respect to employment, are
closer to the ‘standard’.
In Rio de Janeiro new workingclass districts
are now so far from the centres of employment
that maddened commuters, struggling with
what is often a 2-hr journey to work on an ob-
solescing train system, have a number of times
rioted and destroyed trains and/or stations.
In the case of one project with which I was
involved for several years in Venezuela, it was
possible to see these policy contradictions
played out within a single government agency.
The Guayana Corporation was both the plan-
ning agency for a new city on the Orinoco and
the manager of the city’s largest industry, a
steel mill. In its role as employer, the agency
was legally required to provide transportation
and pay travel time for steel mill workers. Yet
in its planning role, the agency was so negative
to the idea of ‘shacks’ in the part of the city
which was conceived of as the showcase and
residential area for higher-income persons, that
an urban form evolved in which the majority of
the steel mill’s workers were commuting daily
from a substantial distance and across a river,
creating terrible traffic bottlenecks on the
bridge. The resulting travel costs had, of course,
to become part of the cost of steel production.
Perhaps the answer to puzzle one and puzzle
two is in some sense the same, lying in the mul-
tiplicity and institutional importance of the
organized interests relating to housing. The
number and importance of organized interests
relating to housing insures the establishment of
the housing problem as part of the social con-
struction of reality; if there were not a housing
problem we would have to invent it. But the
multiplicity of groups makes for contradictory
policy. In some sense, close examination might
reveal that there is not a single housing problem
but several, depending on perspective. Various
alliances between groups are possible, and vary-
ing alliances will produce different, and often
conflicting, thrusts of policy.
On the one hand, employers and workers
have interests which are at one level conflicting,
but at another collusive, in guaranteeing access
of workers to the workplace. These interests are
very likely to align themselves differently with
respect to different classes of workers. For
unskilled workers, competing within a large
pool of more-or-less surplus labour, the issue
seems to present itself less as one of wage bar-
gaining, than as one of access to jobs on what-
ever terms, and hedging against insecurity by
maximum flexibility in expenditures and mul-
tiple earning options. Such workers may share
with employers an interest in preserving the
‘squatter solution’; what to the employer rep-
resents a low-wage adjustment is to the worker
a housing format offering maximum budgetary
flexibility both as to expenditures (the squat-
ter-builder can reduce housing expenditures
almost to zero when necessary) and as to eam-
ings (since the owner-controlled dwelling can be
used to start a business or be rented to lodgers.)
On the other hand, workers more advantaged
in the bargaining process may negotiate wages
upwards and include housing in the package;
and employers may go along, seeing their own
advantage in stabilizing and tying to the firm a
body of skilled workers. Again, circumstances
will shape the perspective taken by both. Where
land and real estate values are rising rapidly,
workers are motivated to treat their housing as
an investment, with reference to the creation of
rental profit, rather than simply as part of the
consumption package; but employers may take
the same perspective, so that the housing prob-
lem comes to involve a struggle between the
two as to which will control, and profit from,
the housing stock.
Government policy on housing has to re-
spond to various conflicting interests. On the
one hand, there is the interest central to the
Marxist argument in keeping a pool of labour
available at minimum cost; this would argue for
ignoring the growth of squatter settlements.
 HOUSING POLICY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Furthermore, the members of such settlements
are voters or potential sources of unrest; this
may lead to moves to actively legitimize their
presence. On the other hand, such consider-
ations may be counterbalanced by pressure
from real estate interests which want to displace
the squatters to use the land for more profitable
developments; this was certainly much of the
story in Rio. At a still more general level, a
government which is committed to preserving
private property interests in land can hardly
allow ‘squatting’ to become so general as to
cloud the security of land ownership generally.
It often seems that much of the zigging and
zagging of government policies towards such
settlements is explicable in terms of the irrec-
oncilable competition between the policies
suggested by these two sets of pressures. Finally,
of course, government has interests of its own,
from which derives the search for ‘respectable
face’. The slum clearance in central Lagos seems
to have been largely motivated by such con-
siderations, rather than by the pressure from
potential developers; the government of Nigeria
found it embarassing for foreign visitors to see
the central city slums. Actual redevelopment
was notably slow in forthcoming.12 Such con-
siderations at the level of national pride may be
reflected in the concern of particular housing
agencies, lest they be seen to be producing less-
NOTES
1. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in
the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1973).
2. P. Ramachandran, Pavement Dwellers in Bombay
City (Tata Institute of Social Science, September
1972).
3. Andrew Hake, Afican Metropolis (New York:
Saint Martin’s Press, 1977).
4. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872).
5. Rod Burgess, ‘Petty commodity housing or
dweller control? A critique of John Turner’s views on
housing policy’ and John F. C. Turner, ‘Housing in
three dimensions: terms of reference for the housing
question redefined’, World Development Vol. 6, Nos.
9/10 (September/October 1978).
6. See Matthew Edel, ‘Marx’s theory of rent: urban
applications’ in Kapitaistate: Working Papers on the
CapitaZist State, Nos. 4-5 (Summer 1976), pp. lOO-
124.
7. William A. Doebele and Lisa R. Peattie, ‘Some
second thoughts on sites and services’ (unpublished).
1021
than-creditable projects; this leads to setting
physical standards at a relatively high level, and
selecting betterestablished families to fill the
projects resulting.
Looking back from such considerations to
the Marxist-liberal debate on ‘squatters’, one
sees that each party focuses on a different strain
in national housing policy. The Marxists focus
on the interest in maintaining a labour pool at
minimal housing cost, and derive from this an
interest in permitting ‘squatter settlements’.
The liberals focus on issues of government ‘re-
spectability’ and derive from this an interest in
policies of building and regulation which re-
strict ‘squatting’ and maintain ‘standards’. Both
are right. There is not a single government
interest, and thus no clear-cut, unambiguous
government policy. Rather, there are diverse
and conflicting interests, and, shifting alliances
between them. One then comes to see the hous-
ing problem as a complex social institution
within which various groups contend in con-
tinually shifting disequilibrium.
It may not be impertinent to suggest that
the contribution Marxist analysis might make is
less likely to be in the format of an overall ‘class
analysis’, than in the analysis of the specific
constellations of power and conflict in specific
times and places.
8. Simon M. Fass, Families in Port-Au-prince: A
Study of the Economics of Survival (Technical Assist-
ante Bureau, Agency for International Development,
30 September 1977), mimeo.
9. See Richard Murdoch Beardmore, Sites und Ser-
vices.’ A Srrategy for Kenyan Urban Development
(MIT thesis), 1978.
10. John F. C. Turner, ‘Barriers and channels for
housing development in modernizing countries’,
Journal of The American institute of Planners, Vol.
XxX111, No. 3 (May 1967), pp. 167-181; John F. C.
Turner, ‘Housing priorities, settlement patterns and
urban development in modernizing countries’, Journal
of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. XXXIV,
No. 6 (November 1968), pp. 354-363; John F. C.
Turner, ‘Architecture that works’, Ekistics, Vol. 27,
No. 158 (January 1969), pp. 40-44; John F. C. Tur-
ner, Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Build-
ing Environments (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976);
William Mangin, ‘Latin American squatter settlements:
a problem and a solution’, Latin American Research
Review (1967), pp. 65-98; William Mangin, ‘Squatter
settlements’, Scientific American Vol. 217, No. 4
(October 1967), pp. 21-29; Wim Mangin, ‘The
barriada movement’, Progressive Architecture (May
1968), pp. 154-162.
1022 WORLD DEVELOPMENT

11. Ivan Szelenyi, ‘Urban sociology and community 12. Peter Marris, Family and Social Change in an
studies in Eastern Europe: reflections and comparisons African City: A Study of Rehousing in Lagos (Evans-
with American approaches’, Comparative Urban Re- ton, IUinois: Northwestern University Press, 1962).
search, Vol. 4, Nos. 2-3 (1977). pp. 10-20.