Slum Real Estate: The Low-Quality High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi’s Slum Rental Market and its Implications for Theory and Practice

By Sumila Gulyani, Debabrata Talukdar. 2008

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary This study of 1755 households in Nairobi's slums challenges the conventional belief that slums offer low-quality low-cost shelter to a population that cannot afford better standards. In Nairobi, slums provide low-quality but high-cost shelter. Although slum residents pay millions of dollars in rents annually, and better quality units command higher rents, very little is being re-invested to upgrade quality. To resolve the challenge that the Nairobi puzzle poses for theory and practice, we develop a new analytical framework for understanding quality of living conditions. Improving conditions in Nairobi's slums requires, we argue, two simultaneous interventions: alteration of the tenure mix to enhance owner occupancy and infrastructure investment.

Subfields: Soil Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c93895c75e6923fd6c57365566096d8d610c0bd7

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Citations in the corpus

Mobility, Poverty, and Gender: Travel ‘Choices’ of Slum Residents in Nairobi, Kenya (2010, background): “This paper is part of a broader research project that looks at various aspects of the lives of the residents of Nairobi’s slums, aiming to gain a fuller understanding of the many dimensions of poverty (World Bank, 2006; Gulyani and Talukdar, 2007, 2008 are other papers in the series).”
Land Registration, Governance, and Development : Evidence and Implications for Policy (2009, background): “…land registration to be more pronounced in urban environs where such interventions may be highly complementary to infrastructure investments (Gulyani and Talukdar 2008), quantitative studies have focused on rural areas and examined land regularization almost exclusively in terms of…”
Retrieving the Baby from the Bathwater: Slum Upgrading in Sub-Saharan Africa (2007, methodology): “This new framework, the `living conditions diamond', is discussed and illustrated in more detail in a series of papers (eg Gulyani and Bassett, forthcoming; Gulyani and Talukdar, 2008; Gulyani et al, 2008).”
Understanding poverty and promoting poverty alleviation through transformative consumer research (2013, background): “Large numbers of urban poor live within informal economies on the fringe of cities (Gulyani & Talukdar, 2009, 2010).”
Rental housing: The international experience (2016, background): “In places, like Nairobi, the landlordetenant relationship is very one-sided, large-scale, absentee landlords charging high rents and protecting their bailiwicks through their political connections (Amis, 1996; Gulyani and Talukdar, 2008; Huchzermeyer, 2007).”