Legal Tenure Security, Perceived Tenure Security and Housing Improvement in Buenos Aires: An Attempt towards Integration

Abstract

This article critically reviews several claims underlying different positions in the debate on tenure legalization and empirically investigates them in a low-income settlement in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even though both tenure legality, in the form of property titles, and perceived tenure security have separately been shown to influence housing improvement, most research has taken a relatively rudimentary approach to their measurement, and little work has been done to examine their interrelations. These issues are taken up in the present article in which the legal-illegal tenure dichotomy embedded in standard perspectives on legalization is broadened to include intermediate levels of legality and subsequently linked to a social psychological perspective on perceived tenure security. The question of to what extent property titles facilitate access to credit is also examined. The results show that tenure legality and perceived tenure security are in fact closely related in the settlement under study, as higher levels of legality also imply higher perceived tenure security. Furthermore, both tenure legality and perceived tenure security are significant predictors of housing improvement and, consequently, settlement development. There was, however, no relation between tenure legality and access to credit. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Informality and the Development and Demolition of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-urban Area

“…Payne (2004) makes the point that legally separable rights to collateralised property are neither sufficient nor necessary for home investment in poor neighbourhoods: perceived tenure security is also an important factor. Van Gelder (2009) finds that tenure legality and perceived tenure security are closely related and that both can enhance housing improvement, but through different mechanisms. One consequence of recognising the separate effects of legal and perceived tenure security in the spontaneous upgrading of poor neighbourhoods is to widen the idea of informality.…”

“…He insisted that an absence of legally protected private property hinders capital formation among the poor because it reduces an incentive to save and invest and lowers access to borrowing. The policy implication of his research is advocacy of the legalisation of land titles through land titling programmes-an approach supported by the World Bank ( van Gelder, 2009;Mooya and Cloete, 2007).…”

“…There has been extensive research on informal settlements in the field of development studies over many years (Gilbert and Ward, 1985;Gilbert, 2007;Gilbert and Gugler, 1992;UN-Habitat, 2003;Varley, 2002;van Gelder, 2009). There is particularly good coverage of Latin American (Gilbert and Ward, 1985), South Asian (Nijman, 2010), Hong Kong (Smart, 2006) and African cities (Huchzermeyer, 2003).…”

Living in state housing: expectations, contradictions and consequences

“…At the same time, the titling arguments of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (2000) were taking hold, convincing governments across the globe that by giving low-income citizens legal ownership of the land on which they reside, they would be empowered to function in the capitalist economy as homeowners. Despite widespread studies indicating that legal homeownership does not enable the urban poor to invest in upgrading their homes or use the house as collateral to secure a loan (eg Fernandes 2002, Gilbert 2002, Royston 2006, Rust 2006, Van Gelder 2009, titling continues to dominate state housing programmes, although in recent years this has been accompanied by a recognition that tenure security is more important than titles. In addition to upgrading, the last decade has witnessed a return to state-driven programmes of mass housing construction in the global South, including in some African countries (Croese et al 2016), but with reliance on private-sector delivery (in contrast to 1960s public housing programmes).…”

Does slum formalisation without title provision stimulate housing improvement? A case of slum declaration in Pune, India

“…As reviewed by Marx et al (2013) and Payne et al (2009), however, quantitative evidence is still scarce. In the meantime, a growing body of literature has stressed that many slum dwellers, despite their informal status, enjoy some degree of de facto tenure security as a result of a variety of factors (Gilbert, 2002;Handzic, 2010;Lanjouw and Levy, 2002;Nakamura, 2016;Razzaz, 1993;van Gelder, 2009;Varley, 1987). Such research also often expresses concerns that titling programmes in housing markets can induce rapid changes to social landscapes, thereby devastating the kinds of social capital that the poorest residents depend upon most heavily.…”