Vaissnavi Shukl
When we talk about discourses on housing, we usually draw references from the western context. It is only in the last few decades that developing countries have come to the forefront of housing dialogues, owing to the growing economies and increasing populations. Today, we take a closer look at the housing market in Kenya, especially in Nairobi. Wh the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we have with us today, Kenyan architect, Etta Madete, who was the lead researcher for the East Africa section of the ‘Countryside’ exhibition by Rem Koolhaas, in our conversation today, she talks about the different types of housing typologies in Kenya and how innovative rental products can revolutionise urban housing and make it affordable.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

And I’m very excited to talk about what we’re going to talk about today, because this is a part of the world, in a geography that, for the lack of our searching skills or lack of publications and exposure to the kind of materials available, we’ve not been exploring as much as we would like to. And so with you, we really want to delve deeper into your work and the broader African context, and of course, then pick on specific instances. So before we get into the real nitty gritties and and the details, I thought, we can start talking about the housing system that that currently exists can’t be throughout the African context, but if you can broadly, just help, you know, initiate us into the world of how is housing, whether it’s urban housing or rural housing, what is the current situation right now when we talk about housing in Africa?

Etta Madete
Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. I love talking about all things housing scale in Africa. And I, personally feel it’s difficult to look at Africa as one country or one regional context for two reasons. One is because we don’t trade directly with each other. The different countries don’t trade. There’s no trade barriers between us. There’s language and cultural differences between the major zones, or north west, east and south. But generally our cities and our towns have grown in a very similar way. So there’s these trade barriers, maybe a few cultural in terms of the different zones, but the way that we build and we deal with housing and infrastructure and urban development is surprisingly very similar when you go to different African contexts. So in one aspect, we can’t really talk when it comes to like, how does capital flow, how does trade flow, and that’s housing and real estate, but we can talk about what I believe is the way we can set up Africa to be ready for that wave of capital that’s coming in the next couple of years. So if you look at the way that, the way I see it is that there’s four ranges of housing typologies that you’ll find in African countries. And I’m giving an example from Kenya, Nairobi, where I’m from. So you have urban rental housing that’s very strong. So you have urban rental because people come from the city, they come into the they come from the rural areas. They come to the city just for work. In the Kenyan context, they really do have an ancestral home and ancestral land, and they intend to live and retire there, my grandparents, my parents, me, my siblings, we all live, we all work in Nairobi, and we know it’s going to be a short period of time, and we intend to already begin building our retirement home in our ancestral land. So you have the urban rental, and the urban rental full range, you have formal, informal, semi formal, part time ownership, rent to own. So the urban rental is very strong and extremely varied, but almost everyone rents 80% rental within the city. So even if you’re in a slum or low income in a slum or an informal settlement, you’re still kind of paying rent to a sort of landlord. It’s just because there’s no supply of formal housing to house a particular income group. So there’s extremely supply constrained, and the demand is constantly rising faster than supply. You know, I don’t think it’ll ever catch up. It hasn’t caught up in the West. I don’t know whether it’ll ever catch up here. So the supply and demand of affordable housing is always at a cross head. So that’s urban rental. Then you have urban home ownership. This is now when either in different income groups, as well as real estate developers and other people providing this housing. You’ll find this usually either in the outskirts of the cities, similar to how suburbia formed in the West. But you’ll find it may not be like Suburban. So if it’s not high end, you sort of like you’re privileged to go out because you can do the transport there. It’s just like land is so expensive in the city that it makes no sense. If you do want to own a home in Nairobi, elevate it on occupying or as an investment, you sort of go to the outskirts. So that’s in my head. Urban home ownership takes on a completely different form. And I have this sort of philosophy where we keep confusing urban rental propositions for affordability and home ownership propositions for affordability. And these are completely different models. You have to think about, if you think about affordability, the person must have a car. We don’t have the infrastructure that supports those transits, even the West doesn’t. You need to have a car. When you move for that from the city, you think about what the amenities that are supporting this move, where are the kids going? Is it really climate positive, because it means you’re just encouraging a car centric environment, and there’s no infrastructure that can cover the suburban movement. And at that point, it’s not even like it’s formal, good quality housing. It’s just you can buy land and build slowly and stop paying rent. So even in the suburbia context, it’s not necessarily good quality, better quality housing. It’s just cheaper, because the land is cheaper. And to add on to that, the African cities are growing massively. So for example, in Nairobi, our city centre maybe had a very small radius. Five to 10 years, this radius expands. And you probably see that as well as in India, it’s going to expand. So even when I’m considering agricultural suburbia, now we know where the city is going to go into the metropolitan region. We never will come and we know that the land will become expensive anyway. So even if what we are saying is affordable, urban suburbia will eventually be part of the city. For example, Nairobi is set to become a mega city in the next five years. So it’s going to go from 5 million residents, which it is right now, to 10 million in five years. It doesn’t matter how it’s not even sprawl, it’s just densification and urbanisation. So affordability is constantly shifting, even as you move out of the city. Those are the two two form housing options. Let’s move further out then you just have rural in the rural areas, and I call rural, and that’s what I call it, like the countryside we did with Rem on mapping out the possibilities of an anti urban future, which is what covid sort of triggered. And this is what I’m checking on, is that most people see the urban areas as an employment hub, as a sort of office for a certain bit of time, so that you can earn money educate your kids, and then you’re added there. That happens all over the world, but it’s much more ingrained in African culture, because you only want to be buried where your ancestors are, or where your parents are, so you already have established even before you start working, so you don’t feel this kinship to I need to own a home in the city so there’s not much driving inside of there. So the rural or the countryside or the non urban, this is usually home ownership. This is usually the size of the house is also supported, not suddenly, it’s not a house, per se. I’ve been to the American South, and those houses are huge. It’s not a big house. It’s a house that is fit for purpose, but it’s also supported by things like connected amenities, kind of or self created amenities, or farmland or agricultural support. You find that these houses are a bit bigger, they’re a bit much more cosy. There are multiple family generations within them, and they’re part of a sort of a communal homestead. And these are self, usually self built. They’re self-built housing, so you build it over time with small income and you buy that and you buy the land, or inherit that land, so it’s very much ingrained within the community. I also mentioned those are the three main groups. There’s another group which is very rare, which is countryside or non urban rental, and this is for transient workers that are basically following employment. There’s a social social category, social workers, so like you, as a doctor employed by the government, you are assigned to this place, this rural or countryside place, you basically have to look for rental housing. This rental, non urban housing is actually a very important thing that needs to be factored in, because you can’t, because if you’re a trans worker, and as I said, one in four people in the next century, by 2050, will be African. And that’s that workforce. So Africa is going to be literally the biggest workforce in the world. And so workforce housing in a non urban and an urban context is something is a small category, but it’s growing in consideration.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think there are a lot of parallels in terms of the city growth that you mentioned. That is a pattern that, of course, India has been witnessing over the decades. So even in my city, and a lot of cities that don’t have the geographic boundaries of growing, like Mumbai, because it faces a sea, you can’t really grow much. So it grows in a linear fashion across one axis. Cities like Ahmedabad, where I live, which is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, follows a very similar pattern, where it has a historic urban core, and then it goes in concentric rings over right? So all the villages which are surrounding the city eventually get swallowed by the municipal corporations, and there are instances where those cities will still be like urban villages, because they don’t move out. So you will have your cows coming out of those urban villages walking on the road, which is why the whole image of cows and goats on the road became so popular, is because we have those urban villages part of the cities, and then they just keep getting swallowed. And that’s pretty much how it goes. There’s a certain kind of densification, which happens in the city centres, but that’s also that spreading out, where you foresee the growth years in advance. You buy land for investment, and then you just go out there and build. But you also drew a lot of examples from the West, and that’s something that even the stages of the Indian Planning Commission post independence kept on referencing the American, you know, the ‘City Beautiful’ movement. You started satellite cities and, you know, garden cities, and then eventually started factoring the idea, well, we don’t really have the suburban context anymore, because, I mean, public transport is good, is is robust within the cities, but if you move that far out, then you you’d rather be driving by yourself, because infrastructure has been able to support now, of course, you have multimode transit systems that are trying to reach out to those areas, because that certain kind of growth needs that workforce to support activity. But talking about the western context and learning from housing in the West, and looking at its adaptability in the Kenyan in the Nigerian context, how do you think over time that learning has been adapted or modified in terms of its adaptability. Because, of course, we’re comparing the West to, you know, a developing country where, of course, economically, we’re very different. Governance wise, we are very different. There are issues that nobody foresees, that we all have to work on a day to day basis, right? Right from corruption to red tape to bureaucracy to nepotism that goes into land at all allotment and all those kinds of things. What? What is that translation, or, I don’t know what, what better word? How does that work?

Etta Madete
I love what you’ve just said, which is, first of all, the urban villages, that is such a very hilarious phenomenon, and it’s a love. It’s very lovely. Like, we have very high end neighbourhoods in Nairobi where the person is insisting you must react goats, and it’s in the middle of the city and like, and that’s why I say like Kenyans always, we always have this anchor in the countryside, because

Vaissnavi Shukl
we have this, just a very quick anecdote, because, because you said that about a decade, two decades ago, we had a So, India. After its liberalisation 1991 circulating, a lot of foreign capital. Right. So liberalised as a part of liberalisation. And there’s a huge car manufacturer that set up its plan on the outskirts of the farmers. A lot of cattle herders who own that land suddenly became very rich, very rich. And this is something that a lot of Gujaratis, where I’m from, know this story, and they still laugh about it. That person, one of the farmers, sold their land for some crazy amount of money, and he goes into a car showroom and he wants to buy an Audi, but he doesn’t even know how to pronounce an Audi. So he says, I want to buy a car with four bangles, because it looks like there are four bangles in the Gujarati language. He says, I want to buy char banger, which is four bangles car, because he doesn’t know how to see Audi, but he has some money to buy it, it’s this.So, that’s a whole piece of the work that I do, and I’m, I’m going to keep doing.

Etta Madete
And it is, how do we instill land use, equity, as the cities are growing. We know it’s going to become a city, we know it’s going to be expensive. And so, and we can see it. I can see where I built it in Nairobi. that my building will get gentrified. Need to instill, in a way within my systems, a way to preserve affordability, because the people who need to be in the city cannot afford the houses that we’re building. Right? So that’s a whole other piece, and that’s what I said , like the urban village concept is an important one. It’s to basically say that emerging markets like India, Africa, Canada, they they leapfrog so like it took 5060, 100 years for America to industrialise, to to get to where it is leading to the question you asked, to institutionalise they, I mean, the great, great financial crisis in 2008 was nepotism, corruption, confusion, lack of proper systems and governance within the American capital structures. So in my view, I don’t think it’s very different. I think real estate, housing economics, they follow the same language in the same historical steps, even as a country is developing, but America the West time to get there, and the experiment was so much like when you look at different housing policies that America has experienced, experimented with, you can see they tried to build the housing that didn’t work. They tried to create associations. Those associations became corrupt. They tried to create a sort of like, let’s just give away money. Let’s improve social security. Now the minimum wage makes everything so much more expensive that now construction of buildings is ridiculous and expensive, making it unaffordable. So there’s all these different experiments that have happened, and some that have worked, some that have not. And I am sitting here, and my grandmother was colonised, so I imagine the distance My family has gone from being in a village my grandmother colonised, educated, she’s lived through pre, during post, and she’s still alive now, and I’m here, and I’m a middle class Kenyan doing housing it like coming from America. So like, imagine that for 50 years, Africa’s growth has been compressed in what you describe as five or six generations in the West. So what this means is that there’s an immense opportunity to, first of all, look at the West and see what have they done right? What have they done wrong? What are the things that are similar and not similar? And also be extremely cognizant that we as a continent are not going to go through the same steps. We are 160-70% digitised. That means that almost everyone has more than one phone, smartphone, and all income groups. So it’s, it’s like we’re not going to go through the same steps when it comes to and that’s something you and Linda talk about in your effort in the countryside as well. It’s like we, if we see it and we understand it, we will probably do what makes sense to be effective as a country. That, in my view, sort of gives me a baseline of confidence. And that’s why I came here for the sabbatical. I was like, You know what? Let me come and just see what happens. Because it’s easy to read about the west office and realise actually they’re very much the same. The problem I see, and that’s the problem I see, is that, first of all, what kind of capital goes into emerging markets? So the kind of capital that goes into building infrastructure and housing and scaling these things are DFIs or Development Finance Institutions, and they want to follow a very similar model to what the West was doing 50-60 years ago. So they want to, they want the capital to basically come into the continent, and they want governments to build housing. Yet, I’ve just mentioned that the government should not be building housing. People have learned this in the West, America doesn’t let the government doesn’t build any more housing. They enable the public and the social sector to build housing that they help to reduce the demand side subsidies to provide access to the right income groups and solve for market failures. Right? So as the continent, as developing countries, we respond to how capital wants us to do the biggest capital that it to be a bit more tangible, they still want to also in systems. And so we have two options. One is, we need to have the private sector demonstrate alternatives, so at risk alternatives, and there’s lots of players like that that are doing like the government right now. Its capital comes from a certain place. It has a debt, it has retired. It has things that they have to do to follow a certain step. That’s fine, but the private sector can demonstrate that there’s another way, and then provide avenues for the government to plug in once the demonstration has happened. We are the government in all countries and are not R and D departments, so the private sector has that role, or the social sector has that role. The second thing is being aware of the internal capital that is available. So like we in the last couple of years, foreign direct investment into Africa, actually, diaspora remittances surpassed foreign direct investment. It’s only a few years ago. It means that people, Kenyans like me, who are abroad, remit money back to the continent, usually for investment, usually because it’s a nice currency hedge. When I say currency hedge, it means that they’re earning so much and the dollar goes so far, but it makes no differences or sunk cost, but flowing into the including India, is so high it’s now surpassing foreign direct investment, which means that that money, if I’m a Kenyan abroad, I know what the money should be doing. I want to use that money and that capital to build or to whatever, etc, to invest in it, and it means that that money is coming to understand the context, understand the risk. So that means that then there’s a bit more leeway. So one is the private sector, a demonstration of different scalable models that the government can adopt. The second is, again, it’s the private sector, but it’s more like the capital flows that are not foreign direct investment. You can also get a different capital source to inspire different forms of rent and housing depending on the continent. But in a simple answer to your question, I came here thinking that I would be blown away by America, and I’ve only been here a year, and I was, I was very impressed with all the stuff that has happened. But the thing that I was impressed with is that America has tried so many types of solutions to housing. They’ve tried so many different types of solutions. They’ve documented it. They have the data. So the best thing we can do is learn from what they did right, what they did wrong, and realise that America was where we were not too long ago. London was where we were. If you look at the pictures of London in, you know, the 1950s and 1800s it’s the same as what we sort of think we’re suffering from. So we looked at the face and realised that all societies go through the same trajectory of development. What is compressed is that we are going through this at the same time as the government is doing poverty, health, security, and corruption. Me, as a housing developer who’s focused on affordable housing and sustainability I need to focus on, okay, this subset. How can I do it, demonstrate and make it easier for the government to scale in future. So there’s a lot of opportunities. Extremely something that I thought was more specific to the American context was also the counter movements that came to affordable housing, stuff like the not in my backyard movement, of course, gentrification always was opposed by those who were natively belonging to a place, but also the sheer demand for places to be gentrified, you know, because of whatever rules. And I think those kinds of things, at least in an Indian context, are not as frequently seen, you know, the NIMBY movement, things like that I feel are extremely American, because in Europe, the scenario is very different, right? You have social housing that it’s normalised, it’s normalised, but it’s also done in a really nice way, where you have competitions where you know the best of the architects participate. They really think of it as not just affordable housing, but kind of extended to things that are larger questions that are urban level and really go beyond just just housing. It’s not limited to that. So I think in that, since the American counter movements were also, I mean, I had no idea what NIMBY was, and turns out it’s a very common word in American classroom when you’re talking about housing, you know, since you mentioned that a lot of, like majority of the housing in in urban Nairobi is primarily rental housing, according to you, then what is the most ideal urban housing, rental product that that can exist, or that does exist, and how do You think that matches up to what you know, the bottom down the the aspirational approach of whoever lived match up to that big question. Just for context, I did develop an entire housing project, aspirationally, trying to make it affordable. And five years Covid And recession, inflation later, as a developer, I realised, okay, my houses are affordable in terms of price point, but the price point is not affordable to the majority of the population because the price point is high. And also, we don’t have a strong enough mortgage market to support people paying for this environment unit. So the reason that we are struggling in Nairobi with with homeownership or a non rental model, is because our mortgage rate is up 16% our base leading lending rate is at 13% so until those rates come down, it doesn’t matter how much money, yeah, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. Doesn’t matter you cannot get a mortgage for a house because you just it’s way too high. But again, I don’t know when it was, but it wasn’t just in the 1900s too long ago, America interest rates were that high. They just went down eventually. So, like, it always starts that way. It is your risk, it’s the debt, but it’s been going down, right? There’s a lot of controls that are coming, and eventually the break comes down. But until that happens, it makes zero sense to buy through cash or directly paying the developer to develop it for you, getting debt as an individual, even myself as a developer, I have to have a very low leverage on my project to enable them actually pencil out to make it make sense. So I think the first step is realising that when you go for an urban rental model, it doesn’t mean that you’re negating home ownership models. You’re just saying that until certain conditions make it possible for home ownership to make sense, then use let’s think about rental models. I also think rental models also need to be an avenue to help deeper credit rating systems in emerging markets. It’s the same in India. In most developing countries, we are moving so fast our population is not credit worthy at the same time that they need to spend money on credit, right? So you find that the low income or the popular needs housing, that needs credit, that needs access, unbanked, or if they are banked, the bank doesn’t, doesn’t see their income, that’s more informal, that’s more sporadic as that, and they’re afraid of the banks, because then the taxman gets you. So you find that the issue of home ownership, the issue of informality, just comes from the fact that we have leapfrogged from rural farming to white collar within 10 years, and we want to expect this person who’s Now a white a white collar, blue collar person to also adopt frayed and fractured so the informal sector has to be acknowledged as an actual sector. I know we call it informal, formal, semi formal. It doesn’t matter, almost every single African is semi formal, like I have formal systems, I have a job. I also have side jobs. I have investments and this and this. And informal doesn’t mean untaxed or unbanked, it just means not easily visible and data sunken. And so the rental model is able to absorb all of this. And when I say somebody in a low income informal slum is paying rent, that just shows you that it’s not an issue of whether they can pay or not, and the amount of rent they’re paying is actually very similar to formal rental. It says that the formal rental, they want to put a contract in front of you in English, and they want you to sign something, and they want to pay a deposit, and that’s not going to gel well with the way that informality works. I think urban rental modelling is one. It’s a gateway to financial, financial security for tenure. And when I say tenure, I also mean rental tenure, security of having somebody you know who’s going to pay your rent and make sure they paid on time, etc. That’s important for the landlord. It’s a portfolio adversely you as a person who’s been paying rent informally or informally for the last 30 years, you should be able to use that income stream or that payment as a way to sort of say, I’m a creditworthy individual, give me some social security in terms of a line of credit. So that piece, I think, is what urban rental should do. It should begin to formalise informality in any way possible. So I’m advocating for simpler lease documents that are in two or three different languages, that are approved by the chief, so that you’re not as a land as you know you’re this developer who’s imposing things on this? No, it needs to come from both ways, just a legal doctor. How do we acknowledge the credit history and and, and waive things like deposit, etc, so that the barrier to entries is different. And I’m not saying wave the deposit altogether. I’m just saying, How can you break it down such that the barrier to entry is not that I have a regular amount more digestible, more digestible, and then also within that rental process, families grow. You go from one small studio house to another one. So you can basically tell this person you can rent here for 10 years, and in those 10 years, here are some things I’ll put in place to make it easy for you to learn about this real estate world. And let’s discuss, after 10 years, how you can use what you’ve done for the last 10 years with me or the developer or the property owner. And let me plug you into a home ownership plan, right? Because that’s the idea, is that you’re taking somebody who doesn’t understand this world and things is intimidating. It’s scary and includes not having a mortgage. But like you, you rent with me for four or five years, get your history. I can see your track record. And we can use this to tell the bank, this woman should get a mortgage, a good mortgage. And so Kenya has a mortgage refinancing company that is below that, basically offices, mortgages for eight to 10 to 9%. Yeah, that’s low, but at the very least, after 8-10, nine years, this woman or this family or this low income family, they’ve grown economically. Their kids are now older. They’re out of school, etc, they’re able to then think about alternative financing options. I don’t even answer your question, but I think urban rental should not be seen as and it is actually being seen as affordable housing. Urban rental money making entity. You make so much money because the demand is infinite and the supply is limited, so you can charge whatever you want to charge. My model is that urban rental needs to be seen within the context of, how do we prepare Africa for this enormous economic growth and urban or forced mobility?

Vaissnavi Shukl
I was going to ask you something else, but I think I’ll rephrase it a little bit. I think the way you’re talking about it sounds like it ultimately this, this model or this should lead somebody towards the path of home ownership. Now, I think in the last two or three months, the New York Times has published a couple of studies. They did an article just two days ago about the renting versus buying model, and how in certain cities it might be cheaper to rent all your life, versus in other cities, buy a house, get your mortgage and be a homeowner. Keeping all of that in mind, I actually want to know your views on what you think about tokenization of properties, because that’s something that one particular real estate developer in my city has been talking about. Again, it’s at a very nascent stage. People are just starting to throw around the tokenization of property. You know, how do you own a share of a property, rather than owning all of it? And then that particular share can then be traded when you want to switch up just like you’re talking about from a studio to a one bedroom to a two bedroom. So, how do you tokenize that? Of course, I think it’s really too soon to talk about in the Indian context, and I think it’s too soon to talk about in any developing country context. But do you think a product like that would work in the affordable market, maybe more than it does in the luxury market, or do you think it sticks around in again today, New York Times published that even though the GDP of Pakistan one is 1/10 I think 1/10 that of India, Pakistanis own about $11 billion worth of property in Dubai, luxury property, yeah, it’s a huge thing talking about, you know, how money is saturated at The top tier, and how that money is never invested back into the country, but invested elsewhere. And so in terms of thinking about tokenization, I just think maybe, if there was a way, I don’t know how, one would make it more accessible, but could work in an affordable market where you’re able to trade those those tokens to, you know, move up or shift gears, or, I don’t know, just your thoughts on that.

Etta Madete
No, I love, I love the idea of tokenization, of breaking down this idea of owning a home to make it make sense. I think there’s, there’s like three or four companies in Canada are experimenting with that, and they’re using, there’s one that’s using Bitcoin, which then just goes overhead, and then it’s on blockchain, then others, which is actually like, how do we turn your rental payment into points that you build out to then qualify or transfer, etc. And it kind of works well within an existing let’s say you own a whole bunch of homes, and then there are different types of homes, so you can be able to sort of do that transfer, right? I think the biggest barrier I see with this is that the people you’re trying to help, usually it’s just too complex to be able to explain. It has to be like, is it right? Like, what are you signing? And also, then people can take advantage of that. So I think on to your first point. You mentioned that you sort of see urban rental as a way to home ownership. I think what I’m trying to say is that urban rental should be a way of creating financial security for all income groups. How you define financial security is neither here nor there. I don’t actually want to own an apartment and live in it in Nairobi, because I want to be flexible. And like, I can I just, I want to be flexible, but I do own investment properties that make sense to me, and because I managed my rent, then it means I cannot. So, like, my rental properties can then pay for where I want to run. Yeah. So all the housing that I own will probably be either in western where my parents and my in-laws are, or on the coast, which is a nice beachfront property. So I think that’s an okay thing to make, and it’s an okay assumption to make for low income communities as well. They don’t want to invest in the house. They want the first windfall they get to make sure the kids are educated. That’s the first thing they invest in. The second is they get a car. So even before they upgrade their house, many times they get the cheapest car in the market. So like, the way that aspirations are implanted on low income from either higher income people or educated people who are trying to help is usually misconstrued, and that’s why I think urban rental provides that sort of leeway. Like, do you want to own a home? I can help you with that. Do you want to upgrade your home? And like, let’s say you ask a family in five years, do you want to then think through how I can move to a two bedroom rental? Like, that’s a question. Like, do you know how much that is? How do you backtrack and how do you get back into it? And there’s a company that’s doing that. The whole point is housing as investment opportunities for financial security. But I think the way I see it is a little bit different, because I feel there’s this sort of social imperative that affordable housing developers need to have to end users, which just gets blown out of the window, because, as I said, I built affordable housing in this area, and it’s affordable now, but because I build quality sustainable as green, it’s going to be literally gentrified immediately. How do I control that if I’m not the owner of each unit? I mean, there’s a lot of condo models in Kenya, so. So Yeah, and like, you have to have a subset who are just behaving the same way that they behave in Europe, where they have a social mandate, but they are for profit entity that makes money, but they have a social mandate to preserve affordability, and then use that preservation of affordability not to give away. So my model is that it’s only for eight years while your kid is in a public primary school, we provide a rental subsidy. And in those eight years after the kid leaves primary school, it means that then that subsidy needs to go to somebody else, somebody who knew is coming into the city, who doesn’t have the money in the eight years you need to to encourage economic mobility, because you have to shift in emerging economies. We have to shift from the you will be given, if you’re if you’re needy, you’ll be given forever. That’s not teaching a man to fish. You need to be able to sort of recycle that social impact so that you can have a wider spread. But also, you know, be sensitive to the fact that, yes, things can happen. But if your size in the beginning eight years is a long time, eight years, you can basically make a low income family stable, and many times they do that all by themselves. Um, so the housing sector, the affordable housing sector, especially with all the energy it’s facing right now, because everyone, everyone has run away from office, everyone has run away from retail. Everyone is scared. So everyone is now unaffordable as a developer, which is fine, but if you really are going to drive this idea of affordability, we need to be much more conscious of what this means in the long run. And I believe in for profit, mixed income, again, learning from the West, concentrated poverty doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t need to happen in emerging markets. I’ve been to Mumbai, like, I am middle class, not by chance. Yes, it was educated. But like, let’s say in our family tree, there’s like, one this line is middle class, this line is high class. This one is so like my cousins, are some of them that are below the poverty line. I have extremely wealthy uncles, and it doesn’t necessarily cross pollinate, but it’s like we in emerging economies, we are constantly we all income groups interact with each other very amicably, like the NIMBY nimbyism. I don’t think nimbyism will. The only nimbyism that happens is, actually, if, if, if you have a noisy club next to, like a school or residential area. So it’s just, that’s just mean, and that’s just land use zoning. But like, we’re not yet, and I’m in Cambridge, we’re not yet in this kind of environment where, you know, it’s like, oh, this is low income. Person is lazy, no low income people in Africa, they’re not late. They’re actually the most hard working people. Hard working. They’re hardworking, they’re hungry, they’re eager. And then we will, they will actually go through economic mobility within five to eight years, they will. There’s no doubt about that. It’s usually like when people get rich, that’s when they become lazy and and confused and confused. And so we have to, we have to, we have to reframe how we are helping. And I’m saying this because I did. I made the mistake. I made the sort of assumption that if I build it, they will come and it will remain affordable. That’s not true, and I have to fix that in our next project. So all of this work, the work I do is and I’m blessed because I’m a doer and a thinker. I like getting my hands dirty. I’ll build it. I’ll be like, Okay, let’s just do it, raise the money. Let’s just go and build it. Then we step back and be like, what have we built? What have you done? Let’s assess it, and then the next project, let’s do it a little bit better. That’s incrementally improved. And there’s no infinite possibilities, because it’s Africa, there’s like the room for experimentation, the capacity of the government to support people, to to help social issues, the fact that the people you are helping are hungry, they’re eager, that they’re willing. They want, they want to be helped, but not to be to be smothered. So like and like, you have to give them that benefit out like, if, if you want to help somebody, you need to be like, I want to help you up until this point. And then the rest, you should help yourself. And then eventually I should not be. You should not need me to help you. You should be helping somebody else, right? And so I think growing up in that kind of context, as well as I grew up abroad, I grew up travelling, has given me a very different perspective about how do we how do we see what we call low income, especially because, as I said, I hang out, I spend time with people within these sectors. And it’s not because they don’t want money. It’s just the economy is not favouring them.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Just two quick thoughts I had on that, because you mentioned nimbyism. I think the closest that comes to having witnessed nimbyism in my cities, we are a staunch you know, there’s a lot of Jains, which is, which is a community in India that doesn’t eat onion, garlic, they don’t really keep killing animals. And this is the first time we had KFC open here. There was a huge approach, you know, you will not have, you won’t want to live near places where there’s a butcher, for example, to the extent where even, like very, very upscale properties. If a developer has a certain religious inclination, for example, they will not allow restaurants in the building to serve non vegetarian food, you know. So, so it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very nuanced. And something else that also happens in the Indian context is there’s, there’s a combination of affordable housing. So there’s privately developed affordable housing. There’s also government housing. And then a lot of times, in the name of development, when slums are cleared and they are given alternate housing by the government, a lot of people, in fact, end up taking that apartment, renting it out, and choosing to live on the street. So a lot of subletting also.

Etta Madete
And it’s that mentality where, again, just increasing supply does not reduce informal supply, that’s not going to happen. And my belief is that you increase supply and you decrease barriers to entry, to formal supply, because somebody will come into the country and they will compare you to the slum or the street. That’s the massive done. And because it’s a tropical country, I can see why it doesn’t work here. Because in Boston, you’ll actually, you’ll actually, you will not survive the winter. But in Kenya, you can, you can literally just go and you can set it up and you’ll be okay. And that’s why I think nimbyism doesn’t work, because the alternative to people’s the alternative is an empty lot. It’s insecurity, it’s slum forming. It’s, you know, the uproar would be, why are you not using this property to develop right? And so we really have to be conscious of the fact that, first of all, just increasing supply does not mean that you’re sorting out the affordability issue. The number of people coming into the cities is just too much. What you have to do is every new person that enters the city, you need to give them a choice. You need to give them a choice. And they need to start choosing the formal supply. Once you start doing that, somebody new comes into the city, and they choose the form of supply because it meets their needs. And what are their needs? A little bit of flexibility, a little bit of the price point has to be right, the location has to be right. So how do we make this and it’s and for me, it’s like there’s a sunk cost in the ones that are already in the city in Islam, those ones will move when it’s time, eventually, and usually they move when they become more wealthy. And when they become wealthy, they retire to the countryside. It’s their kids that then get into formal but the new entrant, and when I was describing the different urban rentals, there’s semi formal rental. It looks like a normal rental. It’s just semi formal because the guy doesn’t expect you to sign a lease. So it’s a bit more fluid. There are formal, informal houses. That is a building. It’s an actual building. They just then follow the permitting process. So it’s just an unsafe building, but it’s a building, and my formal supply is competing with this informal supply. It’s not competing necessarily with Islam, because that’s another segment which is actually rental and it’s and I said it’s purely because of leapfrogging. You have an entire continent that has gone from being a village to being colonised to the AI internet age within one generation. So you will find that everyone is on a different spectrum, but everyone has all the same information opportunity on access. And so the way that we approach housing should be through information, through data and through access, and then you let the market decide, and you’ll find that the market always decides what’s better, as long as it meets their needs.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Last question, so you’re on your sabbatical, and whenever you get back, what is next?

Etta Madete
I’m visiting Nairobi in two weeks, and I’m already building up to the next plans, but it’s really connected to the work that I’ve had the kind of thought, thought, thinking that I’ve been sharing in this session, how do we keep supplying? That’s the earth all keeps applying. We have to improve supply. And there’s a whole lot many market players that are just supplying housing, and I respect that. Let us think about demand side needs on preserving affordability. So you have supply. Just keep increasing. We have a huge deficit. I’m going to keep supplying everyone. Just keep supplying. But we need to connect that with the end users. How are we creating this economic mobility, either through rental, home ownership, rent, owned organisation, etc. How are these developers? Because the people who then control the price of the unit, who goes in there, how the property is managing structures, are developers. But the developers want to just develop. They just want to supply. So I have this mapping that I’m doing, which is basically saying, there’s demand and there’s, I mean, there’s supply developers, there’s demand end users, the people who are living in the units. And if we just assume that eventually they’ll meet, it will never happen. You’ll have these guys choosing what they want, these guys putting price points that are not accessible, putting legal documents and just picking the highest price in the market, which, if it’s gentrified, doesn’t really matter. So what you need is to start developing this middle, the middle portion. And this is a normal phenomenon in markets. It’s called the two sided two sided marketplaces. Two sided marketplaces, high and demand. You have to have a middle person who’s basically an intermediary. This intermediary is not necessarily the government. This intermediary is somebody who then owns and has this housing within their portfolio, but then is also ensuring that, yes, you’re getting your returns and your rental but you’re also making sure that, if it’s an affordable housing intermediary, that you’re creating affordable solutions that are actually available to the people who are on this other side. In Europe, it is the government in the US, you find that many social CDCs, community development operations play that role, and in growing growth markets, you just don’t think about it, because you’re just everybody just scrambling to supply or scrambling to help the low income earn more. So I think there’s that rule of that intermediary. So for me, I want to research what that looks like and what that entity looks like, and build that sort of entity and scale through that. The second thing is this piece on creating a proper systemic solution to land to future land use iniquity. And I think it’s a very simple thing. So like, if you look in the States or in Europe, there’s land use zoning that ensures that there’s a certain density of housing that’s affordable within certain areas. But they did that after the fact, because they realised that, as a city and a country develops it completely, there’s nothing you can do. It’s no longer affordable, even if it was intended to be affordable. So in addition to having these institutions, these stewards, this guardian, institutions that preserve affordability, think about churches and community groups, those like community centres in a city or town, or churches, those are essentially stewards of care, right? The affordable housing sector needs stewards of care that basically are ensuring that there’s preservation of affordability even as we’re organising. And we also need there to be some rules in these areas where the city is growing, let’s say where we’re building in Kiambu, like, the land prices, etc, will govern how affordable this area will be in the next 15 years, and it’s not that long in advance. So can we land bank and just say we will preserve 10% of the housing here for let’s preserve affordability like we just do it in advance, and we tell the government around these public primary schools or around secondary schools, or around churches or around hospitals, just create a zone where there’s a certain percent requirement. And it’s a very simple thing to think about, but like in my head, we can do that now, in Kenya, in Africa, we can do it right now, because that land is agricultural. It’s not yet there, but the government is building roads. The government is gentrifying, but the government is expanding. So those two pieces of work. How do we create that middle person who is helping supply and demand normalise? Think of it like Uber. Uber is a middle platform, right? When Uber came into the market, even in Kenya, the taxi drivers stopped judging us so much because it’s like the guys who are demanding, yeah, there’s infinite competition. It normalised the market, same as Airbnb. Hotels are like, okay, fine, we will listen to what you guys want. So it’s the same with housing. So demand and supply has to have a middle, middle person who’s that steward? Steward of passing information or not just, you just need a middle person. And the second is planning for land use and equity, which the West has retrogressively instilled, which Africa has opportunity to do now. So that’s what I’m gonna do through Zima, through my housing company, and I’ll have an office in the West, so either in London, New York or Boston, and then keep building and building in Nairobi. So I’ll be flipping between the two offices.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That is incredible. Thank you so much for your time, and I wish you all the best for all the cool things you do. Once you finish the programme, it’s gonna be exciting and I’m really looking forward to it.

Etta Madete
Just a few weeks, I’ll be back into it and digging myself into solving these problems. Thank you so much for your time.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.