Does low-income homeownership work? The effects of titling among beneficiaries in Cape Town and Lusaka

• Main Author: Muyeba, Singumbe
• Other Authors: Seekings, Jeremy
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2014
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9294

Includes bibliographical references. === The provision of real property rights through titling and informal settlements upgrading is widely imagined to have considerable direct and indirect effects on urban poverty. The evidence for such effects is, however, scarce, partial rather than holistic, and subject to methodological difficulties. This thesis investigates the effects of real property rights through two case-studies: the subsidized construction of privately-titled housing for poor people in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and the private titling of public rental housing in Matero, Lusaka. It examines nine hypotheses drawn from theories about the effects of property rights but goes beyond to strengthen this literature by drawing on another ten hypotheses from theories of homeownership and a categorisation of all hypotheses into economic, human and social capital effects using the asset-based approach. The research design uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches and non-experimental methods of estimation. In Khayelitsha, quantitative analysis reveals that the housing subsidy is associated with better physical health and (counter-intuitively) a higher occurrence of teenage pregnancy. The qualitative analysis suggests that beneficiaries experienced improvements with respect to ownership of consumer durables, housing, children's education and attainment of a higher social status. Apart from status attainment, these improvements can more appropriately be attributed to a better housing environment rather than to stronger tenure rights. In Matero, survey results revealed that titling was associated with significantly higher property values, per capita income and ownership of consumer durables, political awareness and neighbourhood satisfaction. Qualitative analysis shows that beneficiaries experienced higher status, but also a worsening of their tenure security because of the long term costs of titling. In neither case was titling associated with improvements in most of my measures of poverty reduction, supporting the argument that the benefits of titling may be exaggerated through a focus on selected variables rather than a broader set of measures. By most measures, titling had no effect in either of my cases. Substantively, it is likely that poverty in Cape Town and Lusaka is driven so strongly by factors such as unemployment that real property rights make little overall difference to poverty. Methodologically, these findings indicate the importance of using a diverse set of measures when testing whether (and revealing how) real property rights reduce poverty. Scholars need to go beyond the orthodox titling theory and take into consideration hypotheses drawn from theories of homeownership because consideration of a wider range of effects leads to different assessments and conclusions as shown in this thesis.