What's at Home? Shelter for the Poor in Low Income Cities

Abstract

Finding shelter for the poor in low-income cities is a problem for now and for the future. The twentieth century saw huge growth in human population. This population is now entering the twenty-first century with enormous and growing needs for sustenance and shelter. Millions of new families are created each year all seeking ways to sustain life, to nurture, and to shelter their children. In the new century, most of the population growth will be in cities. Most of these cities will be poor because their already poor economies simply cannot grow at rates needed to raise the level of living while accommodating their own population growth. In addition these cities receive huge waves of poor, unskilled immigrants who not only are destitute but who are often refugees fleeing oppressive regimes. How do these people live? All these people need shelter. How, in the past seventy years, have four billion more people found shelter? The parameters of this process are migration and growth, poverty, homelessness, and rule of law.