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The debt crisis hit Latin America in 1982 when Mexico admitted that it could not service its foreign debts. Capital flows into the region dried up and economic development ceased. The 1980s was a bad decade for Latin America. Per capita incomes fell as governments attempted to pay back their debts to the world's bankers. The poor, who had benefited little from the contracting of bank loans during the boom, bore the brunt of the efforts to pay interest on those loans. Governments slashed subsidies on food, light and transportation. Unemployment increased as private factories closed their doors and governments laid off workers. Inflation rose throughout the region, cutting the real incomes of those who still had jobs. Poor people attempted to cope by putting more people into the job market. Informal sector work expanded. Nevertheless, unemployment continued to rise. The quality of housing deteriorated as people could not afford to improve their self-help housing. In some cities, more families rented homes, in others they shared with friends or kin, elsewhere they invaded land to live in flimsy accommodation. The pace of urban growth slowed as cityward migration slackened. The population of the monster cities of Latin America increased rather slowly during the 1980s. The recession achieved in ten years what attempts at regional development had failed to do in thirty. The prospects for the 1990s are better but the picture is highly variable. Some economies are now beginning to grow, but the prospect for the poor in Peru and parts of Central America is anything but good. Many Latin American governments are telling us that the debt crisis is over, but do not try telling that to the poor in most cities of Latin America.

In the previous papers of this trilogy, I examined the recent literature on housing, infrastructure and services in Third World cities and current writing on changing national settlement systems (Gilbert, [...]

This provocatively titled book contains the proceedings of a conference held at UCL in November 1991. The aim of the workshop was to assess two recent summaries by the World [...]

The pace of urbanization has continued to accelerate in the underdeveloped nations of Africa and Asia. Although the predicted negative effects of urbanization have been proven to be unfounded, Third World societies still are not prosperous and equitable. As governments continue with the trend towards privatization and reduced intervention, changes have to be made in spatial organization and government policy.

In Mexican cities, somewhere between one-third and one-half of all households rent or share accommodation. Over the years, even though rental housing has been in relative decline, the absolute numbers of tenant households have been increasing. Recently, because home ownership has become increasingly expensive, the Mexican state has been anxious to expand the stock of rental housing. However, its policies do not seem to be directed towards the majority of landlords, in part, at least, because the nature of the landlordism is not well understood. This paper examines the main features of landlords and landlordism in two major cities of Mexico, Guadalajara and Puebla. Based on surveys with tenants and landlords, it examines how landlords obtained their property, why they began to rent it, their socio-economic characteristics, their perceptions of the business of renting, and the mechanics of setting rent levels and selecting tenants.

From 1977 to 1981 the World Bank undertook a major study of Bogota, with supplementary work being conducted in Cali. By social science standards the cost of this project was [...]