Urban Sociology of Municipal Rental Housing Inspection Complaint Backlogs and Landlord Repair Response in Nairobi's Low-Income Settlements: A Bunching Estimation of Complaint Queue Thresholds

Municipal rental housing inspection in Nairobi's low-income settlements operates through a complaint queue whose administrative thresholds are poorly understood, and the behavioural response of landlords to queue position remains untheorised. No observational data are used or claimed: the analysis is a design and power study under a declared variance structure with between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, and intraclass correlation = 0.64. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 54 clusters to detect a 5 percentage point effect at 80% power. Complaint queues generate bunching at administrative thresholds because landlords sort around inspection-trigger points, and that the before-after-control-impact estimator can recover this sorting only when cluster counts exceed the threshold identified here. The contribution is a methodological framework that connects urban sociological theories of landlord behaviour to the statistical conditions under which queue-threshold effects become detectable.