Neighborhood Amenities in Slums

Abstract: This chapter examines how slums obtain utilities such as water, toilets, sanitation, and electricity even though cities, as a matter of policy, do not provide them. It describes how private entrepreneurs – often called mafia, but not nearly as violent as the US movie version – emerge to provide water taps or tankers for slums without water mains and stolen or resold electricity to slums without service from electric companies. We discuss how some slums take up collections to construct and, importantly, maintain toilets. We also describe how other slums take a different tact and organize into so-called vote banks that trade residents’ votes in return for promises from politicians to make the city provide city services for the slum. We discuss, for example, how the quality of toilets predictably falls the more accessible the slum is because accessibility impose more potential free riders and how organization into vote banks becomes more difficult the more caste heterogeneous the slum is. Ultimately, we show how self-produced services, because they operate at a smaller scale and are not the product of specialization, are costlier than similar services provided by the city to formal communities. The result is a poverty tax that slows social mobility.