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This dwelling, before remodeling, housed a family of six. Photos: mHS.

quality of the units. Those building the most housing in India are those with the least access to finance and professional technical assistance. As a result, these urban households are living in precarious structures, with poor lighting, hygiene and safety conditions.

Sadly, the debate on housing in India lacks the larger perspective of creating inclusive cities through the principles of urban design and planning. There is little agreement on the need to bring together interdisciplinary skill sets to address the problem. Highly subsidized government programs are not going to solve the problem and private efforts will only work where land is

extremely cheap — often on the outskirts of cities and away from livelihoods.

The founding story: Passionate to contribute to a better future for these households, we founded micro Home Solutions (mHS) on three parallel

principles: community, sustainable design and affordability. Our task began by

understanding the large self-construction market and finding or creating the design solutions that could be innovative, viable and scalable. After the first months of field research and studies, we faced an uphill task: how to enable safer and more affordable construction that is both valued by the households and aligned with best construction practices by local technical assistance (TA) providers?

The pilot project. mHS conceptualized a housing product and service that would bring customized design solutions and access to finance to households in low-income settlements. In partnership with

BASIX, a large microfinance institution, we developed a home-improvement finance product (US$6,000) and provided access to customized engineering and architectural advice. Our aim was to bring safety to home structure and, through better layout design, improve ventilation and lighting. The client would pay a fee of 3.5 percent per loan to cover the costs.

The pilot began in Mangolpuri, a low-income urban settlement in Delhi where residents are given a 99-year license by government as part of a slum resettlement program. A typical plot is a meager 21 sq.

meters with an opening in the front, and with neighbors on all three sides. With ground floor quickly reaching its maximum capacity, many households are adding rooms vertically for family expansion or income from rentals.

Is safety a value-proposition? We learned quickly that households have emotional investment in their house that overrides safety issues. The façade and aesthetics are as important as its functionality, or its role in safety

or hygiene. For example, many have used ceramic tiling to cover the exterior facade, and marble floors for the kitchen, even at the cost of not finishing the full construction.

When colleagues from Mumbai came to evaluate our work and met the

residents – structural safety ranked low among their list of priorities. Neighbors were quick to dissuade our clients from shoring up weak

infrastructures, pointing to homes that had been standing for the last 20-30 years, asserting (without facts) that the probability of an earthquake is low.

In addition, safer structural strength often means

a bigger column that

compromises the precious

floor space inside the house, a cut that many residents are unwilling to take.

Even though not a high priority for their investment, many residents complain of leaking roofs and continuous and costly maintenance efforts. Regardless of their concerns, their “perceived risk” or “safety concern” is not imminent enough to make the investment.

Among the families who participated in the pilot project, there is now some pride in differentiating their house as safer from the others. This was especially true after Delhi experienced three tremors in the last two months (Delhi is located in Earthquake zone 4 out of 5) and an unfortunately

collapse of a 6 story building in East Delhi that killed over 70 renters.

The TA package. The majority of the units are three and four stories, built on single brick masonry walls or with reinforced

cement concrete frames that in most of the case are completely inadequate to support upper floors. These structures may work well to sustain vertical loads, but have no chance to endure lateral forces, for example, earthquakes or strong wind. We didn’t yet have a solution for retro-fitting existing buildings to make them safer, so at first, we only worked with households building from scratch, or families living in one-floor structures who were ready to demolish it.

The TA package included two initial visits, one to understand the household needs and preferences, and a longer meeting to develop a customized solution along with input from the clients. Families were shown 3D images, and actual layouts and plans.

During the pilot, the most intensive part of the TA was the monitoring visits. Initially programmed bi-weekly, it soon became clear that this was the most challenging

Rakhi and Marco explain the value of technical assistance to potential clients.

part of our project and eventually our visits were almost daily, in particular during the foundation/plinth laying stages.

The mason is the driver of the construction process. There was initial resistance on the part of households and local masons to adopt structural safety measures in self-home-construction. Masons are highly respected in these communities. They also have a large network that has developed over generations. Since the clients select their masons, our team was seen as outsiders and it was difficult and foolish to suggest that the current construction building process was not safe.

Bringing innovation to design. Given the initial resistance, we had to make sure the technical solution catered to the poor families’ need to prioritize space and cost.

A large part of the effort was the investment in technical R&D that would lead to the design of a house that is safer, would not require a larger investment, uses local materials (such as bricks, cement) and can be constructed by a local mason. This

did not come easy, even as we consulted more than 18 engineering studios in India and Europe. Eventually, several masons were slowly co-opted into designing the solution. We also initiated community workshops to begin training and increase awareness on construction practices in these neighborhoods.

Making TA mandatory. We also pushed BASIX to make the provision of TA

mandatory to get a loan for construction finance. This was key, since making finance more affordable without ensuring structural safety would only encourage unsafe housing and put more lives at risks. Given the lack of acceptable building codes and outreach of municipal regulation and enforcement, it was critical the financial providers provided the incentives to make TA mandatory.

Scaling up. Making the provision of TA commercially attractive for local architects and engineers on one end and valued by the households on the other continues to be the most challenging part of the business proposition.

Inside view of a home where six people sleep and store everything.

Inside of the same home after TA: more light, order, storage space and privacy.

Despite the high level of awareness and information we brought to communities about safety, hygiene and good

construction, word of mouth by satisfied customers was our best marketing strategy. Referrals by masons and previous customers are key. We also learned that along with advice on safety and construction, the households were interested in other technical services, such as cost estimates, layout designs, and eventually valued the monitoring and problem- solving provided by the team of professionals.

We know that the system we developed needs to leverage the economies of scale.

The drivers for a viable delivery model would be to centralize the R&D efforts, standardize the technical designs and develop a monitoring plan that comes with checks and balances in place. A more informed clientele and a favorable regulatory environment would go a long way to support scaling these best practices.

Safer bricks and mortar construction for their new home.

Access to housing finance and secure tenure have been shown to be the most effective catalysts for self-built, incremental housing improvements. But while they are essential, even together, they are not sufficient to improve the living conditions for many of the world’s low-income populations. Consider:

ƒ Better access to housing finance would not have changed the devastating impact of the recent Haiti earthquake on the poor.

Those who invested in heavy concrete roofs to protect their families from hurricanes were crushed by the earthquake.

ƒ Land rights and secure tenure have proven insufficient to ensure effective housing improvements. Studies suggest that

families delay and limit investment in their self-built home improvements when they fear eviction. This has led some in the

development community to promote secure tenure as a panacea for catalyzing housing improvements in urban settlements. It has become the new low-cost version of the Sites and Services strategy that was accompanied by secure tenure.¹

1 The Site and Services Programs of the late 1960s and 1970s followed self-help building principles and incremental construction process in squatter settlements. Under different modalities of these programs, governments facilitated access to land with secure tenure and basic services to families, who then built their housing incrementally. These programs were supported by many international agencies.

Nearly half of the population in the developing world lives in an urban

context; one-third of them live in informal settlements (830 million). While incremental self-built and improved housing has been the principle strategy used by the urban poor, there is a growing recognition that, without adequate access to better information and support, this self-managed approach is not only more costly and less efficient, but can have devastating consequences with the increasing encroachment and densification in high hazard areas.

In Haiti as elsewhere, lack of land use planning, clear and enforced building codes, a tortured building approval process, poor construction material quality and low technical capacity among construction tradesmen all contribute to the perfect storm that results in low-quality construction in high-risk areas that continue to prove devastating for families without adequate access to technical support.

Additionally, incremental home improvements are often inefficiently sequenced or

constructed using materials that cost the family more to maintain over the lifecycle of their improvement than an equally

available material would have cost. Without access to adequate technical information and assistance on how to improve their dwellings, affordable, safe, healthy housing remains only a dream for the world’s poor.