ABSTRACT
In the industrialized countries, housing is designed and acquired as a finished product. Whether as tenant or owner, households occupy a dwelling whose minimum size and amenities are prescribed by laws that are rooted in the government’s traditional responsibility to safeguard public health and safety. The rising price of shelter in the Western world resulting from the enforcement of improved sanitary and construction standards has been accompanied by the development of complex financing mechanisms to maintain its affordability. These range from the availability of construction financing that keeps a developer’s equity to a fraction of the building’s cost, to housing mortgages for home ownership, to rental subsidy programmes for low-income tenants. In all cases, the result has been to keep monthly payments within a defined range and to enable households to live in dwellings they could not have afforded had the full construction price been paid in a lump sum. Even though the housing conditions of our urban poor are far from satisfactory, a variety of means are at our disposal to ensure adequate shelter; our too frequent failure to utilize them is due more to a political or ethical failure on our part than to an absence of the necessary financial resources or institutions.
