Rental Housing in Informal Settlements:

The current government paradigm towards urban poor housing is to provide land titles to the poor and promote ownership of housing. However looking at the current housing market, especially in large industrial and commercial cities, rental housing as an accessible housing option for the poor cannot be overlooked.

A literature review has shown rental housing to be an integral part of the housing tenure systems in the city, as well as in the stages of a migrant’s upward mobility from a squatter to ownership housing. Studies across the world have shown the presence of rental housing in almost all informal and slum settlements. This research is an attempt to understand rental housing within informal housing and discern its characteristics in comparison to the informal sector owner-occupied housing in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat.

Rental housing provides the much-needed ‘room for maneuver’ (Oakpala, 1981 (Kumar, 2001) or flexibility of tenure arrangements during the lifetime of an urban poor household. Rental housing lessens the burden on a migrant to invest in shelter till one can manage to have disposal income for ownership housing. It is responsive to an individual’s and a household’s life-cycle changes and is an asset for tenants as well as landlords. Rental housing is influenced by the local economic conditions and employment.

There is a long-drawn debate on the significance of ownership versus renting in housing. It is a popular belief that all households aspire to own housing. Many studies have proved this assumption to be true. However, the crucial question is not if ownership is desired by poor households, but if ownership housing is accessible to them (Kumar, 1996).

Issues of accessibility have come up in housing policy discussions because governments across developing countries have tended to design their public housing programmes to cater to the demand for ownership housing. On the contrary, studies across the world have shown that rental housing is of particular importance to migrants. It has been theorized as the first entry point for a migrant in a city. Until a migrant can manage to find a stable job and save to invest in ownership housing, rental housing provides him/ her with numerous options for shelter. Yet, the housing policies do not pay attention to the rental housing needs.

In the quest to be a ‘World Class City’, whatever that means in the cities of developing countries, many cities have launched demolition drives, with the backing of planning legislation, which considers slums and squatter settlements as encroachments. Infrastructure project implementation has also led to the displacement of slums and squatters and in some instances, they have been entitled to rehabilitation.

Most of the rehabilitation projects are designed based on an understanding that the dwellers would desire ownership housing and hence invariably, the rehabilitation package is a dwelling unit given on ownership basis. At the same time, in the rehabilitation process, house owners are viewed as legitimate beneficiaries while missing out on the tenants of the demolished slums and squatter settlements.

‘The struggle for housing is most often a struggle for land’ (Satterthwaite, 2009). Land ownership is a state subject and in most cities, the government is the largest landowner. In the Indian context, land is under the eminent domain of the state and by this fact, the state has the right to regulate the use and transfer of land. The state therefore defines the land use and transfer policies and regulations.

In some instances, the state is actively engaged in deciding the prices of land but in general, its policies determine the land prices. In situations of high economic growth rates and increasing inequality as a consequence of growth, which has been observed in India since economic reforms, the urban land in particular becomes a parking place for speculative investments resulting in rapid rise in land prices. Land becomes a commodity and of a speculative kind. Housing struggles have therefore focussed on either the non-availability of lands for low-income housing or for evictions from lands for high-value activities