Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [34]
The solution, in theory at least, is just over the hill. Within sight of Eunice’s shack, rising along the horizon, is a growing cluster of neat, gray, high-rise buildings, with red roofs and small concrete balconies, the site of an expansive slum-redevelopment project, to which Kibera’s residents are, theoretically, to be moved into stable, sanitary, fully-owned apartment housing. It is a project initiated by UN-HABITAT, the United Nations human-settlements agency, whose world headquarters happen to be within walking distance of Kibera. That such a redevelopment project could only be launched three decades after the U.N. set up shop here is telling. That Eunice Orembo believes that she will never live in these houses is even more telling.
The project, called KENSUP, is typical of slum-redevelopment projects taking place in such cities as São Paulo, Istanbul, and Beijing. It is, in some ways, reminiscent of similar efforts, popularly known as “the projects,” that transformed the inner cities of the United States between the 1950s and 1970s: The inhabitants of the chosen neighborhood (this project is starting with the one next to Eunice’s, known as Soweto) are moved into a “decanting site” for months or years as their old shacks are demolished and replaced with apartment buildings with plumbing, sewage, and electricity; they are typically given title deeds on these apartments, with a small mortgage to be paid off at rates similar to their previous rent payments. This is an improvement on the previous method employed by Kenya and many other countries: the mass demolition of slums and expulsion of their residents, justified by the twin mythologies that slum-dwellers are a cause of urban poverty and that the presence of an unmolested slum will encourage further migration. These bulldozings (which continue at a lower intensity today) had the effect of destroying small-business networks, demolishing capital that had been saved for lifetimes, and scattering people into hundreds of smaller, more precarious slums or into homelessness. So, in 2000, when Kenya’s government acknowledged that slum dwellings ought to be improved rather than eliminated, it was a revolutionary change.
The problem with so many of these rehousing projects is that governments fail to realize that better housing will always have higher commercial value, and that people in slums, as much as anyone in the middle class, view their housing as a source of equity. Slum-dwellers around the world are continually and obsessively interested in the property values of their dwellings, for the real-estate market is one of the most effective levers for escaping poverty. There is nothing quite as empowering as having a full, legal title deed on your property: Ownership gives slum-dwellers legitimacy and rights they’d never possessed before. One of those rights is the right to sell the property. If the apartments were not much larger than a slum hut and had communal plumbing, they would be traded among other arrival-city residents. But the apartments in the KENSUP project, as in many such initiatives, have been built to Kenya’s legal housing standards, designed for the middle class, which require two fully habitable rooms, making them effectively a three-room apartment whose value far exceeds that of slum housing. Slum-dwellers quickly realize that there are two ways to extract this value: either by renting two of the rooms to other families and living in the third (thus ending up with a smaller and less private house than the original slum shack) or “selling” it to a middle-class family (using a gray-market “secret” deed to circumvent slum-development rules against such transactions). The gains from such a sale can be enough to put your children through university or start a small business—even though it means moving back into a slum shack.