Week 35: Securing adequate affordable urban housing in climate crisis.

Globally, over 1 billion people (about a third of the world’s urban population) live in slums and informal settlements (UN-Habitat, 2022). This number is expected to grow three-fold to three billion people by 2050 if no decisive turn is taken in resolving the real barriers of access to adequate housing for the growing urban poor. In Africa, nearly 60% of urban dwellers live in informal housing.

The challenges to be overcome include poverty, a mismatch of price of housing units and the ability to pay, rapid urbanization coupled with weak urban planning - all of which combine and reinforce each other.

Today, an additional more powerful overarching force is at play in the barrier to securing adequate affordable housing - climate crisis.

The photo taken on 14th December 2022 is of abandoned housing units still partially submerged in water more than 2 years after Lake Nakuru burst its banks swelling double its original area (from 35 square kilometers in 2010 to 80 square kilometers). The devastating effects of the water evident not just to the houses but also the vegetation with dried up submerged trees. The level was the highest recorded since early 1900’s. The furious waters engulfed a large portion of the Lake Nakuru National park and private land and housing such as those in the image.

This site stood out for me for two reasons. 

First, this was a self-help community led affordable housing program for urban poor in Nakuru County. Families had saved for years to move out of the iron sheet slum structures in Nakuru city environs. The members had also taken out loans to finance this lifelong aspiration. 

Second, the process of producing the housing followed the Kenyan law to a T - from purchasing the land, to processing its title and requisite planning documentation, to obtaining approvals for the proposed units. This was not a case of grabbing a riparian land. It was covered by the law of the land.

Hardly 3 years later, they were forced out of their homes by the unforgiving waters of a lake which at the time of their investment was kilometers away! 

Lake Nakuru is one of eight Rift Valley lakes in Kenya. In total there are about 31 Great Rift Valley lakes cutting across Eastern Africa from Ethiopia through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, DRC, Malawi and Zambia. The entire rift valley runs from Lebanon to Mozambique. From 2010, local scientists documented the slow rising of the lakes. In 2020 following a vicious rain season the process accelerated with the lakes more than doubling in area.

A couple of reasons were fronted to explain this extraordinary occurrence. First, Human activity through intense farming and grazing near rivers as well as rapid poorly controlled urbanization had caused adverse degradation of the water catchment areas upstream. This results in a very heavy flow to the lakes. The explanation however fell short in accounting for the gradual increase (even in the drought season the lakes were rising!). A second reason pointed to the geology of the area. The Eastern Africa Rift valley lakes lie on active tectonic plates in the earth’s crust that are estimated to be gradually splitting at roughly 2mm a year and perhaps in about 10 million years a country like Kenya will eventually split into two along this fault line. This explanation however does not satisfy the question of Lake Victoria which has also been rising but is not on the Rift Valley.

After accounting for these and many other explanations on the unprecedented rise of the lake waters, the Government of Kenya finally released an official report in October 2021 indicating climate change as the overarching cause of the flooding. 

With the cause settled, the attention shifts back to converting policy to action on the ground – how do we secure adequate affordable housing for the majority urban poor in the reality of climate effects that do not obey social, economic and legal rules of the land?

The Puzzle of securing affordable adequate housing has two sides in balancing the value proposition:

On one side of the scale is the return to the individual and society at large. The returns here run the full scale from the economic wellbeing of the individual and household through improved health, security and access to finance from using the house as a collateral. The society reaps the benefit of healthier communities and promoting dignified living among other multiplier benefits.

On the other side of the scale is the risk involved in securing the adequate affordable housing. A common risk is adequate financing. For this a plethora of solutions have been tested from innovative building technologies, to redesigning mortgage products to collateralizing mortgage loans, even to the Nakuru case of community self-help financing.

With the climate crisis, an additional major risk is presented - whether the housing unit will remain adequate and habitable in the long term.

Looking back at the Nakuru case and taking cognizance that devoid of the climate effect - this was a community that was on the path out of poverty having stretched its individual and collective capacity to the limits, the argument for a bigger player in the fray beyond local and national market systems that aligns to the long term risk is very clear.

The question of “loss and damage” crystallizes and its contribution to securing adequate housing for nearly two – thirds of urban low-income households in Africa. 

There is no official UN definition of loss and damage but the general interpretation in the climate negotiations refers to consequences of climate change for which the harmed communities lack resources (financial and otherwise) to adapt to. It seems with climate effect an overarching risk multiplier, ipso facto, local mechanisms of managing the risks to securing adequate affordable housing will fall short and there is clear need for a fund that derisks long term assets such as the loss and damage fund.