Knowing where the roof leaks: evidence from a quality-monitoring experiment in subsidised housing

Our study examines the value of public governance and monitoring in subsidised housing, a public services domain characterised by its high social impact and high expenditure, but also frequently poor quality, weak management, and oversight. We outline a framework to describe stakeholder decision-making in subsidised housing construction projects. We pair this with a small-scale intervention in a housing project in a low-income community in South Africa. Consistent with the theoretical framework, we find an improvement in the quality of houses exposed to the intervention, even though the intervention had a purely informational role without any sanctions.