Low-income Housing Production Research Articles

Low-income housing in the city of São Paulo: history and diagnosis of growth

Between 2016 and 2021, the city of São Paulo saw the low-income housing market grow from 3,600 to 35,700 units launched per year, a vertiginous growth of almost 1,000% in six years. In the same period, the medium and high-end markets grew 292%, from 15,800 to 46,100 units launched yearly. One of the hypotheses for this huge growth is the municipal Decree 57,377/16, which established new guidelines and incentives for the implementation of low-income housing in addition to the Strategic Master Plan (Municipal Law 16,050/14) and the Subdivision, Use and Occupation of the Land Law (Municipal Law 16.402/16). This first decree was of substantial importance for the growth of the segment in the city of São Paulo and the possible migration of these dwellings from peripheral regions within the city of São Paulo itself to central regions and from the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo to the state capital. The objective of this article is to understand the history of low-income housing in the city of São Paulo, how the low-income housing scenario was built, from its beginnings to the present day, and to diagnose how recent public initiatives have encouraged the production of low-income housing in the city of São Paulo.

Green building and policy innovation in the US Low-Income Housing Tax Credit programme

ABSTRACT This article analyses the integration of green building with the largest low-income housing production programme in the US and the innovativeness of state housing agencies. Drawing on policy innovation literature, panel data and regression analysis are employed to quantify associations between state-level characteristics and the adoption of green building criteria into the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) programme. Results show that housing agencies have increasingly adopted green building criteria, and most have identified co-benefits from energy-efficient buildings and smart growth. Despite overall progress, the rate of adoption of green building criteria has decreased, few US states have comprehensive criteria, and many have dropped important criteria, such as on-site renewable energy generation, often due to perceived additional costs to developers and, in some cases, due to perceived progress in building codes. Results are consistent with hypotheses derived from the literature and suggest that the integration of green building with the LIHTC programme is significantly associated with the states’ internal factors, such as public housing agencies’ motivations and resources, and external factors like regional policy diffusion from other states. Future research should explore organization-level factors that affect environmental policy innovation.

Renting and Sharing in Low-Income Informal Settlements: Lacunae in Research and Policy Challenges

This paper describes the nature of low-income housing markets for renting and sharing in Latin America and the Caribbean. It reviews the importance of non-owner housing markets associated with early urbanization from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1940s when rental tenements of different types—often slums—predominated as migrant and worker housing. The rapid rise of informal settlements and self-building from the 1950s onwards inverted the tenurial status of low-income housing markets: “ownership” eclipsed renting, and whether informal or formal, became the primary mode of state supported housing production. However, as informal access to land slowed in the 1980s and 1990s, so renting and sharing began to emerge as subsidiary and increasingly important housing market alternatives, such that many cities are now showing a relative and significant decline in home ownership levels. Much of this rise in renting and sharing has occurred as a result of densification in the older, now consolidated, barrios that formed in the 1970s-90s. Despite this turnaround in low-income housing production and opportunities, public policy for non-ownership remains almost non-existent. Drawing upon detailed case studies, this article reviews the contemporary nature and dynamics of rental and shared housing across the region, and offers a series of policy approaches and instruments to promote both the supply and demand for non-ownership housing, primarily targeting the poor in the coming two decades.

Community-led housing and urban livelihoods: Measuring employment in low-income housing delivery

This paper explores a significant gap in knowledge about the employment impacts of community-led, low-income housing production, and the complex intersections between rights to housing, rights to work, and international attempts to define these rights, such as the ILO's ‘decent work’ agenda. We develop a four-way classification to understanding the livelihoods impact of housing interventions and how to measure it and, using evidence from construction workers and beneficiaries of the low-income housing developments supported by CLIFF (the Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility) in Nairobi, this paper moves towards contextually-relevant definitions of ‘a job’. We argue that existing employment multipliers used by evaluation agencies underestimate livelihood needs, and that the ILO's ‘decent work’ agenda should be contextually reviewed, particularly for informal economy workers with multiple livelihood streams, where sustainability may be more important than formalised work. We suggest that ‘rights to housing’ and ‘rights to work’ may conflict, particularly where in-situ upgrading is not feasible and developing housing in peri-urban locations is necessitated by the contextual realities of fast-growing cities.

Theory of Social Production and Socio-economic Issues in Low Income Housing in Ogbere, Ibadan

The paper argues that low income housing is socially produced in different social contexts and examines the socio- economic issues in the social production of low income housing. It also presents some results of a case study in Nigeria to explain and understand housing production by low income people despite their marginalization and exclusion.Knowledge of how low income people produce houses and understanding the underlying motivation for house ownership in different social contexts is critical for policy.

According to the Plan: Testing the Influence of Housing Plan Quality on Low-Income Housing Production

For more than 20 years, scholars have assessed a plan’s content to determine the plan’s quality, with quality serving as a proxy for planning efficacy. However, scholars rarely examine the relationship between a plan’s quality and the plan’s intended outcome. Thus, it is unclear whether quality influences planning outcomes or even advances equity. To close this gap, this study assessed a non-random sample of housing plans from 43 cities in California’s Los Angeles and Sacramento regions to observe how cities accommodated low-income housing needs and to observe whether each plan’s quality influenced low-income housing production. The analysis indicates that the plans identified 42 different planning tools to accommodate low-income housing needs, and nearly 60% of the implementing objectives proposed construction programs. Quality is influential after the city’s location, land-use, population, and the plan’s compliance with state housing law are taken into account. In summary, quality illuminated how these cities accommodated low-income housing needs and, in conjunction with other city conditions, quality influences low-income housing production. Due to this non-random sample, this study calls on planning scholars to subject quality to more empirical tests on planning outcomes in other areas to increase quality’s importance in scholarship.

THE YORUBA VERNACULAR AS A PARADIGM FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSING: LESSONS FROM OGBERE, IBADAN, NIGERIA

Low-income housing is often studied in a top down approach by experts and researchers. The Ogbere case study in the outskirts of Ibadan represents housing built by low-income people and therefore a context to understand how the poor provides housing. It is evident from Ogbere that most of the housing producers earlier lived in Yoruba vernacular family houses where they acquired knowledge about the vernacular model they built. This knowledge contributed to their ability to attain housing contrary to their income level. In order to understand low-income housing production in the context of Ogbere, a comprehensive case study approach was adopted. The study examined the socio-economic characteristics and residential histories of the house owners, the characteristics of the houses and the resources they deployed in the housing production process. Multiple techniques of questionnaires, in depth interview and observation were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from one half (n= 926) of the Ogbere house owners in the study area. The findings form a paradigm for low income housing in Nigeria and the developing world.

Evaluating California’s Housing Element Law, Housing Equity, and Housing Production (1990–2007)

Since 1969, California’s Housing Element Law has required that municipalities address housing equity and housing production. In California, housing equity means that a municipality has planned for the future production of low-income housing that is priced from 0 to 120% of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s median family income, and market-rate housing that is priced higher than 121%. For a purposive sample of municipalities (Sacramento and Los Angeles regions, 1990 to 2007, n = 53), this research found that as compliance with the law increased, the sample experienced deficient low-income housing production but surplus market-rate housing production. Mixed-effects models indicated that compliant municipalities were associated not only with increased low-income housing production but also with decreased annual housing production in comparison to noncompliant municipalities. While these associations contrast with Lewis, they suggest that municipal compliance may support California’s goal of providing housing equity but may also constrain California’s overall housing production.

Socio-economic Issues in ‘Socially Produced’ Low Income Housing: Theory and Case study in Nigeria

The paper argues that low income housing is socially produced in different social contexts and examines the socio economic issues in the social production of low income housing. It also presents part of the result of a case study in Nigeria to explain and understand housing production by low income people contrary to their marginalization and exclusion.The paper concludes that if policy is to enhance housing solution for the majority; knowledge of how low income people house themselves and understanding their underlying motivation for house ownership in different social contexts is critical.

Growing Pains: Perpetuating Inequality Through the Production of Low-Income Housing in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex

New regional growth may perpetuate social and economic inequalities caused by uneven urban development, or may reverse such trends by expanding housing options that make possible the dispersal of lower-income households among suburban areas offering better social, economic, and educational opportunities. Supply-side housing approaches can facilitate a more equitable redistribution of housing options. In this research, we examine the role of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program in expanding the geography of opportunity in one fast-growing region—the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Findings suggest that although LIHTC developments are penetrating the suburbs, they are not expanding opportunities for these households. Just under half of LIHTC units are found in highly clustered areas characterized by high poverty rates, minority concentrations, poor educational opportunities, and rampant crime. The remaining units are dispersed in areas with moderate conditions. Suggestions are made for altering program guidelines to achieve better dispersal, income-mixing, and regionwide distribution.

El problema cualitativo en la producción del hábitat popular en la Ciudad de México: análisis cualitativo de la vivienda popular

The 63% of the housing built in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, has been made the inhabitants themselves, who without any support of State and with limited resources, have built up over decades outside the law. In order to solve this problem, in the nineties changes to the Mexican Constitution were made by the government, to involve the private sector in the construction and financing of Social Housing and therefore be able to satisfy the increasing demand. After ten years that these changes were made, the residents remains being the main actor, if no longer in the construction of their habitat itself, in the continuing suitability and transformation. This coupled with the high selfhelp building housing, not only denotes an action that continues to be conducted outside law, but the lack of quality of housing produced by the formal sector. Despite the fact that one of the goals by the Mexican Government has been fulfilled: meet the demand in terms of quantity, the quality of the formal production is questionable in the absence of a adaptation between the housing structures and characteristics of those living. Being the resident the main actor in the production of low-income housing, either produced by real state companies or self-help produced by the same users, this paper shows the results of an analysis of habitability of social housing made in Mexico City, where we compared both types of production, from the view of those who inhabit and consistently adapt their homes.

Does the low-income housing tax credit increase the supply of housing?

The low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) was originated in conjunction with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA 86) to provide incentives for private sector production of low-income housing. In this note we examine whether these units have added to the existing stock or merely substituted for unsubsidized units that otherwise would have been built. We explicitly control for effects of the number of other supply-side (e.g., public housing, Section 8 New Construction, Section 236 housing) and demand-side (vouchers and Section 8 Certificates) subsidies. From estimations of a simple cross-state model of the determinants of the stock of housing per 1000 population, we find no significant relationship between the number of LIHTC units (and other subsidized units) built in a given state and the size of the current housing stock, suggesting a high rate of substitution. However, our test is not sufficiently powerful to reject some alternative null hypotheses that suggest a lower rate of substitution, and we make some suggestions for future research.

The Role of the Nonprofit Sector in Low-Income Housing Production

In recent years, nonprofit organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom have increasingly taken a leading role in the provision of housing to low- and moderate-income households. In this article, the author compares and contrasts how British housing associations and American community-based nonprofit housing providers are financed, the size and scope of their activities, their management, the regulations they are subject to, and the increasing role they play in each nation's housing policy. In addition, the author applies the leading economic theory of the nonprofit sector to examine what the appropriate role of these organizations should be in the development and implementation of housing policy.

Implementation of Linkage Programs: The Planner's Role in Real Estate Market Research and Regulation

The study of real estate development has become an integral part of planning education as planners draw upon the techniques of real estate investment analysis to control land use. The application of these techniques has been expanded by linking new commercial development to noncommercial development that serves public goals. Fees charged against new commercial development are used to fund social programs, such as the production of low income housing. To make these linkage programs work, planners must possess skills in both individual real estate project analysis and market-wide regulation. It is argued here that this second area, market regulation, has not received adequate attention in planning curricula.

Public-private co-operation for the development of low-income shelter

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limits of public sector production of low-income housing in developing countries and explore ways in which the public sector can facilitate increased efforts of the private sector to provide shelter. Topics discussed below include the need for greater private sector involvement in shelter production for low-income people, constraints to increased private sector participation, and suggestions as to what steps may be taken by the public sector, including international development agencies, to stimulate action by the private sector.