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Housing in Addis Ababa
Policy, programmes and lived experience

This chapter examines the evolution and ‘lived experience’ consequences of housing policy in Ethiopia in recent decades, which was radically transformed by the introduction of the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) from 2005. This was a major ‘vanguard’ investment aimed at transforming the economic and social character of the urban periphery. The chapter situates this programme in relation to broader developments in Ethiopian housing policy, including the cooperative housing programme that was initiated in the 1970s but continued into the twenty-first century. It then explores some of the tensions at the heart of the IHDP, which set out to produce ‘affordable’ housing at the same time as being part of an economic growth and homeownership agenda, leading to escalating prices and rents as well as mass displacement. The lived experience of housing of various kinds in our case study areas is then examined. The chapter concludes that ultimately the apparent promise of the ‘vanguard periphery’ in these areas was partly undermined by limitations in infrastructural capacity but also by the simultaneous creation of auto-constructed, speculative and potentially future ‘inherited’ peripheries.

When trying to understand the evolution of Addis Ababa’s urban peripheries over the past decade, the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) looms larger than any other policy measure, investment or residential form. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, this programme comprised one of the most significant ‘vanguard’ investments of the late Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) period, and easily the most significant when it comes to housing. There are peripheral areas of the city where IHDP is not a major feature – particularly in the western and northern edges of it where mountainous terrain has prevented major expansion – and we intentionally selected case study areas with major IHDP sites. These areas are broadly representative of the most dynamic, changing and far-flung peripheries in the city, providing us the best possible sense of the opportunities and challenges of life in the orbit of contemporary Addis Ababa.

The IHDP was an important element of the EPRDF’s broader urban development strategy, which – particularly after 2005 – involved various efforts to both build an urban support base and reimagine Addis Ababa as a city of ‘renaissance’ and the ‘Diplomatic Capital of Africa’ (Planel and Bridonneau, 2017; Di Nunzio, 2019; Gebremariam, 2020; Weldeghebrael, 2022). The massive amount of housing built under the state-led housing programme has irreversibly changed the landscape of Addis Ababa, especially in the peripheries, and the way people live in the city. This chapter will discuss how the IHDP, as the country’s dominant approach to housing in the periphery since 2010, has become an essential tool of physical and social transformation in the peripheral areas in Addis Ababa, and how it has driven the formation of new localities and helped to produce particular forms of land development in the city.

Despite the centrality of the IHDP to housing policy in recent times, it is also important to consider other key elements of housing policy and programming that preceded it and existed alongside it. This includes the Cooperative Housing Programme, which remains important to this day and of particular significance in the Tulu Dimtu area. The chapter begins by situating the IHDP in relation to broader trends in public housing provision in the Global South, as well as in Ethiopian recent history – including cooperative housing. It then explores how the EPRDF government attempted to address the increasingly glaring housing crisis through its distinctive approach to low-cost housing, and how the affordability question relates to other goals of the housing programme. The following sections will then examine the growth goal and the space-restructuring goal of the IHDP, and how they gave shape to the physical and social landscapes in the periphery of Addis Ababa. In this chapter we combine a review of academic and policy literature with first-hand empirical evidence collected in our two peripheral case study areas in Addis Ababa – Tulu Dimtu and Yeka Abado. We argue that the tensions and compromises between housing provision for the poor on the one hand and the pursuit of land value rise, urban land restructuring and the building of a potential middle class on the other have made the urban space in Addis Ababa increasingly unequal. This has contributed to a situation in which social stability in the periphery has become increasingly precarious.

The evolution of housing policy in Ethiopia

The IHDP programme does not meet conventional, strict definitions of ‘public housing’, which generally define such housing as being owned by the state and rented at subsidised rates to relatively low-income tenants, due to the fact it is actually based on owner-occupation. However, it is ‘public housing’ in a broader sense, given that it is funded up front by the Ethiopian government and substantially subsidised through a progressive logic in which the smaller units targeted at the poorest residents are the most heavily subsidised. Since the late 1960s, housing advocates have advised governments of developing countries to abandon their policy of direct public housing provision and transform to act as an ‘enabler’ of self-help and community-based housing activities (Pugh, 1994; Mukhija, 2001). Consequently, state-owned public housing that is rented to urban tenants has declined as a global form in recent decades, though the recognition of the importance of rental housing to many urban dwellers in practice – including informal rental housing (Scheba and Turok, 2020; Lombard et al., 2021) – is leading some scholars to urge governments to pay greater attention to the provision of rental housing options (Bredenoord et al., 2014; Gilbert, 2016). In the past decades most African governments have shifted from housing provision to a more complex approach which emphasises the service management and infrastructure provision (Stren, 1990; Jones and Datta, 2000; Ogu and Ogbuozobe, 2001). While they differ in terms of their modalities and tenure systems, the literature on public housing programmes in developing regions suggests very mixed results (see Olayiwola et al., 2005; Etim et al., 2007; Charlton, 2009; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015).

In the case of Ethiopia, the EPRDF regime was also seeking to shift away from the emphasis on public ownership of housing that had characterised the Derg regime preceding it. Under the Derg not only was there an emphasis on state-provided housing remaining in national hands, but any second homes were also nationalised (see Chapters 2 and 3), with small amounts of rent being paid to the kebele and much of the old housing in the city remaining this way to the present day. In the late-Derg and early-EPRDF period, very little new formal housing was built of any kind, such that between 1984 and 1995, 80 per cent of new housing units built were unplanned, informal and often auto-constructed (Shiferaw, 1998). Against this backdrop, as part of its developmental drive the EPRDF government wanted to stimulate housing provision. However, its first efforts to do so were not through direct investment in housing but through pushing the development of housing by cooperatives.

The Cooperative Housing Programme was first initiated under the Derg regime shortly after it came to power in 1974 as a policy measure to address the housing shortage for low- and middle-income households after decades of land speculation and profiteering by imperial elites. Under this programme, land was allocated for free for the construction of owner-occupied units on plots of a maximum of 500 m2 for individuals and households who organised themselves as cooperatives, none of whom could already own a house (Tesfaye, 2007). In 1986 there was an attempt to make the programme more efficient by initiating a full Department of Cooperative Housing within the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, reducing interest rates, committing the government to provide physical infrastructure and reducing the maximum plot size to 250 m2. The Housing and Savings Bank provided loans for the cooperatives collectively at interest rates substantially lower than were available to individuals, while the Housing Construction Corporation provided assistance in materials and construction (Zewdie et al., 2018). The subsidies were generous – not only was land free, but construction materials were provided at a 60 per cent subsidy (Masumoto and Crook, 2021: 41).

From 1975 to 1992 the cooperative movement produced 40,539 housing units – an average of 2,252 annually (Tesfaye, 2007: 31). This, however, satisfied only a small proportion of demand for the period, and the processes for securing loans and acquiring permits were slow and cumbersome (Tesfaye, 2007: 31). Despite its drawbacks, as a modality of housing delivery it continued to exist and evolve, remaining one of the main mechanisms of housing delivery under the EPRDF. However, land was no longer given entirely free (being instead allotted at a benchmark price under the lease system), and interest rates became significantly steeper due to liberalisation reforms in 1994 (Matsumoto and Crook, 2021: 15). To benefit from the scheme it is also required that these individuals pool their capital so that 50 per cent of the planned construction cost was set aside in a blocked Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) account prior to registration (Zhang et al., 2019: 42). This meant that those able to engage in cooperative housing construction were mainly middle- and upper-income groups.

The cooperative housing system delivered 24,820 cooperative houses in Addis Ababa between 1996 and 2003 (UN-Habitat, 2011: 4), an estimated 60 per cent of which were in the peripheries (Zhang et al., 2019: 41). This was a far higher number than the 7,409 units built by the state in this period, or the 3,520 built by real estate developers, as well as being slightly higher than the 22,225 houses built formally by individuals and just under the estimated 30,000 informal dwellings (UN-Habitat, 2011: 4). Combined, this estimated 88,000 was, however, still nowhere near meeting demand, given that Addis Ababa had accumulated an estimated housing backlog of 233,000 units by the early 2000s (Delz, 2014).

Given the relative failure of the cooperative housing policy to generate anything like sufficient amounts of housing, the EPRDF reached a decision – in line with its broader turn towards large-scale investment in urban infrastructure and fixed capital (Goodfellow, 2022) – to invest massively in housing that could then be divested to city dwellers. The Cooperative Housing Programme was officially suspended in Addis Ababa in 2005, partly due to concerns about speculation facilitated by the preferential land allocation for cooperative housing (Masumoto and Crook, 2021: 41) but also due to the fact that by this time the IHDP was the centrepiece of the government’s housing policy. The IHDP has facilitated the building of around 300,000 housing units in more than thirty sites in Addis Ababa alone.1 As discussed in Chapter 1, as the programme advanced, the new sites were pushed further towards the edge of the city and this led to widespread evictions of farmers and informal settlers. The sprawl of housing land to the periphery and the swift relocation of low-income households into these disconnected sites have often led to loss of incomes, interruptions of children’s education and current social ties, and challenges in access to public services (Abebe and Hesselberg, 2015; Ejigu, 2012; Megento, 2013; Gebre-Egziabher, 2014; Keller and Mukudi-Omwami, 2017).

The fact that the IHDP has had some negative consequences, including large-scale displacement, should come as no surprise when one considers the multiple functions served by the programme. Contrary to the understanding of housing policies as the government’s efforts to solve housing shortages, these policies have always been an ‘ideological artefact’, more often than not being directed towards maintaining political or economic order rather than merely addressing housing shortages (Marcuse and Madden, 2016: 184). Although ‘affordability’ and ‘housing the poor’ are central to the rationale for the programme, the decision-making on the IHDP (like many other large-scale housing programmes) has been ‘negotiated’ among different interest groups and entities, driven by a set of varying political interests and rationalities at different levels that inevitably generate contradictions and tensions between targets, procedures and results (Huchzermeyer, 2001; Charlton, 2009; Marcuse, 2013).

Given that such housing programmes are often multifaceted and riven with inconsistencies, in this chapter we examine the IHDP programme from a range of different perspectives. We argue that despite a core focus on housing affordability, the programme embeds much more complex social and political goals. As such, the IHDP was not only a housing programme but also a key element of a broader ‘developmental’ idealism in the EPRDF’s Ethiopia. As an official document from the Ministry of Works and Development pointed out, ‘The IHDP envisages … the utilisation of housing as an instrument to promote urban development, create jobs, revitalise the local urban economy through MSE development, encourage saving and empower urban residents through property ownership, and develop the capacity of the domestic construction industry’ (Ministry of Works and Urban Development, 2008).There are at least three goals that the housing programme aimed to achieve besides housing provision itself. First, the Ethiopian government has been using the programme as a tool for economic growth through investment in the construction sector and related industries, as also examined in Chapters 2 and 3. Second, the IHDP has been central to the cultivation of a ‘property-owning’ class that could provide a long-term support base for the EPRDF in Addis Ababa (Planel and Bridonneau, 2017). Third, the IHDP has been a tool of spatial restructuring of the capital city of Addis Ababa through the change of land uses and density redistribution. Proceeding in parallel with the attempt to disperse residential populations out of the city centre (discussed in Chapter 1) while remaining within politically and institutionally manageable boundaries, densification has been a driving concept behind the design of the IHDP condos (UN-Habitat, 2011: 20). While the first condominium buildings were ‘ground plus four storeys’ (G+4), later ones, including those developed at Yeka Abado, are up to G+7. As one of the city government officials put it, ‘bringing scattered people in one space and making very compact kind of lifestyle might [make] good value on land use’ (Ethiopian Government Official 1, 2018).

The continued effort of inner-city renewal and peri-city housing projects in Addis Ababa has therefore resulted in an increase in density on residential land in the city. Indeed, the average population density in residential land in Addis Ababa increased from 170 people per ha in 2006 to 201 people per ha in 2016. In the meantime the percentage of informal housing occupation of the total residential areas has decreased significantly from 58 per cent to 38 per cent (Larsen et al., 2019). The housing programme has thus been an integral part of the urban renewal programme to clear the city centre and densify communities at the edge to avail central land for high value-addition investment. In the following sections we analyse these different layers of the housing programme and their effects on the periphery of Addis Ababa, as well as some of the aspects of the lived experience of condominium housing and the other housing forms that surround it in our case study peripheries.

Housing crisis, affordability and the multiple rationales of the IHDP

By the mid 1990s the sense of a housing crisis in Addis Ababa was acute; various studies showed that only 21 per cent of the city’s housing stock met definitions of ‘acceptable’ housing, with 80 per cent of the population living in conditions designated as crowded (Shiferaw, 1998). 57 per cent of housing units were publicly owned (a figure later estimated at 70 per cent (UN-Habitat, 2011: 15), with levels of deterioration of these houses reaching a critical state in the majority of cases (Shiferaw, 1998). Throughout the 1990s, transformation of existing housing was the primary means through which housing was provided for the burgeoning city population (Shiferaw, 1998), notwithstanding some new housing production through various modalities outlined above. Although the EPRDF had made an effort to unleash the urban economy by leasing public land to increase government revenue and open up the housing sector to the private actors (Goodfellow, 2017b; Zewdie et al., 2018), this in itself could not rapidly address the housing backlog – particularly for affordable housing. Housing development was constrained by limited land availability, soaring prices for land that was released for auction and severely limited access to finance (Goodfellow, 2017b). Thus, despite efforts by the government and assistance from the international organisations to support self-help housing, the housing backlog persisted.

Facing the significant housing deficit, in the early 2000s the government of Ethiopia started its collaboration with German Technical Cooperation (GTZ, since renamed GIZ) to explore low-cost construction technology, and initiated what was initially called the Addis Ababa Grand Housing Programme (AAGHP) – the predecessor of the IHDP. This was a particular priority of Arkebe Oqubay during his time as Mayor of Addis Ababa from 2003–05. With GIZ support, a pilot project was carried out in the Bole-Geji in eastern Addis Ababa in 2004, where 750 housing units (with one–two bedrooms) were constructed along with some office and commercial units. The major work was completed within eight months, though elements of the housing blocks were left intentionally incomplete (e.g. floor tiling and interior plastering was left to residents themselves), and the delivery of infrastructure was beset with problems of coordination and quality (UN-Habitat, 2011). However, despite its limitations, the pilot provided an important learning curve, and these challenges did nothing to dampen the government’s enthusiasm for taking the programme forward. Once established, the AAGHP facilitated the design and planning of more than 60,000 units in one hundred different sites through the newly established Addis Ababa Housing Development Project Office (AAHDPO) (Delz, 2014). In 2005 the EPRDF government scaled it up and rebranded it as the IHDP, with the official aim of building 396,000 housing units during the first phase up to 2010 (MoUDHC, 2014: 45).

The initiation of the AAGHP, and its successor the IHDP, reflected two major characteristics of the government’s new approach to housing: 1) massive provision to address the housing crisis, and 2) subsidisation, particularly of smaller units, to promote affordability. The programme proved able to deliver a significant number of housing units within a limited timeframe through the channelling of an impressive amount of public resources. By the designated deadline of Phase I, the programme had delivered 142,802 units in total, of which 62,557 (43.8 per cent) were built in more than thirty sites in Addis Ababa (MoUDHC, 2014: 45; UN-Habitat, 2017). By 2015, 245,000 units had been built in total (Keller and Mukudi-Omwami, 2017), and by 2019, 175,000 had been built in Addis Ababa alone, with another 132,000 under construction (Larsen et al., 2019). Moreover, in the early stages at least, the programme largely delivered on its overriding aim of building condominium housing at low cost: the cost of the pilot programme was ETB886/m2, as compared with an estimated ETB2000/m2 on the private market (UN-Habitat, 2011: 18). As well as providing basically no finishing in the interior of the units, new technologies were adopted:

The LCH [Low Cost Housing] technology’s main measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency consisted of designing a new and cheaper hollow block size; creating columns without formwork by inserting reinforcement inside the hollow blocks, combining both strip and slab foundations, and introducing a pre-fabricated formwork-free slab system using beams and hollow blocks. Overall, this resulted in construction costs of ETB 500–800 (USD 59–95) per square meter, a 40% reduction of average building costs in Ethiopia at the time. (Delz, 2014)

To further regulate the cost of constructing condominiums and to enhance support to the MSEs, the government restricted the condominium housing contracts to domestic companies (Interviews with City Government Officials, 2018). Despite the government’s effort to reduce construction costs, the affordability of the housing units was increasingly called into question as the programme continued to expand. Even from the outset, the intention to actually deliver housing affordable to poor urban residents was somewhat contradicted by a manual published by GTZ and the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) in 2003, in which it is stated that the targeted beneficiaries are people with an income range of between 300 and 1,300 birr, those who can afford a down payment equalling half of the construction cost or those who ‘have a fixed employment as civil servants or within the private sector’ so that they can access the credit system of the banks (Ministry of Federal Affairs, 2003). Later development of the programme further demonstrated that affordability has not been the top priority of the IHDP. Originally funded by the Addis Ababa City Administration (AACA)’s own resources, when it expanded to national level in 2006, the CBE agreed to provide finance for the IHDP housing through a bond agreement with the government (UN-Habitat, 2011). At the distribution end, the housing unit recipients are supposed to make a down payment upon allocation of the housing unit and pay back the loans over the long term with a concessional interest rate. This finance-distribution mechanism could be traced to the Cooperative Housing Programme discussed in the preceding section, though the finance for the condominium housing is directed towards individual households and the payment mechanism is more complex. There are three modalities in terms of deposit/loan ratios, each associating with particular housing modalities. The cheapest units, targeted at the lowest-income households, pay 10 per cent as a deposit and are loaned the remaining 90 per cent, which they can repay over twenty-five years at an interest rate of 9.5 per cent. The units under this scheme are studios or one-bedroom apartments. The 20 per cent down payment/80 per cent loan option is associated with more spacious two-bedroom apartments. The 40 per cent down payment/60 per cent loan option is targeted at middle- and high-income groups for bigger apartments and attracts a higher interest rate (MoUDHC, 2014). In all cases, houses are delivered via a lottery scheme, with applicants having to demonstrate they can afford the down payment before being able to sign up. The primary exception to lottery-based delivery is that some of the 10/90 units are allocated to low-income groups evicted from settlements – usually in the city centre – that have been appropriated by the government for urban redevelopment.

The rationale of the financing system is that the buyers of the housing units will pay back the loan and economically benefit the CBE; indeed, the intention is that the whole programme can deliver 100 per cent cost recovery. By the end of 2011 the government had raised ETB3.2 billion (USD153 million) from CBE through bonds for implementing the IHDP (MoUDHC, 2014). To achieve this cost recovery, the government is willing to compromise the tenure of the housing units. In other words, while it was intended as a programme to create owner-occupancy, it is recognised that this is not possible in many cases given that the cost of loan repayments is beyond the capacity of many beneficiaries of the lottery scheme:

No credit or income checks on potential beneficiaries are undertaken. The assumption is that if beneficiaries have the financial capacity to meet their mortgage obligations, they will do so. If not, they will rent out their unit and finance the mortgage through this income. The CBE refers outstanding mortgage repayments to the HDPO, who, depending on the grace period, in turn may replace the household with another household who has the ability to pay. (UN-Habitat, 2011: 19)

Our survey in the two sites of Yeka Abado and Tulu Dimtu, where the majority of the IHDP condos fall under the 20/80 financial scheme, has shown that renting of the condominium housing is indeed a common practice. Among condominium residents surveyed in Tulu Dimtu, 36 per cent were renting, while in Yeka Abado this figure was even higher at 52 per cent. This far exceeds the percentage of the rental tenants in the private real estate development adjacent to the condo sites in Yeka Abado, in which only one in six of our respondents were renting. Interviews show that there has not only been informal renting in the condominiums but also informal selling of the condo houses immediately after allocation – which is contrary to the rules in place that officially prohibit resale within five years: ‘Those who can afford to live in it are living in it and those who can’t or prefer not to are selling their properties and earning enough for their plan’ (Yeka Abado NA 050 ♂ Interview). The housing officials in the city government also recognised that informal sales of the condominium housing have become a popular practice (Addis Ababa Housing Officials 1 and 3, 2018).

As the financial mechanism and the practices on the ground show, the IHDP is not designed for maximum provision of suitable shelter and tenure for the poor, but rather to facilitate flow of capital into the housing market. The economic implications weigh heavier than any other elements in the housing programme, and there is a clear pursuit of broader economic development goals above the realisation of housing rights for the poor. These goals include the boost to construction sector activity (see Figure 5.1) discussed in Chapters 2 and 3; yet, as is clear from our findings in relation to jobs and livelihoods, the stimulus to these sectors was often temporary and also resulted in the formation of new informal workers’ settlements with poor living conditions that then became permanent, co-existing in tension with the government’s drive to progressively formalise housing in the city.

Another element of the IHDP that raises the question of long-term economic impact of the programme is its vigorous promotion of homeownership, which aims ‘to not only improve one’s housing conditions but also to take advantage of … [the] extremely secure private asset’ (UN-Habitat, 2011: 38). Experiences in other countries have shown that the growth of housing ownership does encourage savings and may contribute to wealth accumulation and the formation/consolidation of a middle class, as well as potentially strengthen social stability (Lim et al., 1980; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998; Rohe et al., 2013). However, recent studies have also challenged the correlation between homeownership growth and economic development in the ‘late’ homeownership era (Forrest and Hirayama, 2018). In Ethiopia the demand for private ownership of condominium units has also proved to be lower than anticipated outside of Addis Ababa. While the IHDP was planned to be a national programme, in 2010 the programme was suspended in all cities outside the capital because of low effective demand and highly constrained ability to pay for the housing (UN-Habitat, 2011: 19). This suggests that a programme predicated on an abrupt shift towards private ownership has limited potential to meet the housing backlog, especially outside Addis Ababa, throwing the overall approach into question. In reality the promotion of homeownership and the objective of housing affordability always exist in tension, given that the wider economic prosperity generated by homeownership depends on the rising value of assets, while housing affordability relies on cost control (Ortalo-Magné and Prat, 2014).

The lived experience of housing in the peripheries of Addis Ababa

Life in the condos

Despite the stated aim of creating homeownership, our survey data shows the high rates of renter-occupiers in the condominiums. Out of the 204 people surveyed in the Tulu Dimtu area, 136 were condominium residents, 85 of whom were owner-occupiers and 49 renters (36 per cent). In Yeka Abado, where 131 out of 204 residents surveyed were based in condominiums, 63 were owners and 68 renters (52 per cent). The data also presents a very mixed picture when it comes to people’s feelings about whether their lives have improved since relocating to these areas. In both Tulu Dimtu and Yeka Abado, around half of the interviewees across all housing types in the area consider that their lives have improved after relocating there (50 per cent and 51 per cent respectively), but the ratio of condominium owners specifically who acknowledge life improvements is slightly lower (45 per cent in Tulu Dimtu and 46 per cent in Yeka Abado). Although the difference is relatively minor, one might expect a programme designed to enhance housing conditions to result in higher levels of satisfaction regarding life improvement.

While this suggests that becoming a condominium owner does not necessarily translate into greater satisfaction with living conditions, there were plenty of owners for whom that fact of homeownership was highly significant. When discussing their positive feelings about homeownership, residents cited reasons such as the freedom to settle in one place with a sense of continuity/stability, including in social and religious relationships and affiliations (Tulu Dimtu MM 090 ♂ Diary). Owning one’s own home was associated with pride and increased confidence (Tulu Dimtu RG 034 ♀ Diary). In perhaps the most striking quote on this issue, one resident of the part of Tulu Dimtu known as ‘Eritrea’ (due to it being cut off from the main site by a major road) said that ‘Not living in a rental house is like moving to heaven for me’ (Tulu Dimtu DT 029 ♀ Diary). Similar religious imagery was used by condominium residents in Yeka Abado, with one resident saying they would ‘like to thank God who has delivered us from rental housing and gave us a home of our own’ (Yeka Abado TB 001 ♂ Diary).

This sense of gratitude for a house of their own was particularly marked among some of the very poorest residents, who had been allocated small and relatively cheap 10/90 condominium units (Yeka Abado EN 014 ♀ Interview; Yeka Abado ZW 049 ♀ Interview). Related to the pride of homeownership was the sense of dignity associated with having one’s own facilities such as a toilet, a water supply and a kitchen. As one resident noted, ‘We’re very lucky that God gave us this kind of house which gives us unshared facilities’ (Tulu Dimtu TZ 031 ♀ Interview). Freedom was also often cited by residents as one of the great merits of living in (and especially owning) a condominium unit, particularly for those who have experienced various forms of housing in which they had been constrained by communal life and community pressures. One male Yeka Abado resident noted that his biggest source of joy was the freedom his family has in the house where they now live (Yeka Abado BA 072 ♂ Diary). Some people were so happy with life in the condominiums that they said there was nothing at all they weren’t happy with (Tulu Dimtu KF 012 ♂ Interview), though this was relatively rare. Around half of condominium owners surveyed also cited a reduced cost of living as a benefit of being an owner-occupier in a condominium.

However, most of these positive assessments of the quality of the living environment, facilities and cost of condominium life were countered by people saying the opposite. In terms of cost, for many residents in the condominiums, ‘the rise in everyday expenses [has become] a major issue’ (Yeka Abado SM 042 ♀ Interview), including due to the increased spending on transport (see Chapter 8). The costs were often significantly higher for renters given the rapidly escalating cost of the rental market in the condominiums. As one condominium resident in Tulu Dimtu noted, ‘There are many people who rent in Tulu Dimtu and the rental prices are constantly increasing so that third parties can make commission from them’ (Tulu Dimtu ME 011 ♀ Diary). Rents of around 2,500 birr per month were cited by residents of a typical condominium in Tulu Dimtu – significantly higher than the figures of 671–1,500 per month (depending on size) paid by owner-occupiers repaying their CBE loans. The increases in rents are striking: in just two years, one Yeka Abado resident reported their rent increasing from 600 to 2,000 Birr (Yeka Abado MK 022 ♂ Interview). These rapid increases perpetuated the high turnover among renters, leading people to ‘hop’ from one condominium site to another, newer or less well-located one in pursuit of cheaper rents. As in Tulu Dimtu, brokers were held responsible for pushing up the rents by demanding ever higher commission (Yeka Abado MK 022 ♂ Diary).

A further factor contributing to the cost of living in an IHDP condominium relates to the unfinished nature of the units at the point of distribution, discussed previously (see Figure 5.2). While the units were considered to be 80 per cent complete, the cost of finishing the remaining 20 per cent was hugely burdensome for many residents, especially when added to loan repayments. Some residents complained of the large amounts they had to spend just to make the apartment liveable given the poor quality of the materials and lack of fixtures and fittings (Tulu Dimtu BA 030 ♂ Diary; Tulu Dimtu BA 032 ♂ Interview; Tulu Dimtu RG 034 ♀ Diary). The sense that the various elements of the apartments were not joined up – with, for example, drainpipes that didn’t connect with the guttering – was widespread. The cost of interior decoration and renovation was cited by some interviewees as amounting to 50 per cent of the overall cost of owning the unit (Yeka Abado TB 001 ♂ Interview). One resident noted that the condominiums were also ‘not comfortable for children’ (Tulu Dimtu RG 034 ♀ Diary), and the sense that they could be difficult for family and communal life echoes findings from elsewhere (Ejigu, 2012).

Meanwhile, regular cuts in water and electricity, as well as noise and disturbance from construction and interior decoration, impeded people’s enjoyment of their property even when they were broadly positive about condominium life. Some residents of Tulu Dimtu condominiums – where our survey indicates that basic services such as water and energy provision was particularly poor at the time of our research – commented that they only received water once a week, and even then there was not enough water pressure to reach the third and fourth floors (Tulu Dimtu MH 092 ♂ Diary; see Figure 3.1 of a man carrying water containers in Yeka Abado). Water provision was notably better in Yeka Abado, though concerns about quality remained. In general, life on the higher floors was particularly hard, a problem felt especially acutely in the top floors of the tall G+7 blocks in Yeka Abado. Here, elevators had not yet been installed, hazardous drops in elevator shafts were commonplace and disabled and elderly people – though in principle supposed to be allocated lower floors if they won the unit in the lottery – struggled with long staircases (Yeka Abado ED 002 ♂ Diary; Yeka Abado KT 017 ♂ Diary). Residents commented on being shocked at seeing elderly people regularly having to deal with these staircases, which lacked crucial fixtures such as handrails (Yeka Abado KT 017 ♂ Diary).

Meanwhile, some residents – particularly in Yeka Abado where there were very high numbers of renters – commented that they had to ‘give up’ on some of the freedoms and values they deemed desirable in a place of residence, including cleanliness in the shared areas. As one Yeka Abado resident noted:

When you live in a condominium house there is no point of cleaning your house alone because not everyone is clean and cares about cleanliness like you do. For example, on our floor there are ten houses; except our house the other nine are renters. Most renters don’t care and most are single men or women; these usually leave in the morning and come back in the evening. (Yeka Abado TB 001 ♂ Diary)

Similar complaints were made about theft in shared areas of the condominium blocks. Meanwhile, there was a clear sense that even one’s own private space, nurtured through months and years of decorating and care, could turn suddenly from being a treasured haven into somewhere very unpleasant if the infrastructural and service failures were too severe. The following quote captures well this duality between pride and pleasure in the home, and its capacity to go wrong at short notice due to factors beyond your control: ‘A condominium house is comfortable for living. Nevertheless, if there is a problem of water shortage and power cut, a condominium would be among the very worst places to live in. Especially the smell of toilets, carrying water up, smell of the fridge from rotten food is very ugly’ (Yeka Abado AA 068 ♀ Diary).

Life outside the condos

Of course, condominium housing is by no means the only type of housing in our case study peripheries; as well as cooperative housing in Tulu Dimtu and substantial private real estate development in Yeka Abado, both areas have informal settlements that house (among others) construction workers, former construction workers and displaced farmers. As alluded to in earlier chapters, one of the dark sides of the condominium programme has been the large-scale displacement of farmers, which – by the government’s own account – was not adequately accounted for either with respect to livelihoods (see Chapter 3) or alternative housing provision. According to our key informant interviews in 2018, the IHDP only started to include the dislocated farmers fifteen years into the implementation of the programme, following the recognition that a significant number of farmers could not sustain their lives with the compensation they had been given (Ethiopian Government Official 2, 2018). Koye Feche, the most recent condominium site to be completed and by far the largest, has resulted in the displacement of about 1,925 farmers in order to build over four hundred four-storey housing blocks accommodating 600,000 housing units (three times the size of Yeka Abado).2 The consequent homelessness of many of these farmers significantly contradicts the programme’s aim to address a lack of shelter in the city for the poorest and most vulnerable.

For many such people, small mud houses in the interstices between the condominium sites and other land uses are typically where they have ended up living. Some people reported being happy in these houses – for example, appreciating the wider area, their status as owners and the freedom to decorate them as they choose (Tulu Dimtu BA 085 ♀ Interview; Yeka Abado YG 064 ♀ Diary). Others are much less positive about them, with one resident in a Tulu Dimtu informal settlement saying they ‘don’t like the neighbourhood or house’ as it ‘doesn’t fulfil their needs’ – lacking a water supply or toilet (Tulu Dimtu AM 083 ♂ Interview). For many residents of such areas, there is ‘no comfort’, and living with children in such housing is very difficult, not least due to an absence of their own water or power supply, leading to a heavy dependence on other people (Yeka Abado GS 048 ♂ Diary). Others still were ambivalent, with one resident commenting that they ‘feel nothing about their house’ (Tulu Dimtu HT 081 ♀ Interview). For some in these areas, the sense of hope for a better future – given the rapid development of the surrounding area – was palpable, with the housing considered ‘okay for now, until I get better options’ (Yeka Abado TA 040 ♂ Diary). Even in these areas, which constitute the most vulnerable and under-serviced housing in our case study peripheries, the cost of rent was often increasing every month despite no improvement to the quality of the house and quality of life (Yeka Abado SF 045 ♀ Interview). These areas are thus far from immune to the upward push of rents, with one Yeka Abado informal settlement resident noting that ‘when you stay too long at that house they assume that is it because the rental prices is cheap for you and hence always look for a reason to increase the price’ (Yeka Abado AA 046 ♂ Diary).

In the cooperative housing area of Tulu Dimtu, part-constructed buildings (usually just one or two storeys) housing multiple households are the norm. Multiple household occupancy is unsurprising given the conditions attached to developing cooperative housing, which required between ten and twenty people to come together in the formation of a cooperative, while the unfinished nature of buildings is also a consequence of the official discontinuation of support for the programme after 2005 (Masumoto and Crook, 2021: 27, 41). Although one study found that the majority of inhabitants of cooperative housing are actually from the top two income quintiles (Zhang et al., 2019: 42), our research suggests that the experience of living there can be insecure and ‘scary’ due to the perceived social instability of these multiple-occupant households, which often house temporary renters seeking scarce work (Tulu Dimtu S 060 ♂ Diary; Tulu Dimtu AA 083 ♂ Interview).

More generally, both informal settler residents and cooperative housing residents share many of the condominium residents’ concerns about rising living costs due to lack of access to markets and supplies (Interviews with Tulu Dimtu Residents in March 2018). Although land belongs to the government, there are widespread informal transactions of landownerships (or user-ships) among farmers in the periphery, and land value has seen a rise since the construction of the IHDP buildings in these sites (Interview with Various Government Officials, Addis Ababa, December 2018). The change of land use and the rising price of farmland are part of the structural change in the development of Addis Ababa, which whether through the cost of acquiring land or the cost of rent has had a profound impact on the living costs of the peripheral urban dwellers, as well as their livelihood opportunities.

Meanwhile, the residents living in Country Club Developers (CCD) – the large, gated, real estate development adjacent to Yeka Abado condominiums (see Figure 9.1) – noted their appreciation of the quietness, clean air, cleanliness and beauty of the area (Yeka Abado M 100 ♀ Diary). The contrast here with people in the informal settlements primarily housing displaced farmers could hardly be more stark, with many such families forced to live in one-room houses (Yeka Abado FB 039 ♀ Interview) as well as under the constant threat of eviction due to the illegal status of their dwelling (Yeka Abado AT 037 ♂ Interview).

Conclusions

Urban Ethiopia – and especially Addis Ababa – has been the site of some of the most remarkable housing policies on the African continent in recent decades. The country’s tumultuous modern history – involving abrupt shifts from imperial rule and landlordism to radical communist revolution, and then a form of developmentalist state capitalism – has meant the gradual adding of new housing policies and programmes on top of (very different) older ones, but without the older ones being fully extinguished. The sedimentation of different housing types over time – from the conversion of backyard dwellings in nobles’ houses to state-owned kebele housing, to the introduction of cooperative housing, the birth of the IHDP, the gradual opening up of private real estate and the proliferation of informal settlements for displaced farmers – has produced a unique urban built environment. All of these housing types exist in the urban periphery. They often rub up uncomfortably against one another while at the same time sharing many similar challenges of distance, poor connectivity and (in all but the case of the wealthiest real estate enclaves) major challenges in basic services and material qualities.

The IHDP originated as a technical solution to address the housing shortage by using low-cost building techniques to house the urban poor on a massive scale. It expanded to a national level and was integrated into the state’s broader developmental goals to achieve a set of social and economic targets, and the aim of providing shelter for the poor intertwined with other social and political interests at city and state levels. The competing and contradictory interests and stakes within the strategy have, however, undermined the efforts to achieve ‘integrated’ results and led to mixed outcomes. The government planned to use the construction of massive housing sites as a way to stimulate growth of the construction sector and accumulate a potential property-owning middle class. Yet the job creation effect of the programme has not been sustained (see Chapter 3), and a lack of linkages with the private sector has limited the overall economic development effect of the housing programme. The combination of the housing programme and inner-city urban renewal schemes relocated thousands of inner-city residents to the periphery and fundamentally changed the structure of the land use in Addis Ababa. But the lack of physical and social connectivity has led to the formation of isolated and often fragmented localities in the peripheral sites, in which many residents face huge challenges in everyday life and highly uncertain futures, while new and growing forms of urban inequality are etched into the urban landscape. In this sense the promise of the ‘vanguard periphery’ in these areas has been partially undermined not only by its own over-reach in terms of infrastructural capacity but also by the simultaneous creation of auto-constructed, speculative and potentially future inherited peripheries.

Indeed, without more sustained job creation, farmers’ rehabilitation and more widely affordable housing, the peripheries will surely continue to be places of poverty and exclusion even if aspirant middle classes come to ‘capture’ the condominiums themselves. The IHDP has now been discontinued, with Koye Feche the last major site to be built (and mired in scandal over the allocation of its units). Yet the rise and fall of the IHDP has shown the challenges of trying to combine the welfare role of state housing with the value creation function. While the ‘integrated’ nature of the programme made sense in terms of Ethiopia’s range of development challenges, housing cannot be truly ‘affordable’ to the majority so long as it is primarily seen as a tool of economic development and a means of building an urban middle-class political base.

Notes

1 By 2015 the programme was able to build 245,000 units (Keller and Mukudi-Omwami, 2017), and the last and biggest IHDP project in Koye Feche will provide 60,000 more apartments, according to our informant interviews in February 2018.
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Living the urban periphery

Infrastructure, everyday life and economic change in African city-regions

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