| dc.description.abstract | Shelter is a chief basic societal need, and therefore accessibility to decent rural and urban housing by a country's population is an important aspect of socioeconomic development as it is positively correlated with labour productivity. The provision of housing needs to be planned to take cognizance of the poverty exhibited by the majority of the urban residents and the migrants from the rural areas. Urban housing problems cannot be analysed in isolation from a country's dominant political ideology and economic policies. Therefore, any observed skewness in the distribution of urban housing may be interpreted as a consequence of lopsided developmental policies, and the solutions offered for the housing problems must reflect a radical change in a country's political, economic and social milieux. This study investigates the exact nature of the housing problems in a typical Kenyan town, Kisumu, and the apparent ineffectiveness of the official preventive and curative measures that have been proposed. The sures that have been proposed. The examination of this problem centres on two major issues what the problem is and how the poor respond to it, and J whether the current housing policies are capable of eradicating the problem. Kisumu's free market residential districts were stratified into low rent areas (those whose median rent per month is below Ksh. 300), the medium rent areas (Ksh. 300 - 700 per month) and high rent areas (over Ksh. 700), and four estates in each stratum chosen randomly. With households taken as the observation units, the stratified sampling technique was applied to ensure representative coverage as the estimated households vary in numbers by stratum. A recording schedule was administered to 408 and 51 household heads in the three strata and the site and service scheme, respectively. A difference of proportions test was applied to evaluate the assumption that the residents of high rent areas are favoured more in terms of the flow of information concerning vacant housing units. The analysis revealed that the variation of the information flow between the high and the low rent areas is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. The implication is that there are separate urban housing markets catering for different socio-economic groups f and therefore any planning for the provision of housing must recognize this reality. Having established that separate housing markets exist, Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment Case V and Generalized Linear Interactive Modelling (GLIM) were used to estimate preference scales for Kisumu's residential districts and whether different income groups have a toncordant view of the major attributes of a 'decent' residential district. The results of the analysis show that low income is not a handicap for the identification of what comprises an acceptable living environment, and therefore the concept of "revealed preference" may be grossly misleading if applied to the housing planning and provision particularly for the low income people. The mal-distribution of income is shown to feature prominently in the analysis of housing problems and results in overcrowding and squatter phenomenon. The difference of means test has been used in this study to analyse both the spatial distribution of overcrowding and the comparison of income and house rents among different income groups. The study reveals that whereas the mean number of people per room {individual overcrowding} is statistically higher (Confidence level =.0.05) in the low rent areas than in the high rent areas, the sharing of housing units by different households (demographic overcrowding) is more prevalent in the medium rent areas."The implication is that the problem of overcrowding must be approached from different perspectives when dealing with different income groups. The analysis also shows that it is not enough just to say that people spend a particular percentage of their incomes on housing; what their incomes are and the quality of the dwellings they inhabit must be clearly defined. The study concludes that the current housing policies and programs are elitist, serving the interest of the high income people, and may have regressive effects on the real income of the urban poor. Even the programs intended for the low income population such as site and service schemes have been shown to benefit mainly the high income groups. The conclusion, it is stressed that in the absence of thorough structural changes in the whole socioeconomic and political framework many of the recommendations will serve only as palliatives rather than curatives. The meaningful starting point in the analysis of urban housing problems is a deep understanding of the structural causes of mass poverty. This will ensure the incorporation of the principles of social justice -- need, contribution to common good, and merit in urban housing planning and provision in an attempt to eradicate spatial and social inequalities. | en |
