Toward an Urban Housing Strategy

This essay will examine the development of housing strategies for low and moderate income countries by framing a set of questions, attempting to answer those questions, considering the policy implications of the questions, and developing strategies for dealing with those policy implications. The questions we consider come naturally from various bifurcations of housing fundamentals. Costs come from either land or improvements. Tenure ranges from owning to renting, with some gradients in between. Finance comes from equity and debt. Beyond these bifurcations, we consider settlement patterns of the poor. In some instances, the poor settle in centrally located slums, such as Dharavi and Makoko; in other instances, such as Mexico City, they settle in peri-urban areas.