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Then we also looked at the question whether big cities suffer more
from this housing unaffordability compared to smaller cities. And the
cutoff was one million, and actually we found that both the big and
medium-sized cities, they both suffer from this housing unaffordability.
This also comes from the fact that in terms of urbanization not all the
people came to the big cities; a lot of people came to the smaller cities
of lower than one million inhabitants. So, you have here the increase of
population by city size. As you can see, the smallest cities absorb a lot
of population that they have the highest population growth in terms of
percentage. Now adequate housing is very much connected to affordable
housing; if housing is unaffordable then people live in inadequate
housing. So, we also try to better understand how inadequate the
housing is throughout Asia.
This is a picture that I took earlier this year in Mongolia. It's in a
smaller city in Mongolia and people get their water from this well. As
you can see it's a rather sophisticated place to get water. There is a CCTV
camera, and there's also some light, and you can actually pay for the
water with your banking card. But of course, you have to go there in
summer and winter to get your water from the well.
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So, what is actually adequate housing? There is no internationally
agreed definition on what adequate housing is. But in order to gauge
what actually the issue is, we thought we should at least define adequate
housing in the most basic sense. So, we looked at the durability of the
dwelling; so we said at least they should have a solid roof; second we
said no more than three people should share a bedroom; then we said in
terms of access to water, we defined that at least there should be water on
the plot and that you don't have to go out to the street to get your water;
and when it comes to sanitation, we said there should be at least a flush
toilet, or a ventilated pit latrine not shared by more than two households.
So, we thought that is kind of a very low minimum that adequate
housing should fulfill. And we collected the data from the so-called
demographic and health survey. This is a very large survey and a very
robust and solidly done survey. We looked at these surveys for 10
countries covering almost a million households. And we covered the
countries of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar,
Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Tajikistan and Timor-leste. And when we
look at the results, here we have the results by groups of rural population,
medium cities below 1 million and above 1 million.
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