The CDA’s statement in the Supreme Court case on katchi abadis (informal settlements) has rightly gained notoriety for its illustration of the religious bigotry that remains embedded in the hearts of the bureaucrats running Islamabad. Fear mongering against minorities in order to build support for the destruction of their homes is nothing new for them -- barely 4 months ago, the CDA and Interior Ministry brutally evicted over 15,000 residents of the I-11 katchi abadi after drumming up baseless fears about them being dangerous ‘Afghans’ when nearly all of them were Pakistani Pakhtuns.

Amid the outcry for accountability for the CDA’s display of religious prejudice, it is important not to lose sight of the underlying state failure that these xenophobic smears were attempting to cover -- the failure to provide housing for the low-income and working classes. The brutal demolition of the I-11 abadi and the subsequent admission of AWP’s petition on katchi abadis and the right to housing in the Supreme Court have provided an opportunity for a long-overdue national policy debate on housing. While the final decision is pending, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has, for the first time in its history, termed shelter a fundamental right, denounced summary evictions and ordered the various government departments including CDA to prepare practicable plans to fulfill their responsibility to provide housing to low-income citizens.

Unfortunately, as is evidenced from the CDA’s grotesque reply in the Supreme Court, the organisation, much like the rest of officialdom in Pakistan, continues to view the problem of katchi abadis as one of ‘criminality’ and ‘illegal occupation’ rather than the fulfilment of a basic human need. This is a perspective also shared by large sections of the middle class, who often express disdain and even hostility toward slum-dwellers for ‘unlawfully’ squatting on state land instead of working to acquire it ‘legally’ as they themselves supposedly have.

Despite the implicit classism, one can attempt empathy with such middle-class resentments; given soaring real estate prices in recent years, home ownership is a distant dream for the majority of middle classes. However, this perspective represents a serious misdiagnosis of the housing crisis in Pakistan; crucially, it diverts blame away from those actually responsible for the crisis -- the state and private developers -- to those actually bearing the brunt of it -- katchi abadi residents.

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The facts surrounding informal settlements demonstrate clearly that this crisis is a direct failure of state policies. Facing rural landlessness, unending violent conflict, stagnant incomes and rampant feudal and religious persecution, millions of Pakistan’s working classes, including ethnic and religious minorities, have streamed to cities in search of security and employment. Sadly, the cities that develop and sustain themselves through the labour of these millions have a near-total absence of dignified and affordable housing; the current housing deficit stands at 10 million units, most of it consisting of low-income.

This enormous shortage cannot be explained away -- as the CDA crudely attempted to -- as a natural consequence of rapid urbanisation; it is a policy outcome of the unrestricted privatisation of housing and the unaddressed market failures that have resulted.

Private developers, handed the bulk of housing production by the state since the 1990s, simply do not produce housing for the poor. All the major private and semi-government developers are largely engaged in building walled estates for upper-middle and upper class elites, while the government housing authorities build only for government employees. Building for low-income earners is seen as a risky investment with slow returns and low short-term profitability, unlike the ‘advance-booking’, speculative bonanzas that accompany the launch of every new upscale suburban development.

As one would imagine, much of this high-end production ends up being surplus, with thousands of plots in these housing developments remaining unoccupied for years. The state’s lack of interest in applying land use regulations allows a rising class of property traders to freely engage in speculative land holding, driving up land prices while it remains unutilised. Apart from causing spiralling housing prices that crowd out both middle and low income groups, this speculative land regime also constitutes a criminal wastage of livable space in an increasingly crowded urban landscape, where millions of families huddle next to open sewage for shelter.

While the profits of unproductive property traders have boomed, the consequences of this privatised, speculative real estate development model have been predictably disastrous for the not-so-wealthy; from 2010-14, house prices rose by 80 per cent, apartment prices by 118 per cent and land prices by a massive 201 per cent.

According to a survey conducted by urban housing expert Tasneem Siddiqui in 2014, the poorest 68 per cent of the population can now only afford 1 per cent of the homes available on the formal market.

It is unsurprising then that nearly half the urban population in Pakistan lives in katchi abadis. This implies nearly 40 million people living with insecure tenure, little to no access to basic services like water and electricity, and in a perpetual state of vulnerability to state violence and economic and climatic shocks. While these settlements house the city’s workers, their innate precariousness inhibits the same workers from adequately investing in their health, education, skills or long-term productivity. Multiple studies have confirmed the heightened vulnerability of residents to communicable and water-borne disease, with significantly shorter life spans and child mortality. While much is often made of abadi residents’ ingenuity in the self-provisioning of basic services (through solar power, for instance), the celebration of this choice-less ingenuity serves to mask the criminal state neglect that leaves them in a state of exclusion and perpetual vulnerability.

It is evident then that katchi abadis are not some criminal aberration but a structural outcome of a criminally unequal political and economic order. While provincial governments in Punjab and Sindh have recognised this and moved to periodically regularise abadis and award use and property rights as a recognition of their social protection function, the CDA has not done anything of the sort.

As an unaccountable bureaucracy institutionally sealed from the pressures of popular demands, the CDA has chosen instead to maintain the status quo, without a single low-income housing project in the Capital since Farash Town in 2001 (even though the city’s population has since more than doubled). As evidenced in the recent FIA investigation into CDA officers’ complicity in the establishment of katchi abadis, it is clear why many officials choose to maintain the status quo -- it serves as a running source of informal income earned through the exploitation of working classes’ need for shelter.

This cannot go on. Pakistan’s urban-focused growth strategy is likely to hugely enhance the demand for housing in the coming years. It should be unacceptable that Pakistan’s working poor continue to be forced to choose between living conditions of vulnerability and squalor or homelessness from forced eviction, while property developers occupy and gamble with valuable land resources.

It is not difficult to imagine how the state could address these failures. Urban planning experts like Tasneem Siddiqui and Arif Hasan have laid out in detail the required institutional and policy solutions, ranging from regularisation and participatory upgradation, public housing projects targeted toward working classes, to the development of land banks with regulations to ensure occupation and prevent speculative trading. Multiple examples exist from within the country that can be learnt from -- such as the Orangi Pilot Project and Khuda ki Basti initiatives in Sindh, with their successful, low-cost and affordable financing models involving incremental occupation and development.

Clearly, the issue is not a shortage of solutions -- instead, as is clear from the absence of policy action on housing for years, it is a question of the absence of political will from above or organised political pressure from below to apply those solutions. The working classes that most require solution have been too fragmented to effectively demand them, while much of the relatively better-organised middle class is too busy aspiring towards the very gentrified private developments that are crowding them out of the market for home ownership.

However, the recent groundswell of legal and political opposition to CDA’s policies of summary evictions and institutional discrimination, accompanied by the sustained protest movement for housing rights by both Muslim and Christian katchi abadi residents in Islamabad, have provided an opportunity to organise and push for reform.

The Supreme Court’s orders to the CDA and the federal and provincial governments to come up with actionable plans to fulfil their constitutional responsibility to provide shelter have opened up significant policy space for action on housing. Pakistan’s authorities have been ordered by the highest court in the land to concretely act on fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.

It is now time for Pakistan’s political and civil society to move beyond condemnations of official gaffes and finally hold our governments and institutions like the CDA to account for their obligation to provide affordable housing for the millions that need it, in Islamabad and the rest of the country.