The Bellagio Housing Declaration
Over the course of four extraordinarily intense days in May, at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference villa in Bellagio (Como), Italy, a small hand-picked group of housing policymakers from four countries (Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand), together with global experts, came together to examine two core issues which our framing paper had highlighted as critical to the development of effective housing markets and new housing supply in these countries:
- Attracting private capital into low-income housing markets
- Facilitating the resale of existing homes
Under the able direction of Nic Retsinas, head of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, my colleague David Porteous and I participated on the facilitation team. The participants –
The Bellagio participants (full list here)
– outdid themselves, producing among other things the powerful concept of a customer-country-drive global housing facilitator (Attachment A, see pages 4-6) — “we invite you in, we invite you out” — as well as a high-level conceptual brainstorming approach to the financial and operational challenges of upgrading the world’s developing urbanizing slums. Indeed, that brainstorming session, which I had the great fun of facilitating, introduced me to my new Kenyan colleagues and directly led to my Nairobi trip (and visit to Kibera, Africa’s largest slum) a couple of weeks back, devoted exclusively to advancing the slum upgrading concept in Kibera and other places.
But the conference’s truly significant milestone, I believe, was the Bellagio Housing Declaration (link in .pdf), which places housing squarely in the center of national economic growth:
- Housing as a sustained national priority.
- Housing as an engine of social and economic development.
- Housing as an element of wealth.
- Housing as connected markets.
- Housing and government.
- Housing and public-private partnerships.
Substantial aid pledges are all well and good, depending on what the money is used for. Long ago I read (possibly in Robert Caro’s mammoth and hotly disputed biography of Bob Moses) about the ‘flash flood’ metaphor for urban development — a huge inflow of money and bulldozing that completely changes a neighborhood, but sweeps through without changing the ecosystem.
Like the flash flood, whose water runs off leaving the desert still arid, aid paid too quickly often just sluices through the governmental superstructure before landing In luxury villas or offshore accounts. Countries can benefit from aid only if they have developed the beginnings of their own domestic capital sources, delivery mechanisms, and approaches to public-private partnership — and only if the aid is used to build capacity rather than ambitious schemes. In the long run, the capital to lift a country must be domestic capital, so that it is domestically raised (inherent governance) and domestically recycled (inherent economic activity).
All these concepts are expressed in the “Bellagio Partnership Model” for housing (Attachment D, pages 10-12) that describes, in effect, the preconditions to making stimulus aid useful in emerging countries.
I’ll have much more to say about Bellagio in future posts. It was among the most intense experiences of my life, and with any luck, among the most significant.
