Attachments
Why this handbook?
In Latin America and the Caribbean, many people affected by various crises leave their homes behind and find a housing solution by renting in the new city where they find themselves.
Governments and humanitarian actors work to facilitate access to rental housing for people in need of shelter and protection, engaging with the rental market in various ways to support them. The housing market is very different from commodity markets (household essentials, building materials, etc.). Each housing unit is unique because of its specific location, its size, layout, cost, access to services (e.g., water and electricity), materials it is constructed with, its orientation, ownership and contractual arrangement, among many other characteristics.
It is necessary to analyze government policies, tenure patterns, demand, and supply of rental housing, among others, as well as the obstacles that populations face when renting.
Understanding this market is therefore essential.
The Shelter Sector and the Cash Community of Practice have identified among its priorities, a contribution to strengthening the analysis of the rental market to inform humanitarian assistance. In spite of the efforts and impulse given to these modalities, humanitarian organizations implementing rental assistance programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean continue to face many obstacles to effective and quality programming¹. The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and REACH with the support of CashCap/NORCAP, established an ad hoc, time-limited task force to support more and better collaborative assessments of rental housing markets in Latin American countries during 2021/ 2022. This document is the result of this collective work. If you belong to an organization working on rental assistance, this document might prove useful.
What is this handbook for?
The Field Handbook for Collaborative Rental Housing Market Assessments (hereafter referred to as "the Field Handbook") aims to support field teams in conducting rental housing market assessments to inform the design of rental programmes within humanitarian contexts in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this handbook, you will find tools to build a common conceptual and analytical framework, methodology and data collection plan to understand:
• How the rental housing market system functions and assess its functionality, in order to design appropriate responses for population groups that support and strengthen, rather than undermine, existing rental markets.
• To what extent the rental market system enables or limits access to adequate housing for population of interest in a given geographical area.