Building Community, Brick by Brick: Visiting Saiban

Editor’s note: Sasha Dichter is Acumen Fund’s Director of Business Development.

Earlier today, I visited Saiban’s development at Khuda Ki Basti-4, about 30 minutes outside of Lahore. Saiban’s potential seems limitless. Simple, clean, brick homes for people making between two and four dollars a day, in a self-contained community with full plumbing, electricity, commerce, schools, and even playgrounds. Someday, this will be a full, vibrant community of 2,500 people who have moved away from rental and slum dwellings.

There is still a long way to go. 45 families have already moved in to the Khuda Ki Basti-4 (KKB-4), out of 115 plots that have been sold and booked. There is also a 3-room school, a small playground, one shop in place and another three planned. Acumen Fund Fellow Jawad Aslam is even talking about putting in a soccer pitch. A few gardens are planted, and houses throughout the site are in various stages of construction. But, three years into this project, it still takes a lot of imagination to envision a full, thriving community of 500 families.

Jawad and the team at KKB-4 are in the business of overcoming challenges, whether it’s getting the permit for the site, bringing in power and sewage, or getting the access road to the site built – which took a full year longer than expected. Saiban’s customers are now able to get 10 year mortgages from the House Building Finance Corporation, which are the first mortgages ever to be provided to this segment of the Pakistani population. But it is a long, hot, dusty road, and nothing comes easy.

There is talk of the need to get a critical mass of customers in order to show people that the development is for real. Jawad tells us that there are a lot of fly-by-night housing schemes in Pakistan, where people simply put down money and get nothing in return. More common still are developments where land is purchased by speculators who either hold or flip their empty plots, and no houses are built for 10 or 15 years. So Saiban’s proposition of building a community that will be vibrant and full of homes in less than five years’ time is more aggressive than it seems. They have done it before in Karachi, and all the pieces are in place to have similar success at KKB-4.

We met a man of 70 named Ishaq, who beamed with pride at his new home. Ishaq’s seven children are grown up and married, and over Ishaq’s long years of working as a day laborer, making $2 to $4 a day, he saved up enough to buy a plot at Saiban for $1,000 (60,000 rupees), as well as the materials which cost another $2,000 (115,000 rupees). I think of what it must have taken to build up this much savings, of years of strength, perseverance and commitment. On top of that, rather than having Saiban build the house, which costs more money, Ishaq has hired a mason to build it, brick by brick. Ishaq, 70 and still going strong, has kept working as a day laborer to pay the mason.

The three-room home, which was one of the most beautiful we saw in Saiban, was completed in just 30 days. It was clean, had two rooms for sleeping and a small cooking area, along with an outside patio paved with brick. The patio’s brickwork has a small break in the middle where a poplar tree was planted, and I hope to be back in a year’s time to see that poplar grow, along with the community around it.

This is what we mean when we talk about patient capital. Capital with the patience to stand behind initiatives like Saiban – in which nearly every aspect is breaking one convention or another: about how you build housing in Pakistan, about the ability of poor people to take on a mortgage, about creating a new kind of community for low-income residents. Someday soon, I hope, 500 families will create a thriving community at KKB-4. The real payoff will come if KKB-4 can serve as a blueprint for how to build incremental housing for the poor – both within an outside of Pakistan. From what I saw today, it just might happen.