Building Societies and the surburbanisation of Zimbabwe: A history

The essay traces the development of Zimbabwean housing finance and it's impact from the 1950s up to the present day. The essay argues that, consistent with the political landscape up to 1980 building societies largely benefitted the white minority and in the post independence period the emerging African bourgeois class were the immediate beneficiaries. The colonial and post-colonial trend contradicts the traditional mandate of building societies: providing housing to the small man. The essay also explores the responses of the small man as he sought inclusion in the urban housing landscape. To this end housing co-operatives are posited as the small man's response to a financial system marked by exclusion of the low income earners.