Traditional housing type has for a long time been recognised as the
most inexpensive way to provide rental housing in cities of the global south.
Although the architectural design may be more cost-efficient to construct
than modern ones, the ultimate rent paid by a tenant may not necessarily be
lower given the multiplicity of factors that affects rent. This study examines
the effects of traditional Swahili houses on marginal rental values of occupied
rooms, taking into account the neighbourhood and individual characteristics
of both tenants and owners in Kinondoni municipality in Dar es Salaam Tanzania.
The data were collected using questionnaires which were administered
to 2,339 owners and 2,113 tenants between February and June 2014. The
survey solicited data on imputed rent from owners and actual rent paid by tenants
and included an assessment of households, housing and neighbourhood
attributes. The share of Swahili houses in each administrative unit (wards)
were first computed to define rental housing submarkets and then marginal
rent per bedroom was estimated for each surveyed housing location from a
Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model. Based on these preliminary
results, a Linear Mixed Effect (LME) model was then implemented to
identify significant determinants of marginal rent per bedroom across submarkets.
The results suggest that, predominantly Swahili-house type rental
submarkets are relatively closer to the CBD where rent-per-bedroom tend to
be higher in line with both higher income and house size while limitedly Swahili-house
type rental submarkets predominates in the periphery where rentper-bedroom
is lower in line with both income and size of the house. Thus,
although traditional Swahili houses can easily be supplied by self-builders,
room rents in those houses are not necessarily lower unless the houses are
located far away from the city centre. These findings provide evidence on a
significant departure of rental values from construction cost in self-built housing
in developing countries. It is concluded that self-built traditional Swahili
houses may not necessarily provide affordable rental housing despite having
all the attributes of being low cost housing from the owners’ point of view if
the rented space is bedroom oriented as it is the case in this study.