The Effects of Emergency Housing on Wellbeing: Evidence from Argentina’s Informal Settlements

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present evidence on the effects on wellbeing of providing a basic dwelling on-site to households living in situations of extreme poverty in urban slums. In particular, the paper evaluates the impact of the NGO TECHO's emergency housing programme in informal settlements of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Using a quasi-experimental pipeline approach, the paper shows that the programme has a large effect on privacy, security, interpersonal relations, psychological wellbeing and perception of quality of life. In health the program only produces a reduction in the prevalence of cough and congestion. While indicators of sleep quality improve, the effects are not statistically significant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. Additionally, the programme increases the likelihood that households with school age children have a tranquil place to study, evidence that the programme could broaden children's long-term opportunities.

Using Multidimensional Poverty Measures in Impact Evaluation: Emergency Housing and the “Declustering” of Disadvantage

“…Approximately one-third of the treated households replaced their dwelling with the TECHO house and two-thirds used it as an additional room. Mitchell, Macció and Mariño Fages (2019) show that the treatment and control groups are well balanced. The results of t-tests indicate that there is not a statistically significant difference between groups for any of the 17 pre-treatment household characteristics considered and in all cases the value of the normalized difference is quite low, indicating that regression analysis is a valid method for estimating average treatment effects (see Imbens 2015).…”

“…The evaluation of TECHO-Argentina applied a quasi-experimental "pipeline" design (Coleman 1999;Bali Swain and Varghese 2009;Deininger and Lui 2013) consisting of an ex post comparison between treated households and a control group of households that had been selected for the programme but had not yet received treatment (Mitchell, Macció and Mariño Fages 2019). The households were chosen from 34 informal settlements in the peri-urban areas of Buenos Aires.…”

“…This programme, which is currently being applied in 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries, provides a basic dwelling on-site to households living in informal settlements. We extend the evaluation applied in Buenos Aires, Argentina using a quasiexperimental "pipeline" design (Mitchell, Macció and Mariño Fages 2019) to a multidimensional framework. Our results show that the TECHO programme produced a large declustering of disadvantage in dimensions related to the built environment.…”

“…A limitation of that evaluation was that it focussed primarily on measuring the programme's effects on income and other means for achieving wellbeing, rather than on final ends, or "what it is worth seeking for its own sake" (Richardson 2015, 163). Mitchell, Macció and Mariño Fages (2019), guided by the lessons of the capability approach, sought to measure treatment effects on deprivations in the space of human functionings (to be free of disease, to feel secure, to experience privacy, to enjoy adequate sleep, to have opportunities to socialize, etc.). We expand upon their analysis by assessing the programme's effects on the simultaneous occurrence of housing-related deprivations.…”

“…It is our opinion that both strategies are valid and the choice depends on the purpose of applying the Alkire-Foster to impact evaluation. As our objective is to construct a parsimonious composite outcome measure in which each indicator represents a distinct facet of deprivation related to the built environment, we chose to select two indicators within each of six outcome dimensions from the list of 31 impact indicators employed byMitchell, Macció and Mariño Fages (2019).…”