Urbanization and Growth in India

by Sonali Mathur
Research Assistant

“Urbanization as a Growth Strategy for India” was the focus of a panel discussion on Saturday, February 6 at the India Conference at Harvard University, the largest student-run conference focusing on India held in the United States. (The Joint Center was one of the event’s co-sponsors.) As one of the most populous countries in the world, the policy decisions and investment choices that are made in India will have a resonance beyond its borders in terms of environmental impact and quality of life for one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world. Panelists at the conference, who noted that India’s urban population is expected to grow significantly in coming decades, focused on a variety of topics including the role that urban areas can play in the country’s economy and the many challenges to achieving that goal.

Shirish Sankhe, Director of the Mumbai office of McKinsey & Co. opened by citing the 2010 McKinsey Global Institute report, India’s urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth, which estimates that India’s working age population will grow by nearly 270 million people by 2030 (from about 800 million to over 1 billion). The growth will be urban, he said, noting that by 2030 at least 10 of India’s 29 states will be more than 50 percent urbanized.  (Currently, only two relatively small states are urbanized.) Moreover, McKinsey projects a five-fold increase in GDP.

Accommodating this growth will be a major challenge, he conceded, because 25 percent of the urban population of India lives in slums and the country only invests $17 per capita per year in infrastructure, about an eighth of what McKinsey estimated was needed. Illustratively, because the country has underinvested in transportation, the share of people using public transportation is estimated to have dropped in recent years from 50 percent to 30 percent. Moreover, there is a significant lack of public understanding about administrative practices and the role of various organizations involved in city and state governance, which not only makes public participation challenging but complicates the entire planning process.

Photo courtesy of The India Conference

Prathima Manohar, an architect and founder of The Urban Vision, an urbanism “think do-tank;” asserted that another key challenge is that the leaders of India’s cities seem to be fixated on strategies that more developed parts of the world are moving away from, such as auto-centric development and over-consumption of resources. Despite the creative brilliance and skilled human capital in India’s cities, she added, there is a lack of civic and recreational space that would improve residents’ quality of life. However, she also said there are an increasing number of grassroots organizations working to improve urban environments. She also predicts that the success of these smaller enterprises will be paramount to improving livability of the cities.

Brotin Banerjee, CEO of Tata Housing, noted that the lack of affordable housing options is a problem that has plagued Indian cities for decades. Given the scale of the problem, he said it would take efforts from various sectors in order to make a difference. Tata Housing is spearheading this effort from the private sector, by investing in construction that provides homeownership options for the low- and middle-income urban residents. The challenge in doing this, he added, is devising models that are scalable and profitable, particularly when new projects must also provide supportive infrastructure such as water and sewer connections as well as roadways, which are typically the public sector’s responsibility.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, the panelists agreed that given the scale and interdependence of the urban problems in India, the prevalent expectation that the public sector should solve all the urban problems is unreasonable and likely detrimental. Instead, they agreed that there needs to be – and there seems to be – growing coordination between the public and private sector, and there is a significant role for grassroots organizations to play.

In discussions moderated by Bish Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, the panelists highlighted a host of approaches and practices that, in their opinion, seem to be working. Shirish Sankhe noted that funding allocation methods based on competitive grounds, like the one being used for development of ‘smart cities,’ seems to be a successful model. These are small to medium size cities competing for federal fund to spur infrastructure development and the selection is based on certain predefined design criteria.

Along similar lines, he noted, there is a movement towards a performance management system of city governance. In this approach, India’s cities are ranked on various criteria which then puts pressure on the elected officials to perform and be more accountable to the public. Highlighting some of the positives surrounding the development of “greenfield” sites, he added that anticipation of transportation needs and how those are likely to evolve over time has become an integral part of planning. In the context of building more affordable housing, Brotin Banerjee noted that some of the policy solutions in recent times have revolved around making construction and green construction more cost effective by providing flexibility around height limitations and FAR regulations. He also added that perhaps the best form of public-private partnership would be talent sharing.

In response to questions from the audience about the segregation patterns that have or could emerge based on racial and cultural lines, the panelists agreed that Indian cities need to move away from identity based politics in order to avoid increased segregation and to build more inclusive cities.

From the Archives: When New York’s Legendary “Power Broker” Spoke at the Joint Center

by David Luberoff
Senor Associate Director

Fifty years ago today, Robert Moses, the legendary “power broker” who reshaped New York City in the mid 20th century, gave a lunchtime talk at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. Thanks to Adam Tanaka, a 2015 Joint Center Meyer Doctoral Fellow who was doing research for his thesis on the construction of large-scale, middle-income housing in New York City, the Joint Center recently received a copy of his speech.

Given today’s debates about housing, transportation, and other issues related to urban development and urban policy more generally, it’s instructive to look back at Moses’ remarks, which were given at the predecessor of today’s Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Moses, whose language was florid and at times supercilious, asserted that most major municipal problems could be solved “by genuine courage as distinguished from braggadocio, empty millennial problems, buck passing to Washington and yielding to every obstructionist group, every Johnny-Come-Lately planning expert, every editorial pundit, and every racial, religious and sectional minority. Water supply, sewage and waste disposal, roads, parking, schools, hospitals and health, all are the same category of works requiring an honest, factual, fearless approach and attack by officials with at least a thirst for martyrdom and an instinct for the jugular.”

Robert Moses

The remarks and the harsh judgments are particularly striking because Moses – whose importance is sometimes compared to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s impact on 19th century Paris – was a singularly important figure in New York specifically and American cities generally. Working from a series of appointed state and city positions (many of which he held at the same time), Moses oversaw the construction of 13 bridges (starting with the Triborough Bridge, now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge), 416 miles of highways (including the Long Island and Cross-Bronx Expressways), 658 playgrounds and parks (including Jones Beach State Park), key cultural and non-profit institutions (including Lincoln Center and the United Nations), and 150,000 mainly high-rise housing units for the city’s low- and moderate-income residents (including Trump Village, a 3,800 unit complex in Coney Island built by Donald Trump’s father). These changes not only transformed New York, they also provided a template for redevelopment and highway projects throughout the country.

Image by Hassan Tahir (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

However, such changes came at a huge human cost. In The Power Broker, a critical and seminal biography of Moses that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, Robert Caro estimated that taken together, Moses’ road, bridge, housing, and urban renewal projects displaced about 250,000 people, most of them poor and many of them blacks and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, Moses strongly supported policies that did not allow blacks to move into many of the new housing projects, such as Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan – a private moderate-income housing development built on land cleared by a city entity that Moses oversaw.

By the time that Moses spoke at the Joint Center, his power had begun to wane largely because of increasingly intense disputes about his aggressive approaches to urban development and growing feuds with key elected officials, particularly then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His opponents, who included Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of American Cities, had stymied his efforts to radically transform lower Manhattan via the construction of an elevated expressway from the Hudson River to the East River and to use urban renewal powers to clear parts of Greenwich Village for high-rise middle-income housing developments. As a result, by the time he gave his Joint Center talk in 1966, Moses, who once simultaneously held 12 separate city and state positions, had only one official post, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, a self-financed public entity that he had chaired since he had led the effort to create it in the 1930s. When Moses spoke at the Joint Center, the authority owned and operated nine bridges and tunnels, including the Verrazano-Narrows, Throgs Neck, and Bronx-Whitestone bridges as well as the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels.

In his remarks, Moses – who was fond of the French aphorism (sometimes mistakenly attributed to Joseph Stalin) that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” – made it clear that his recent defeats had not changed his views. He began by hailing the approach to urban problems taken by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who headed the Joint Center from 1966 to 1969 and who went on to several prominent posts, including serving as one of New York’s U.S. Senators from 1976 until 2000. “I like Mr. Moynihan’s approach to our municipal problems,” Moses said, “because it is honest and forthright at a time when solutions are mainly the province of demagogues screaming for perfection, smooth politicians with new catchwords and slogans appealing to every racial, religious, sectional and economic faction and minority, image makers, fanatics, self-appointed wowsers, reformers with direct links to Higher Regions, far-out critics with long claws and venomous serpent’s tongues, ponderous editors, computer analysts, and just plain nuts.”

Moses went on to endorse his support for what had become a common, but inaccurate reading of “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the controversial report Moynihan had prepared in 1965 while working in the Johnson Administration. Moses began by restating – and expanding – the report’s best-known assertion. “If I understand him,” Moses said, “Mr. Moynihan says, and quite rightly I believe, that family, church, and other ancient responsibilities and disciplines must be restored if we hope to meet the problem of negro, Puerto Rican, and other slums and ghettos.”

However, like many conservatives who embraced Moynihan’s assessment of the state of black families, Moses did not repeat Moynihan’s assertion that the problems were largely caused by “three centuries of unimaginable mistreatment” of blacks by whites. Nor did Moses support Moynihan’s proposals to address those problems via large-scale government programs focused on strengthening black families. Instead, Moses asserted that responsibilities to family, church and other institutions had to “come first, ahead of improved housing, schools, recreation, the Four Freedoms, integration and even human rights.” He added, “But our political and opinion-making leaders don’t go for such simple and sane reasoning because it represents restraint and, like charity, begins at home.”

Moses, who was forced out of the TBTA in 1968 when the agency became part of the newly formed Metropolitan Transportation Authority which used some of the TBTA’s revenues to subsidize the region’s subways and commuter rail lines, concluded with a somber assessment of the then-current urban policy landscape. “Almost no one in high office wants to be told that a motorized civilization is bound to glut the roads and that the best we can do will not meet the problem short of approaching much more drastic regulation which will require sacrifice,” he said. Then he returned to some familiar critiques of others’ ideas, asserting, “Careless experts say we shall meet the demands by preferring rails to rubber, substituting regionalism for states, master planning, super duper departments run by administrative giants of an elite corps of experts who are also seagreen incorruptibles, trained to be public tycoons, more business in government, the repeal of Parkinson’s Law, rebuilding everything without hurting or discommoding anybody, and combining immediate, uncompromising slum clearance with revolutionary social objectives.”

Moses, who died in 1981, concluded by noting, “Here endeth the lesson, if I have any to offer, and the beginning of the interrogation which will enable you to get even with me.” While we haven’t yet found a transcript of that discussion we’re sure that, like Moses’ remarks, they not only would be an informative historic artifact but also would highlight many of the urban issues that we are wrestling with today.

Read the speech transcript.

As the Housing Recovery Strengthens, Affordability and Other Challenges Remain

The national housing market has now regained enough momentum to provide an engine of growth for the US economy, according to the latest The State of the Nation’s Housing report released today, June 22, by the Joint Center (live webcast today @ 12:30 ET). Robust rental demand continues to drive the housing expansion, and sales, prices, and new construction of single-family homes are on the rise. Even more important, income growth has picked up, particularly among the huge millennial population that is poised to form millions of new households over the coming decade. At the same time, however, several obstacles continue to hamper the housing recovery—in particular, the lingering pressures on homeownership, the eroding affordability of rental housing, and the growing concentration of poverty.

The national homeownership rate has been on an unprecedented 10-year downtrend, sliding to just 63.7 percent in 2015. Tight mortgage credit, the decade-long falloff in incomes that is only now ending, and a limited supply of homes for sale are all keeping households—especially first-time buyers—on the sidelines. And even though a rebound in home prices has helped to reduce the number of underwater owners, the large backlog of foreclosures is still a serious drag on homeownership.

As these lingering effects of the housing crash fade, homeownership may regain some lost ground, but how soon and how much are open to question. Moreover, the report finds that income inequality increased over the past decade, with households earning under $25,000 accounting for nearly 45 percent of the net growth in US households in 2005–2015. The question is not so much whether families will want to buy homes in the future, but whether they will be able to do so.

Mirroring the persistent weakness on the owner-occupied side is the equally long surge in rental housing demand, with increases across all age groups, income levels, and household types. With vacancy rates down sharply and rents climbing, multifamily construction is booming across the country. But with strong growth among high-income renters, so far most of this new housing is intended for the upper end of the market, with rents well out of reach of the typical renter making $35,000 a year. Because of the widening gap between market-rate rents and the amounts many households can afford at the 30-percent-of-income standard, the number of cost-burdened renters hit 21.3 million in 2014. Even worse, 11.4 million of these households paid more than half their incomes for housing, a record high. The report finds that rent burdens are increasingly common among moderate-income households, especially in the nation’s 10 highest-cost housing markets, where three-quarters of renters earning $30,000–45,000 and half of those earning $45,000–75,000 paid at least 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2014.

Cost burdens are nearly universal among the nation’s lowest-income households. (View our interactive maps.) Federal assistance reaches only a quarter of those who qualify, leaving nearly 14 million households to find housing in the private market where low-cost units are increasingly scarce. Low-income households with cost burdens face higher rates of housing instability, more often settle for poor-quality housing, and have to sacrifice other needs—including basic nutrition, health, and safety—to pay for their housing. These conditions have serious long-term consequences, particularly for children’s future achievement. And compounding these challenges, residential segregation by income has increased. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of people living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty more than doubled to 13.7 million.

The report notes that a lack of a strong federal response to the affordability crisis has left state and local governments struggling to expand rental assistance and promote construction of affordable housing in areas with access to better educational and employment opportunities through inclusionary zoning and other local resources. Our researchers noted that these efforts are falling far short of need. Policymakers at all levels of government need to take stock of what can and should be done to expand access to good-quality, affordable housing that is so central to the current well-being and potential contribution of each and every individual.

Evicted: Confronting Some Uncomfortable Truths

Chris Herbert

Managing Director

Matthew Desmond’s new book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is just being released today, but it has already generated an amazing buzz which started with an article in the New Yorker a few weeks back, and has continued with reviews and commentary in major news outlets across the country. His bottom line conclusion that “without stable shelter everything else falls apart” is a message that housing advocates have long felt keenly. Given that the country’s serious housing challenges have failed to make an appearance at any Presidential debate, the substantial public attention the book is generating is profoundly important.

I got the chance to read an advance copy of the book myself and finished it this past weekend. As someone familiar with Desmond’s work and with a strong interest in trying to bring attention to the desperate straits that some 11 million renter households face by having to devote more than half their income to rent, I expected to be moved by the book’s up-close-and-personal depiction of struggling renters in Milwaukee. While I was certainly moved, what I didn’t expect was how challenged I would be by Desmond’s account.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies has for many years been documenting both the magnitude and consequences of a lack of affordable housing through meticulous analysis of national survey data to help fuel the policy debate. But while numbers may inform the head, they don’t move the heart and so by themselves have a hard time moving the needle on policy. Housing advocates have come to appreciate the importance of personal stories in putting a face on the numbers. The Make Room campaign, launched by Enterprise Community Partners in the past year, is a particularly effective attempt at documenting powerful stories of struggling renters to help sway hearts as well as minds.

Desmond’s stories are also powerful, but in a very different way. The Enterprise campaign focuses on people who have been undone by sickness and other life events outside their control, who struggle to make a decent living, not from lack of trying, but by a lack of good paying jobs. In contrast, Evicted largely tells the story of people who are dealing with what often seem like self-inflicted wounds—drug addiction and questionable choices about how they spend what little money they have, people who are prone to violence and seem to make only sporadic attempts to work. In short, while Enterprise shines on a light on the so-called ‘deserving poor,’ Desmond doesn’t shy away—in fact, seems to seek out—the “undeserving” poor; people whose own families and social networks often refuse to offer assistance.

But through the course of the book, and with the support of hundreds of footnotes that draw on the academic literature and put forth more of Desmond’s own arguments, he builds a convincing case for how the circumstances of grinding poverty lead to choices that otherwise might be hard to understand and how drug addiction and a history of abuse and deprivation exert a powerful tide that is extremely hard to escape. In short, Desmond forces readers to confront their own embedded notions of the “deserving poor.”

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the book for me was a footnote that confronts this issue directly. Desmond notes that liberals tend to ignore the “nastier, more embarrassing aspects of poverty.” Citing William Julius Wilson, he argues that this approach will ultimately fail to garner support anyway as the public wants to see these behaviors taken into account. Lambasting this approach, Desmond writes, “There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of sin.” He’s right. We do need to construct a policy argument that accounts for the sinners as well as the saints—not least of all because no one’s a saint.

Evicted has also challenged my thinking about how the housing market operates at the lowest rungs of the ladder. On its face, the rental market would appear to fit the classic competitive model: there are many buyers and many sellers, information on rent levels is fairly easily available, and there are few barriers to becoming a landlord. Sure, rents are quite high relative to property values, but wouldn’t high maintenance costs, the very real risk of non-payment of rent, and the costs of carrying out evictions account for the high rents? Maybe in part. But the examples Desmond details suggest that, even after taking these costs of doing business into account, the returns earned by landlords are extremely high. The most telling example is the $16,900 house in relatively good condition in a stable block. The mortgage payment on such a small mortgage would be less than $100 monthly. Even with property taxes and maintenance factored in, it wouldn’t take much rent to earn a decent return. And he notes the landlord had acquired other properties for as little as $5,000.

So why aren’t these markets more competitive? One barrier to entry is the lack of access to capital by those who are looking to live in these neighborhoods. Given what’s involved in managing these properties, there may be few landlords who are willing to take on property ownership under these conditions, limiting competition. Landlords also have over a barrel those tenants with a history of eviction, a criminal record, or no visible means of support. With the need for housing so fundamental, landlords can extract the lion’s share of a household’s income. As Desmond notes, researchers have focused a great deal of attention on the provision of subsidized housing but very little on the supply of non-subsidized, low-cost rental housing where a large majority of the poor find their homes. As this book makes clear, this is a major oversight.

So what does Desmond propose as policy responses? To begin with, he advocates for an entitlement program for low-income renters to obtain housing vouchers in the private market. This proposal is actually not that radical, as the Bipartisan Policy Center Housing Commission made this same recommendation. There is a strong case for such a policy, particularly for those at risk of homelessness who are profiled in Evicted. The short-term outcomes report by Abt Associates for the Family Options Study provides compelling evidence that providing housing vouchers to families coming out of the shelter system produces more stable living situations, reduces domestic violence and substance abuse, keeps families together, and reduces the number of school moves among children. And it achieves these results at no greater cost than the traditional assistance families receive coming out of shelters. Desmond also advocates for publicly provided legal assistance for renters in eviction hearings. Given the stories presented in Evicted, there is a clear need to level the playing field between landlords and tenants. If tenants have access to universal vouchers, landlords will have less to worry about in terms of unpaid rent.

The one part of Desmond’s recommendations that puzzled me is that he suggests relaxing housing quality standards as part of a universal voucher program to entice more landlords to participate. He argues in a footnote that in countries where such programs exist without quality standards, tenants are able to use the market power of their voucher to choose higher quality units. But given how the current system exploits renters’ vulnerabilities to accept appalling housing conditions, I would worry about leaving the market to determine this outcome.

In fact, Desmond makes a forceful case that exploitation of the poor thrives when it comes to essentials like housing and food. For that reason it might also have been useful to consider including some recommendations about expanding property ownership among those who would be less likely to exploit the poor—including the poor themselves. In cities like Milwaukee where home prices in inner city neighborhoods are so low, homeownership may be a cost-effective solution for some. More ownership of low-cost rentals by the public or non-profit sectors could also provide needed competition for for-profit landlords.

What’s also missing from his recommendations are supports beyond just rental assistance that are needed to address some of the root causes of instability, such as treatment for addiction and mental health disorders. Housing assistance is a critical step but by itself may not be sufficient to help people become stable tenants. But Desmond is focused on the housing part of the equation and so can’t be faulted for looking at all the ways we need to shore up our social safety net.

Overall, Evicted tells a powerful story and presents persuasive evidence about the fundamental importance of housing instability as a cause and a consequence of poverty, and in the process makes a compelling case for the need to foster housing stability as part of efforts to address poverty. Evicted is that rare book that will generate spirited thought and discussion not only among a general audience but also among those of us who spend a great deal of time trying to understand the critical interplay between housing affordability, poverty, and social mobility.

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On Thursday, March 3 at 6 PM The Malcom Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School is holding a book launch event for “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” with author Matthew Desmond, Co-director of their Center’s Justice and Poverty Project, along with a distinguished panel. View their event flier >

Housing Cost Burdens Weigh Heavily on Low- and Moderate-Income Renters Across the Country

by Ellen Marya
Research Assistant

The Joint Center’s new report – America’s Rental Housing: Expanding Options for Diverse and Growing Demand – highlights the now familiar trend of increasing affordability pressures facing renter households. As of 2014, just under half (49.3) of renters were housing cost burdened, spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs. This share includes more than one-quarter (26.4 percent) of renters who were severely cost burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing. The burden percentage rates remain near their peaks reached in 2011. In total, 21.3 million renters were cost burdened in 2014, 11.4 million severely so, both all-time high numbers.

Notes: Moderately (severely) cost-burdened households pay more than 30% and up to 50% (more than 50%) of income for housing. Households with zero or negative income are assumed to have severe burdens, while households paying no cash rent are assumed to be without burdens.

Source: JCHS tabulations of US Census Bureau, American Community Surveys.

Our interactive map series, released in conjunction with America’s Rental Housing, illustrates that renters across the country are experiencing housing cost burdens at high frequencies. In the nation’s 917 metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, the cost-burdened share of renters ranged from about one-quarter to nearly two-thirds in 2014, with between 40 and 50 percent of renter households housing cost burdened in the typical metro. Over half of renters were housing cost burdened in more than 200 metro and micro areas. Among these highly burdened localities are some of the nation’s largest metros, such as Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Also highly burdened were many smaller areas either with particularly high housing costs, such as Santa Cruz, Key West, Juneau, and Olympia, or with significantly lower incomes, such as Laredo, TX, Monroe, LA, Las Cruces, NM, and Flint, MI.

The link between low incomes and high cost burdens is evident across the country, and for those with the lowest incomes, housing cost burdens were nearly unavoidable. Among renters with household incomes under $15,000 per year – equivalent to full-time work at the federal minimum wage – just under 84 percent were housing cost burdened nationwide in 2014. Rates reached upwards of 90 percent in over 100 areas both large and small – Denver, Los Angeles, Dallas, Milwaukee, Walla Walla, WA, Sheboygan, WI, and Grand Forks, ND – and were above 50 percent for all but two small micro areas – Beatrice, NE and Ardmore, OK.

Even among middle-income renters with household incomes between $30,000 and $45,000, housing cost burdens are widespread. Nationwide, about half (48.4 percent) of households in this income group were cost burdened in 2014. Burdens for this group were especially high in several pockets across the country, typically in areas with especially high-cost housing. Upwards of 55-60 percent of moderate income renter households were cost burdened in metro and micro areas along both coasts, near major interior population centers such as Chicago and Atlanta, and in areas across Texas and northern Colorado.

These data show that, across the country, housing cost burdens are no longer a problem only faced by renters at the bottom rung of the income ladder. Indeed, their prevalence among moderate income renters is growing rapidly. Between 2001 and 2014, a time of strong growth in renting, the number of renter households with incomes between $30,000 and 45,000 increased by just over 13 percent. At the same time, the share of renters in this income group with housing cost burdens rose 11.5 percentage points from 36.9 to 48.4 percent, the largest jump among any income group. As a result, the number of moderate-income renter households with housing cost burdens increased by over 48 percent between 2001 and 2014. This dramatic rise underscores the growing affordability challenges facing America’s renters during a time of increasing demand for rental housing.

The dynamics of this demand, along with the supply response, market conditions, and policy challenges facing today’s renters, are explored in more detail throughout America’s Rental Housing.

Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development

by Eric Belsky
Managing Director

Tackling urban poverty and attending to its spatial manifestations is vitally important. The speed with which many regions of the world are urbanizing, the haphazard spatial development of urban areas, and the deplorable living conditions of more than 800 million slum dwellers make the need to address urban poverty more urgent than ever. Climate change is only intensifying the necessity to act, as the urban poor tend to occupy land susceptible to physical risk, such as steep slopes, flood plains, or low-lying coastal areas made more vulnerable with extreme weather and climate variability. At the same time, however, government and business leaders are awakening to the potential to advance social and economic development by engaging the urban poor as consumers, producers, asset-builders, and entrepreneurs.

The Joint Center’s recent report, Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development: Correcting Planning Failures and Connecting Communities to Capital, highlights the challenges of tackling urban poverty as well as promising strategies to do so. Obstacles to addressing slums and realizing the potential of slum residents include weak, non-participatory, and uncoordinated urban planning. National governments often establish regional authorities or public-private partnerships to plan major investments in urban infrastructure that fail to consider broader regional land use planning goals, community input, or the needs of poor communities. Local land use regulations and plans, to the extent that they exist at all, are not widely followed. Plans for slums seldom situate them in the context of broader plans for the urban region. And the non-governmental organizations that do much of the work to improve slums rarely coordinate their efforts. In addition, community-based organizations often are weak and not incorporated into the government’s urban planning process.  Finally, these governments, authorities, and partnerships generally fail to formulate specific strategies to improve or redevelop slums in ways that leave the poor better off.

Yet many examples of better planning practices exist around the world: efforts to develop national strategies for urban development and poverty alleviation, metropolitan regional planning and governance, anticipatory planning for urban growth and climate change, spatial planning and coordination of land uses and investments, participatory planning and community engagement, asset building for the poor, and institutional transparency and accountability through initiatives such as participatory municipal budgeting.

Drawing on these positive examples, several strategies emerge to improve urban planning and investment in order to spur inclusive and sustainable urban development. Most important, spatial planning must be fully integrated with investments in infrastructure, and the development of regional plans must involve participation by all stakeholders. A variety of practices can support inclusive, integrated planning such as funding for multi-stakeholder planning at the regional level and investment in community-based organizations and their intermediary supports. Government capacity can be built through national urban development commissions—spurred by intergovernmental, international bodies—charged with developing plans for inclusive and sustainable urban development. Technical assistance and capacity building can help national, regional, state, or local governments form and manage public-private partnerships, optimizing the use of scarce public resources while also introducing stronger and more rational spatial and participatory planning techniques into the process. A host of other tools described in the report can support more coordinated planning and investment as well as innovation in employment and small business, housing, and infrastructure programs in slums.

Taken together, these actions would greatly improve planning for inclusive and sustainable urban development and create an international movement to focus on these issues. With a growing list of examples of best practices to address urban poverty in effective ways (many summarized in the report), the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations still before us, and a chorus of globally-branded businesses (including McKinsey and JP Morgan Chase) calling for better urban planning and poverty amelioration strategies, there is a chance that these issues will gain the international attention they deserve and lead to concrete actions.

Read the new Joint Center report: Advancing Inclusive and Sustainable Urban Development: Correcting Planning Failures and Connecting Communities to Capital