Analyzing real estate development as a modern form of tragedy of the anti-commons in Kenya

Abstract

Real Estate development 111 Kenya has been on the rise since the year two thousand. It is expected that the laws governing real estate would come to force prior to the 21 st century when real estate development begun in Kenya. However, this was not the case. Developers, begun to invest in real estate before neither the revision: nor the introduction of new laws that would govern the sector. Even the laws that regulated the sector were so many that the developers did not understand them and they complied with them just because it was a requirement. This also meant that they disregarded them when an opportunity arose. This has led to many substandard buildings and wrongful planning especially in Kenya. This is why in this research I have called the lack of properly coordinated laws that govern real estate, poor development in the real estate and lack of proper planning for example where you find funeral homes next to residential houses and houses built in places where roads are meant to be with an attempt to make profit on the part of real estate developers as the tragedy of the anti-commons which is basically a property regime in which owners hold effective rights to prohibit one another from utilizing a scarce resource. This research seeks to find away how this problem can be addressed so that we can have a proper real estate sector that is well managed in terms of planning and also profitable to I the developers and the country at large. In this research, in chapter one ,I am going to use the capitalist school and, the radical school of free-market economy of Robert Nozick and in my theoretical framework I will use,Race, Estate and uneven development by Goham , Urban Planning 1996 by Racliffe $stubbs and an article by Kimani and Musungu (2010) , Restructuring the Planning and Building Law and Regulations in Kenya for Sustainable Development and Keitb Thomson's Development control; principles and practice. In chapter two , I will critique the Kenyan legal provisons on real estate development and the implementation of the same. In chapter three, I will discuss how real estate development is a modern of tragedy of the anticommons in Kenya and how the same can be remedied. Finally in chapter four, I will give my recommendations and conclusion.