A Home is for Ever? Residential Mobility and Homeownership in Self-Help Settlements

Abstract

Self-help housing is clearly an ‘architecture that works’. Owner-occupation is also a highly desired tenure among the Third World urban poor. Governments in most poor countries are encouraging self-help ownership. But what do poor households actually gain through ownership? Unlike the housing of the better off, consolidated self-help housing is seldom sold. If there is a limited market for this kind of property, capital appreciation must be limited and, therefore, the poor are likely to lose out relative to the rich. If the poor do not sell their consolidated self-help homes what do they do with them? Are homes merely to live in or do they have economic functions too? The author attempts to answer some of these questions with the aid of research on consolidated self-help suburbs in Bogotá, Colombia. He broadly concludes that self-help ownership does not offer the same advantages in terms of capital appreciations as does ownership in higher income areas.