Housing the poor: Mumbai’s underground rental market

Rakhi Mehra, Founder, micro Home Solutions contributed this article to the urb.im blog. The urb.im network is a global community working for just and sustainable cities. Read the original post here.

About 80 percent of low-income rental units in India exist in the informal market. These affordable units house Mumbai’s working poor and are rented out by makeshift landlords, who are often poor themselves but who capitalize on any extra space they have at home. Often, the rental units are simply partitioned-off areas of slum or resettlement housing which act as secondary sources of income for the “landlords.” The spaces for rent are rudimentary but often in central locations, offering a cost-efficient way for Mumbai’s laborers to live near their work.

Take Chetan, for example. He is 27 years old, from a village near Kolkota, and one of millions of migrant laborers in Mumbai. He works seven days a week photographing visitors at the Gateway of India — a national landmark — for a small fee, US$0.40 per click. He earns about INR12,000 ($225) a month for his work and pays INR1,800 ($33) for a room he shares with four others, just 15 minutes from the Gateway. His landlord runs a tea stall, lives in the adjoining room, and earns a few thousand rupees more than Chetan.

For migrant laborers, renting makes sense. Many migrants are short-term residents, earning enough during short spurts of work to then return to their home villages. While in the city, their circumstances are precarious, and work opportunities come and go quickly. Renting, as opposed to home ownership — which has dominated the government’s policy focus for the urban poor — allows for flexibility and a fluidity that matches the migrants’ life and experiences in the city. Chetan, for example, does not pay rent when he returns to his family in his home village for months at a time. While there is certainly a place for home ownership for the urban poor — some of whom have been the fabric of this city for generations — a mixed housing stock is essential for meeting their varying shelter needs.

Is policy stifling the affordable rental market?

If the poor are renting from the poor, then it seems to be a win-win situation. Affordable rooms are being made available in a city with a crisis-level housing shortage, and the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor has shown yet another to way to squeeze water from the stones around them.

Yet the government’s approach to renting and supporting this informal market has been less than favorable. In fact, a study by Professor Sunil Kumar at the London School of Economics, who has researched rental policy frameworks in India, says the government’s policies are blocking the informal rental market, thereby distorting the only available and affordable rental market for migrants to the city. He cites an example from Surat, a city north of Mumbai in the state of Gujarat, where resettlement housing for former slum dwellers has been limited to a meager 15 square meters with “an implicit aim … to prevent the construction of rooms for rent.”

The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) has set up a poorly designed policy in its rental scheme. Qualifying families, for example, must have a 15-year residency proof and a monthly household income above INR 5,000 ($US93). However, according to the 12th Plan Working Group on Financing Urban Infrastructure, about 90 percent of the housing shortage in the country pertains to people in the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) who have a monthly income below INR 5,000. Even if the average income in Mumbai is higher than national average, the policy is still blocking out the poorest of the poor — those who need affordable housing the most.

Unsurprisingly, the MMRDA is woefully behind in its ambitious goal set in 2008 to build 500,000 rental units within five years. By the end of 2012, only the first 2,500 units will have been constructed.

Ideas for formalizing underground rentals

Rental markets play a critical role in the efficient functioning of a city. In Mumbai, to promote renting is an important step in the poverty-reduction process. Studies show that those who have early access to stable shelter achieve faster stability of income. For the urban poor ever to improve their circumstances, affordable, stable housing is an essential base. In order to move in this direction, the MMRDA and other city municipalities around the country will need to rethink their approach to designing a diverse housing stock, including rentals that serve both families and individual migrants like Chetan.

In the meantime, Mumbai has a goal to meet: at the end of 2012 — with only one year remaining before the deadline — it will have met just 0.5 percent of its goal of 500,000 affordable rental units. With this process so far behind schedule, perhaps it’s time for the city to consider how to incorporate the underground, informal rental market for the poor into its countable stock. The MMRDA could encourage informal private landlords by complementing the housing with basic infrastructure services — water, sewage, and so on — in these neighborhoods and explore the benefits of bringing construction finance and tax incentives for landlords and rent vouchers for tenants. The result of appropriately regulating the informal rental market may be just the boost the city needs to improve housing options. And if innovative incentives are introduced to benefit these “landlords” and their renters, the new approach would be a more inclusive way forward for affordable urban housing.

The challenge of changing mindsets: The DHS experience

Vyas Yengkhom writes about the human tendency to accept and the challenge of questioning what has become the norm. Vyas is an architect and has been with mHS since its inception.

“The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics”. – Honore de Balzac 

“With no common sense, there can, not be a society” – Vyas Yengkhom

I had no idea what my journey of life as an architect would be like when it began. I’d like to believe that architecture as a profession is a life full of surprises. The study and practise of architecture has changed the way I think and the way I live; encouraged me to observe critically and dream of the impossible….. and I was fortunate I found an unusual place to start my professional journey in micro Home Solutions.

My work in mHS has instilled in me the concept of being multi and inter disciplinary. I have been here for about two and a half years and it still intrigues me how, as we continue to live in society, we get used to everything around us till it is hard to pin-point and say, “Hey that’s wrong, that’s bad etc…” even if you know it is wrong. From my experience on the field working with mHS, I have realised that the most convincing thing anyone could say is, “Whoa! What’s the problem? Everything has been this way and it can go on!”.

One of my favorite mHS’s projects in this context is DHS- Design Home Solutions, which works to influence people to change precisely this line of thinking in which we accept whatever is the norm without questioning it. DHS targets with homeowners in low-income settlements who are building their homes incrementally. Currently, self-construction in India’s low-income settlements is done by a local mason and safety and quality of life are severely compromised. DHS is designed to help homeowners access finance to rebuild fresh homes while simultaneously offering them technical assistance to design and build a better and safer home.

I worked on the DHS pilot project in Mangolpuri in Delhi from start to finish. The experience has been great but the influencing bit is the real challenge. It will probably take many years to win over mindsets of people and bring about improvements in poor construction practices we see right now. Also DHS, with its organic nature, is a tough concept to manoeuvre around.

We have our fingers crossed and we are hoping to see more DHS projects coming up on the ground. I will leave you with some illustrations.

This was our initial experience with DHS. It wasn't easy for homeowners to accept the changes we proposed to the way they currently built. Stages 4 and 5 are where things are not going as planned!

This set of drawings shows our improved experience with DHS, which included close monitoring (especially steps 3 to 6)

 

 

 

Comfortably Slum!

Nipesh P Narayanan, architect and urban designer with mHS argues that it is the poor conditions of slums that make them affordable. To find solutions for housing the urban poor, we need to stop seeing land as a commodity and view it as a resource for the betterment of citizens, he argues.

More than half the population in Delhi (and in all the metro cities) lives in settlements that are comfortably termed as slums. The majority of the population are categorized in this manner with such negative connotation that the only viable option perceivable is a philanthropic approach of pumping in public money to improve their condition. Already (as of Dec 2011) almost 30,000 Crore rupees (INR 300,000 Million) has been spent for ‘Basic Services to Urban Poor’ under JNNURM and the preparatory phase of Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) itself has spent almost 30 Crores (INR 300 Million) for 38 cities, this is apart from 1000 crore rupees as mortgage guarantee fund. World Bank also now intends to pump $ 300 million for low income housing through NHB. This is not something new; we keep spending money with no results. Slums keep growing and their condition worsening. Are slums a necessary evil for the development model that we have chosen? Is there no way to get rid of slums? Why all the money that went in, is not bringing any change in the status of slums all over the country?

Most of the interventions that are currently being done are to improve the condition of the slums. So the basic ideology is that slums are not a good place to live in, or are they? Slum as a term had different connotations until in 2002 when UN came up with a common definition of slum as described below

So the basic definition of slum revolves around the infrastructure and tenure of the place (except for the poor structural quality); thus a notion that, improving the infrastructure will improve housing condition. India is having an infrastructure boom, still the slum population is growing; more people in slums live in poorer conditions today than before.

To put it straight, if all the slums in Delhi have tenure rights and proper infrastructure then will there be no slums in future? …. RAY now focuses on bringing tenure rights to all slum dwellers, looks like a magical formula, but it should be noted that Madhya Pradesh government (and subsequently Rajasthan, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh) passed an act to regularize tenure of landless persons in urban area throughout the state way back in 1984, yielding to nothing more than just capitalizing on vote banks.

“…. it is too simplistic to assume that tenure regularization and infrastructure  improvement will, in any case lead to improved housing condition of the poor…” (Banerjee, B. 2006)

The basic reason that the slums still exist is that we have been focusing on the symptoms than on the disease….. more affordable housing with subsidy….spending money for physical infrastructure…. accessible finance….. all these are important but still the core reason for mushrooming of slums remain unanswered….. THE LAND!

Affordable housing, or finance to urban poor are initiatives that can perhaps be taken care by private players with some help from the government, but the issue of land is something which needs a broader policy perspective. Even builders who are ready to build affordable housing want land for free, so that makes the selling price of the house much lesser than the market rate, opening obvious inefficiencies. If one studies any of the slum resettlement colonies (colonies created for relocated slum dwellers, usually in the outskirts of the city) of Delhi, it can be easily seen that most of the original allottees have sold their land informally to someone else.

The genesis of the land issue in Delhi started with the establishment of DIT (Delhi Improvement Trust) in 1937, which was motivated by profit generation concept from Nazul land as developed by R B Whitehead report of 1908. Post independence also when DDA was formulated in 1955, the main ‘weapon’ it had was the ‘land acquisition act of 1884’. DDA became the biggest land speculator of the city-state by acquiring land and selling it for making huge profits, on the pretext of generating money for developing affordable housing – which is a paradox. One can’t speculate to increase the land prizes and provide affordable housing at the same time.

When land becomes a tradeable commodity and speculation becomes a profit making game, then the poor and marginalized are pushed out to the so called slums.The very poor condition of these areas is what is making it affordable. Improving the housing condition will naturally let the market to force creation of new slums – and the vicious cycle continues till the land is rationalized.

Rationalization of land doesn’t mean that there be forceful restrictions, which never work, but a thorough study of the market dynamics and delinking speculation of land from the development process. We can see that the Dharavi model, or the much acclaimed PPP model where every project seems to derive its main funding by trading land which is counterproductive for the development of an inclusive city.

Land in an urban context is a common resource like water and air, which should be utilized for betterment of the citizens. Any project which perceives land as a money generation avenue creates the basis for most of the urban problems- – physical and social.

A new life! Reflections of a Spanish intern

Miguel Angel de la Fuente’s account of his internship at mHS

This is an account of my experiences at mHS over the last two months.  Before the end of 2011, I was a student of Civil Engineering in Spain, trying to finalize my Thesis in my modest city of 300,000 people. In this brief period, my life has been the complete opposite. I have come to Delhi, with a population of 16 millions, with its crazy traffic and never ending honking. I have had to get used to a new culture (sometimes completely opposite to mine) in a short time, make new friends, try to balance work with travel because I am in a country that might never visit again.

But maybe the most important change for me is the beginning of my professional career. For me my internship in micro Home Solutions is my first job, with all that that implies. It is the first time I have noticed that is not so easy to apply in real life everything I learnt during my studies. That as an engineer, you are supposed to know lots of things that I won’t know until I put it in practice or until some experienced engineer teaches me.

And besides all this, my first job has been in India. This means that the official language is English. I never thought I would have a problem with level of English, what with my well-known Cambridge title! But once I arrived I noticed my level was not so good and I couldn’t express all my ideas. Thankfully I think I have improved in this issue. The other problem India poses for a foreigner in his first job is the “professional environment”. You can write a thousand emails without response, wait for a call for years, listen a hundred times to “I will send it to you in half an hour” (Indian time) or spend a whole day going from one side of the city to the other to get some useless sample.

Luckily this first job has been in mHS, where I have found a multicultural environment, with colleagues always willing to help me (or maybe inside their heads they are waiting for me to close my mouth). In mHS I have learnt lots of things related to my field, what it’s very good for my career, but even better for my growth as a person, I have learnt lots of things about the non architectural part of the company, like policies, or the operation of the low income housing in India. I only miss being in the field, interacting with people and helping them to get a good place to live, besides teaching them whatever I am able to teach right now. But this is only because of the lack of time. I hope I can come back to extend my experience in India, a country that, as a friend of mine says, you can hate and love in the same moment.

 

Happy Meal can really be someone’s Happy Shelter

It is intriguing and surprising how well non-architects can design, analyze. I came across a group of creative minds building a miniature structure made out of straws, some French Fries and Burger boxes in McDonald’s at Saket, New Delhi. The structure resembled one of the study models that a novice architecture student would build, trying to define the possibilities and defy the usual course of built form. Their explanation was philosophical indeed: the built form is an artifact, which will identify the arch; an underpass, but at the same time an architectural cliché. The structure looked creative, waiting to get translated in reality. What captured my attention, though, was the use of cardboard paper as a viable permanent external material.

With resources being extensively used and waste generated nearly three times more than the consumption, our only option is to transform waste into resources. Architects have experimented and mulled this question for decades, using different materials to give character to their structures.

Most of the waste generated in our cities comprises of paper and cardboard. However, many consider recycling of cardboard as a difficult process, while very few people will use it for permaculture or sheet mulching. So where does the rest of the cardboard go?

Very few designers have experimented with cardboard on a large scale. There are already several common uses of cardboard in construction; doors are filled with a cardboard honeycomb; tubes are used for column forming and as pile sleeves; panels are widely used in temporary structures, in exhibitions and for murals, etc. In reality, cardboard can perform very well over an extended period if it is designed correctly and treated properly. But if this is possible on a large scale still remains a question! My quick research showed me a few inspiring examples.

Structural engineers at Buro Happold, a UK-based engineering consultance, have already been addressing this issue by looking at the potential for using cardboard as a viable building material. The team is supported by the UK’s Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). Research director Dr. Andrew Cripps at Buro Happold explains that the widespread problem of cardboard disposal can be turned into an abundant resource by building a permanent cardboard building that would be a long lasting functional structure. The team built an elementary school out of cardboard as prototype in Westborough, Essex.

In May 2008, China’s Sichuan province was hit by a massive earthquake that measured at 8.0 on the Richter scale. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and a team of Chinese and Japanese students erected a temporary but resilient school out of plywood and recycled cardboard tubes hoping to rebuild stronger and more sustainable structures at a later date.

To come back to the group on friends building the structure using cardboard papers at McDonald’s: We know that McDonald’s has the highest percentage of card paper waste in the world, even when compared to Burger King, KFC and other fast food chains. It would be no exaggeration to state that on a per day basis McDonald’s generates more than 200kg of paper waste per outlet. Considering more than 100 outlets in an urban city and growing, that is a lot of raw material! Indian cities do not practice segregation of garbage and so the paper waste may just get land filled and may not see the recycling center.

Don’t get me wrong! This article isn’t targeting McDonald’s or other such fast food chain for the amount of waste generated, that’s inevitable, but we should capitalize on the potential that these giants have to transform the waste into resource and contribute to the larger picture of sustainability. McDonald India definitely has sustainable initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint, like recycling all its cardboard packaging. However, an initiative is needed to collaborate with expert R&D center, structural designers and architects and involving advanced technology to use the cardboard paper waste that is generated per day as a strong building material. Inspired by the initiatives by Buro Happold and Shigeru Ban, it would be exciting to find a workable solution to construct affordable shelters using waste material like cardboard and paper.

McDonald’s Happy Meal can really be someone’s Happy Shelter

Himanshu Sanghani

 

Experimental design and prototyping can yield solutions to India’s urban problems

As an architect and planner living in India, working in urban settlements with varies degrees of formality- or rather informality, I feel a sense of urgency to evolve ideas and possible solutions to house the poor. Too many people in urban India live in absolutely critical conditions. Looking at the urbanization trends for the future, the urgency assumes dramatic proportions and the scale of the problem is so large that one is almost devoid of hope.

In the last century, architects and planners responded to several urban and architectural issues with the aim to create better living cities, already beginning to become aware of the ecological problems that we see manifested so clearly today. Studies and projects peaked in the 60’s, with visionary proposals and studies. Some of them are simply amazing, and images of cities in the shape of gigantic pyramids and a gigantic translucent dome to cover Manhattan come to mind.

Buckminster Fuller's Dome over Manhattan was an attempt to rectify the wasteful nature of the urban environment. Fuller was obsessed with the efficiency of a climate-free city, citing the enormous savings in elements such as snow removal to promote its superiority over traditional urban development. Images and text: Storefront for Art and Architecture; www.storefrontnews.org

In some other case, the studies get further and cities built ex-novo. I would call these efforts prototypes. Prototypes are necessary objects to develop ideas, test them, refine and finally replicate concepts in scale. The desire to find solutions in the last century was supported not only by professionals, but also by the academic world and, most importantly, enabled by government and administrations. Today, sadly, these efforts are simply not there.

Current developments in Asia and UAE have may mirror the massive scale of the projects of the past, but there is nothing of the ideology and research that was the cornerstone of work of people like Frank Lloyd Right, Le Courbousier or Buckminster Fuller.

Le Courbousier's Radiant City attempted to open the city to light, air and nature, while simultaneously achieving extremely high residential densities. The park-like ground plane of the city was completely open to the pedestrian, crisscrossed by elevated highways and dotted with towers on pilotis. Images and text: Storefront for Art and Architecture; www.storefrontnews.org

There are few exceptions, like the sustainable Masdar City by Foster & Partners  and the urban integration of an informal area in Medelin, Columbiaor niche studies promoted by academic and professional studios. However these are a meager number compared to what the last century produced.

In the 60’s, the number of people living in cities was 1 billion, a 33% of the total world population. Today over 50% of the world’s 7 billion people live in cities. In my view, research-supported experimentation to find creative solutions to hard urban problems is the need of the hour.

In India, there are already 63 cities with over million people and this number will go up to perhaps over 80 in the next 20 years or so. These cities are growing with no creative vision for the future. There is no innovation that I know of, not at the city scale, not at the regional one. Masterplans as conceptualized and used in the west are now being used in India, often without the required professional support or process of consultation.

Masterplans by themselves, even if well implemented by multidisciplinary teams, run the risk of being inappropriate for the Indian (or indeed Asian) context. The pace of the development, the high rate of migration of people from rural areas to urban, is occurring at a scale never seen before. Masterplans require years to be finalized, and usually by then they are already obsolete.

Worse, mistakes made in Europe and America, especially during the economic booms, are getting replicated in India, but at a larger scale and with comparatively dire consequences.

Resources for planning cities are woefully inadequate. In India, back in the ‘60s, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, commissioned Le Corbusier to build Chandigarh, envisioned as a city that would replace Lahore, the capital of the Punjab that was lost to newly created Pakistan after partition in 1947. Now politicians, (so called) leaders and bureaucrats permit a city of one million inhabitants to be designed by a senior engineer and some draftsmen as a matter of course!

In this context, the need for experimentation is urgent indeed.

The usually cited hurdle to creative urban design is cost. Prototypes are expensive. There is expertise and time invested into the R&D required to craft the perfect objects. However, the Government of India keeps announcing multiple schemes to reduce urban poverty, encourage urban equality, improve living condition end so on. Each of these schemes is funded with hundreds of million of dollars. Clearly, the problem isn’t lack of money, especially considering that in some case these funds stay untapped, usually because the schemes are poorly designed and the target beneficiaries cannot access them!

The problem lies instead in the lack of real leadership. The urban project in Medellin that saw the transformation of the city is the result of the vision of its Mayor Sergio Fajardo (and his predecessor Mayor Luis Perez). In India, such leadership is rare. If it existed, it would be easy for the government to promote international debates, competitions, studies and finally test solutions on the ground. Today, such efforts are carried on by multilateral agencies and foundations, rather then by the government.

The other concern is that new ideas, often imported from another context, are rolled out without sufficient testing on ground. A case in point is the new scheme Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) designed to make India slum free by 2020 (!). The scheme revolved around the concept of providing tenure rights to poor city dwellers and suggests in-situ redevelopment of informal areas as an ideal solution. Without commenting on this, I would like to ask, where are the precedents for such projects in India? Apart from the Mumbai experience in Dharavi, etc, there are basically no experiments done in the last 30 years in this direction; certainly not in Delhi, where mHS co-created with the community a scheme for redeveloping an East Delhi slum that is yet to see the light of day.

The key issue, and this is my personal view after my years spent in Delhi, is that politicians and bureaucrats are disinterested in solving urban problems. Perhaps civil society would need to exert consistent pressure to kick-start the process of urban renewal for Indian cities. However, when this does happen, I advocate putting in place a widely consultative, design process for addressing problems in a creative manner and rigorous testing of selected solutions via pilot projects on the ground. It’s time to move on from tentative half-baked attempts (or no attempts) to improve our cities and take bold steps forward, to transform Indian cities from dens of poverty and squalor to destinations of opportunity and hope.

Marco Ferrario

Revisiting the Yamuna bank homeless shelter

On February 12th, Lorenz and Nipesh from mHS visited the Yamuna Pushta Green Zone where it had built a temporary homeless shelter three winters ago. They were joined by IGSSS’ Indu Prakash Singh, Dr. Amod and DUSIB representative Vijay Kumar Sharma. With the objective of evaluating current design practices for temporary homeless shelters, the team reviewed each one of the three existing helter by entering the premises, looking for technical flaws and discussing possible improvements, maintenance solutions and improved design keeping the needs of the homeless in mind.

For mHS, the visit was a wake-up call to conduct some much-needed due diligence of its shelter. Though it is commendable that the existing shelter, erected as a temporary structure, has been operational and functional for three winters, there has been relatively little follow-up. Follow-up visits are important to ensure mHS’ continual learning from its past experiences and for mHS to remain a relevant player in the homeless shelter scenario, which are an important part of the shelter pyramid that illustrates mHS’ philosophy that focuses on providing multiple housing options for the poor. The shelter pyramid starts at the bottom with homeless shelters, moves to dormitories, then rentals and finally home ownership.

Homeless shelters are urgently needed by Delhi’s homeless population, not only in winter when the issue tends to gain the attention of political bureaucrats, but through the year. The existing shelters are neither plentiful enough nor are they respectable places for homeless populations. As Delhi’s population continues to grow, so will its homeless population, which requires that thinking surrounding homeless shelters take into consideration sustainability and innovation an a holistic approach to supporting the lives of the extremely poor.

Compiled by Lorenz