The housing crisis

The cities are exploding outwards, more as a citification of rural communities that are inwardly migrating than a planned expansion of urbanisation. The lateral sprawl is more village than town and there is a chronic shortage of affordable housing for the poorest section of the population. A survey conducted in Lahore in 2012 showed that 68 per cent of the population in the lowest income bracket had only one per cent of available housing units within their reach. Nothing has changed for the better since. The pressure on housing is producing the kind of human tragedy exemplified by the plight of the illegal occupants of 1,000 apartments that had been built for workers on the Karachi Northern Bypass. Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah has ordered that they be “ejected” within two months. Those being evicted were themselves rendered homeless by the floods of 2010 and have occupied the workers apartments illegally — but the state had made no provision for them and they are now refusing to move saying, probably rightly, that they have nowhere else to go.

In January 2015, the State Bank of Pakistan reported that the national housing shortfall increases by 0.34 million units a year. The poor — anybody earning less than Rs30,000 a month in practical terms — have no choice but to live in unplanned neighbourhoods or as in the case outlined above encroach illegally on existing housing. The number of multi-generational households increases not because they choose to live in cramped insanitary conditions but because they have no choice. Even when city administrations do build affordable housing, it is quickly snapped up by speculators and resold at prices far beyond the reach of those the units were intended for. Poor housing makes for unhealthy, uneducated communities, bereft of health services and schools, lacking potable water and prey to disease and crime. Ejecting homeless rendered thus by historical floods is going to solve nothing and will exacerbate a chronic problem. Getting on top of rampant profiteering is not going to solve the problem overnight but it may at least mitigate some of the worst excesses — a faint hope, perhaps. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2016.

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