Research from Brazil suggests informal settlements persist not because people want to live in them, but because cities continue to fail on affordable housing, education and access to work.

The standard policy response to slums – relocate people, bulldoze the settlement, and build public housing elsewhere – is older than the slums themselves. It has never worked.

The logic seems straightforward. Slums are viewed as unsanitary, unsafe, and visually jarring. If you want to build a modern, orderly city, you should remove them. But people do not live in slums by choice. They do so because there are no affordable alternatives near their jobs and essential services. Destroying their homes without addressing the conditions that drove them there merely shifts the problem to a different – often worse – place.

Experience bears this out. In 1968–75, Brazil’s military government launched an aggressive slum-demolition campaign in Rio de Janeiro, forcing nearly 50,000 families into housing projects on the city’s periphery. The residents of Catacumba favela, which housed nearly 15,000 people on prime real estate in Lagoa before its destruction in 1970, experienced a decline in household income, higher commuting costs, and reduced access to jobs following their relocation.........

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