Paper short abstract:

Advancing housing justice requires us to enumerate what matters. Most developing countries enumerate slums rather than count housing deprivations. I propose using household level data and measurements that has potential to advance housing justice for over a million "slum" dwellers across the world.

Paper long abstract:

There are over 1 billion people living in slums globally, majority of them in South Asian cities. Inclusion of specific targets towards slum improvement in both Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicates the salience of this global challenge. However, monitoring progress towards these goals in resource constrained environments is difficult because data on slums is often non-existent or of poor quality. In this paper, I demonstrate a way to overcome this challenge by proposing to use alternative data sources such as Demographic and Health Surveys, that are conducted in over 90 developing countries. This will paper use the 5th round of this survey from India called National Family and Health Survey V to estimate housing deprivations in absence of official slum statistics. Decadal Censuses have provided data on slums since 1991 routinely. However, India's Census 2021 is delayed until after 2024 general elections for reasons that are both practical and political. This paper shows an alternative path to enumerate housing deprivations instead and estimate the extent of multiple housing deprivations experienced at household level in cities of India. I analyze household level data that also captures several socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and can show uneven development outcomes across various groups such as religious minorities, lower castes, and the poor. By counting housing deprivations (e.g. access to water on premise) leads to just housing through policy actions (e.g. providing water) rather than enumerating political categories such as slums leading to further exploitation of marginalized populations.