IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/wdevel/v109y2018icp42-56.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cost of being a slum dweller in Nairobi: Living under dismal conditions but still paying a housing rent premium

Author

Listed:
  • Talukdar, Debabrata

Abstract

The UN notes that the current global slum population of nearly one billion not only reflects “a rather unacceptable contemporary reality, but one whose numbers are continuously swelling.” Not surprisingly, its latest global development priorities, announced through its Sustainable Development Goals agenda in 2015, emphasize addressing the slum challenge in developing countries as a major goal. Our study focuses on gaining an in-depth understanding of the nature and extent of such slum challenge faced by Nairobi. Specifically, using data from a recent (2012–13) statistically representative survey, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of the rental housing market conditions faced by households living in slum versus formal areas of Nairobi. Our analysis findings establish relevant benchmarking for key policy relevant measures against which to evaluate the efficacy of new policy initiatives.

Suggested Citation

  • Talukdar, Debabrata, 2018. "Cost of being a slum dweller in Nairobi: Living under dismal conditions but still paying a housing rent premium," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 42-56.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:109:y:2018:i:c:p:42-56
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.04.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18301219
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.04.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. World Bank, 2016. "Kenya Urbanization Review," World Bank Publications - Reports 23753, The World Bank Group.
    2. James R. Follain & Emmanuel Jimenez, 1985. "The Demand for Housing Characteristics in Developing Countries," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 22(5), pages 421-432, October.
    3. Jan K. Brueckner & Harris Selod, 2009. "A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 1(1), pages 28-51, February.
    4. Ben Jann, 2008. "The Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition for linear regression models," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 8(4), pages 453-479, December.
    5. Oaxaca, Ronald, 1973. "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(3), pages 693-709, October.
    6. Julia Bird & Piero Montebruno & Tanner Regan, 2017. "Life in a slum: understanding living conditions in Nairobi’s slums across time and space," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 33(3), pages 496-520.
    7. United Nations UN, 2015. "Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," Working Papers id:7559, eSocialSciences.
    8. Archambault, Caroline S. & de Laat, Joost & Zulu, Eliya Msiyaphazi, 2012. "Urban Services and Child Migration to the Slums of Nairobi," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(9), pages 1854-1869.
    9. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    10. Rakodi, Carole, 1992. "Housing markets in third world cities: Research and policy into the 1990s," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 39-55, January.
    11. Debabrata Talukdar, 2008. "Cost of Being Poor: Retail Price and Consumer Price Search Differences across Inner-City and Suburban Neighborhoods," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 35(3), pages 457-471, July.
    12. Salon, Deborah & Aligula, Eric M., 2012. "Urban travel in Nairobi, Kenya: analysis, insights, and opportunities," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 65-76.
    13. Nakamura, Shohei, 2017. "Tenure Security Premium in Informal Housing Markets: A Spatial Hedonic Analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 184-198.
    14. Paul Collier & Anthony J. Venables, 2013. "Housing and Urbanization in Africa: unleashing a formal market process," CSAE Working Paper Series 2013-01, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    15. Fox, Sean, 2014. "The Political Economy of Slums: Theory and Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 191-203.
    16. Benjamin Marx & Thomas Stoker & Tavneet Suri, 2013. "The Economics of Slums in the Developing World," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(4), pages 187-210, Fall.
    17. Gulyani, Sumila & Talukdar, Debabrata, 2008. "Slum Real Estate: The Low-Quality High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi's Slum Rental Market and its Implications for Theory and Practice," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(10), pages 1916-1937, October.
    18. MacKinnon, James G. & White, Halbert, 1985. "Some heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimators with improved finite sample properties," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 305-325, September.
    19. Tammy Harris & James W. Hardin, 2013. "Exact Wilcoxon signed-rank and Wilcoxon Mann–Whitney ranksum tests," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 13(2), pages 337-343, June.
    20. Parikh, Priti & Fu, Kun & Parikh, Himanshu & McRobie, Allan & George, Gerard, 2015. "Infrastructure Provision, Gender, and Poverty in Indian Slums," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 468-486.
    21. Sumila Gulyani & Ellen M. Bassett & Debabrata Talukdar, 2012. "Living Conditions, Rents, and Their Determinants in the Slums of Nairobi and Dakar," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 88(2), pages 251-274.
    22. Sumila Gulyani & Debabrata Talukdar & R. Mukami Kariuki, 2005. "Universal (Non)service? Water Markets, Household Demand and the Poor in Urban Kenya," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 42(8), pages 1247-1274, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pilar Mercader-Moyano & Oswaldo Morat-Pérez & Carmen Muñoz-González, 2021. "Housing Evaluation Methodology in a Situation of Social Poverty to Guarantee Sustainable Cities: The Satisfaction Dimension for the Case of Mexico," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(20), pages 1-48, October.
    2. Kovacic, Zora & Musango, Josephine Kaviti & Ambole, Lorraine Amollo & Buyana, Kareem & Smit, Suzanne & Anditi, Christer & Mwau, Baraka & Ogot, Madara & Lwasa, Shuaib & Brent, Alan C. & Nsangi, Gloria , 2019. "Interrogating differences: A comparative analysis of Africa’s informal settlements," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 614-627.
    3. Goytia, Cynthia & Heikkila, Eric J. & Pasquini, Ricardo A., 2023. "Do land use regulations help give rise to informal settlements? Evidence from Buenos Aires," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    4. Vivas, H & Franco, A, 2021. "Spatial heterogeneity of housing prices in formal and informal settlements: A GWR hedonic model for segmented markets in Cali," Documentos de trabajo - Alianza EFI 19293, Alianza EFI.
    5. Oscar Ingasia Ayuya & Katrine Soma & Benson Obwanga, 2021. "Socio-Economic Drivers of Fish Species Consumption Preferences in Kenya’s Urban Informal Food System," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-15, May.
    6. Junhua Chen & Shufan Ma & Na Liu, 2023. "Multi-dimensional Housing Inequality Index: The Provincial Evidence from China," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 165(2), pages 633-654, January.
    7. Libertun de Duren, Nora Ruth, 2020. "Effects of neighborhood upgrading programs on domestic violence in Bolivia," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 19(C).
    8. Joshi, Nupur & Gerlak, Andrea K. & Hannah, Corrie & Lopus, Sara & Krell, Natasha & Evans, Tom, 2023. "Water insecurity, housing tenure, and the role of informal water services in Nairobi’s slum settlements," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).
    9. Katrine Soma & Benson Obwanga & Charles Mbauni Kanyuguto, 2021. "A New Rural-Urban Fish Food System Was Established in Kenya–Learning from Best Practices," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(13), pages 1-14, June.
    10. Johan Mottelson, 2020. "A New Hypothesis on Informal Land Supply, Livelihood, and Urban Form in Sub-Saharan African Cities," Land, MDPI, vol. 9(11), pages 1-22, November.
    11. Murphy James T., 2022. "Urban-economic geographies beyond production: Nairobi’s sociotechnical system and the challenge of generative urbanization," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 66(1), pages 18-35, May.
    12. Panman,Alexandra Patricia & Lozano Gracia,Nancy, 2021. "Making Room for Renters : Understanding and Supporting Rental Markets in the Global South — Evidence from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9579, The World Bank.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gulyani, Sumila & Talukdar, Debabrata & Bassett, Ellen M., 2018. "A sharing economy? Unpacking demand and living conditions in the urban housing market in Kenya," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 57-72.
    2. Nakamura, Shohei & Avner, Paolo, 2021. "Spatial distributions of job accessibility, housing rents, and poverty: The case of Nairobi," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C).
    3. Brueckner, Jan K. & Lall, Somik V., 2015. "Cities in Developing Countries," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 1399-1455, Elsevier.
    4. Joshi, Nupur & Gerlak, Andrea K. & Hannah, Corrie & Lopus, Sara & Krell, Natasha & Evans, Tom, 2023. "Water insecurity, housing tenure, and the role of informal water services in Nairobi’s slum settlements," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).
    5. Thomas Y. Mathä & Alessandro Porpiglia & Michael Ziegelmeyer, 2014. "Wealth differences across borders and the effect of real estate price dynamics: Evidence from two household surveys," BCL working papers 90, Central Bank of Luxembourg.
    6. Marco Caliendo & Frank M. Fossen & Alexander Kritikos & Miriam Wetter, 2015. "The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Not just a Matter of Personality," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 61(1), pages 202-238.
    7. Huong Thu Le & Ha Trong Nguyen, 2018. "The evolution of the gender test score gap through seventh grade: new insights from Australia using unconditional quantile regression and decomposition," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-42, December.
    8. Kilic, Talip & Palacios-López, Amparo & Goldstein, Markus, 2015. "Caught in a Productivity Trap: A Distributional Perspective on Gender Differences in Malawian Agriculture," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 416-463.
    9. Tymon Słoczyński, 2015. "The Oaxaca–Blinder Unexplained Component as a Treatment Effects Estimator," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 77(4), pages 588-604, August.
    10. Bachmann, Ronald & Martinez Flores, Fernanda & Rulff, Christian, 2022. "Die Lohnlücke in der Zeitarbeit: Eine empirische Analyse auf Grundlage von BA-Daten und der Verdienststrukturerhebung," RWI Projektberichte, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, number 262219.
    11. Sánchez-Jabba, Andrés Mauricio, 2014. "Etnia y rendimiento académico en Colombia," Chapters, in: Sánchez Jabba, Andrés & Otero Cortés, Andrea (ed.), Educación y desarrollo regional en Colombia, chapter 2, pages 59-100, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.
    12. Azam Mehtabul & Han Luyi, 2020. "Accounting for Differences in Female Labor Force Participation between China and India," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 1-17, April.
    13. Vassilis Monastiriotis & Angelo Martelli, 2021. "Crisis, Adjustment and Resilience in the Greek Labor Market: An Unemployment Decomposition Approach," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 44(1), pages 85-112, January.
    14. Brandon Vick, 2017. "Measuring links between labor monopsony and the gender pay gap in Brazil," IZA Journal of Migration and Development, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-28, December.
    15. Philippe Adair & Oksana Nezhyvenko, 2020. "Wage Differentials in EU Transition Economies (2009-2016): How Large a Penalty for Females and Informal Employees?," Proceedings of Economics and Finance Conferences 10913129, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.
    16. Powers, Daniel A. & Yun, Myeong-Su, 2009. "Multivariate Decomposition for Hazard Rate Models," IZA Discussion Papers 3971, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Oscar Molina Tejerina & Luis Castro Peñarrieta, 2020. "Unexplained Wage Gaps in the Tradable and Nontradable Sectors: Cross-Sectional Evidence by Gender in Bolivia," Investigación & Desarrollo 0120, Universidad Privada Boliviana, revised Nov 2020.
    18. Amelie F. Constant & Annabelle Krause & Ulf Rinne & Klaus F. Zimmermann, 2017. "Reservation wages of first- and second-generation migrants," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(13), pages 945-949, July.
    19. Bryan, Mark & Bryce, Andrew & Rice, Nigel & Roberts, Jennifer & Sechel, Cristina, 2022. "Exploring mental health disability gaps in the labour market: the UK experience during COVID-19," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    20. Bachmann, Ronald & Martinez Flores, Fernanda & Rulf, Christian, 2022. "Die Lohnlücke in der Zeitarbeit: Eine empirische Analyse auf Grundlage der Integrierten Erwerbsbiografien und der Verdienststrukturerhebung," RWI Materialien 153, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:109:y:2018:i:c:p:42-56. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.