RESEARCH General World Affairs

HOUSING
Affordable housing market shrinking for women in Third World

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

11/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Unless more is done to increase access to home ownership among women in Third World countries, the end result will be the "feminization of homelessness," says Faranak Miraftab, a University of Illinois professor of urban and regional planning.

Miraftab describes this emerging trend in "Risks and Opportunities in Gender Gaps to Access Shelter: A Platform for Intervention," a paper published in the September issue of the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. The report focuses on a seven-year research project undertaken by the United Nations Gender and Habitat program in 16 low-income communities in Africa, Latin American and South Asia. Miraftab was a consultant on the project.

Information gathered in the study points to what Miraftab calls "countervailing" trends: "female headship is rising, but feasible and affordable housing options for women householders are diminishing." For example, in the three settlements examined in Ghana, 47 percent of the women are identified as heads of households, yet only 26 percent are owner-occupants of homes.

This trend, Miraftab said, "presents a serious risk of further deterioration of women's wealth and well being. Housing is a key resource for women. Not only is it an economic asset important to their wealth, it also is central to their physical and emotional well being. It is the site of child rearing, and also of income generation, and it is a nexus for social networks of support and community-based reliance. Therefore, women's diminished access to housing seriously threatens their personal, social and economic well being."

In the countries studied – Colombia, Costa Rica, Ghana, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia – researchers identified factors that may lead to gender-based inequities in housing options. Overall, Miraftab said, women have less access than men to "certain key resources: construction skills, time, economic resources and inheritance rights." And while these factors may not point to conclusive reasons for low home-ownership rates, Miraftab maintains that they "outline a series of gender roles and ideologies that put extra demands on women's time and energy, place them in lower paid or non-paid jobs, and limit women's inheritance rights and their perception of such rights as legitimate."

Social trends – such as "the polarization of social classes and the intensification of
poverty" – also contribute to the situation. For example, female heads of households are typically concentrated in central-city rental tenements, and housing policies tend to focus largely on home ownership in urban peripheries, while neglecting needs for rental accommodations in city centers.

If there is a silver lining to what’s occurring, Miraftab said, it is that "nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations are making strong alliances with grassroots women's movements to help respond, and recognizing the strong role they are playing in the absence of traditional roles of the state."