CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.0 Background to the Study Lagos state has witnessed continuous restructuring due to exceptional rate of population growth and urbanization expansion. Its population grew from 73,766 in 1911 occupying about 46.6km2 land area to about 665,000 in 1963 contained in approximately about 69.9km2 land area (Federal Office of Statistics (FOS), 1952 & 1963). The metropolitan built-up component of the state accounted for a population of about 88.1% of the state population in 2006 occupying about 999.6 km2 land area (Federal Office of Statistics, 2006). Based on an estimate of 3% annual growth rate, the metropolis would have attained over 9 million in 2011, over 10 million in 2015 and about 13 million people in 2025. This restructuring as a result of the population build-up, brought unusual demographic pressure on land and this cause unprecedented demand for urban land use. Consequently, most planned area of the metropolis especially the residential areas (especially in Lagos Island, Victoria Island, Ikeja and Lagos Mainland among others) have been taken over by other urban land use that can afford rent the demand elicited. The unprecedented rate of growth and expansion in the metropolis is characterized by demographic increase which is not complemented by proportional increase in housing stock and its supporting utilities most times but with re-development and conversion of residential buildings; the implication of this is use-pressure on housing and neighbourhood supporting utilities. Page | 1 Land use zoning as presented in Lagos state Master Plan (1980) is a policy guide on land and building-use allocation, is not very effective in Lagos metropolis because the increasing population growth and the demographic pressure on land trigger economic reaction which impact on both the land and housing market. A clear evidence of the failing workability of the zoning policy is the increasing propensity to convert building-use especially residential properties in residential zones to non-residential uses through which the owners maximize personal economic gain to the detriment of the liveable status of such zones. The primary responsibility of government at regulating the event of use contravention lost its effectiveness in the face of the dwindling field staff capacity to monitor and check post- construction contraventions. Besides the issue of manpower capacity, officers‟ corruption is also behind the difficulty to abet the increasing spate of contravention. Also, the issue of policy compromise by the regulatory body made its effectiveness difficult. The violation of zoning as prescribed by the Lagos state 1980 Master Plan was encouraged by the way the state implemented the Decree 88 of 1992 which prescribed development control for any development in the state. Institutionally, the policy framework of the Master Plan failed since the enforcement of Decree 88 of 1992 on development control was seen as avenue of generating fund rather than enforcing zoning. For any redevelopment or reconstruction application the applicant were charged application and processing fees for change in use which discouraged proper monitoring of conformity of such redevelopment to zoning as prescribed by Master Plan. Consequently, use-conversion of building has undermined the effectiveness of the statutory urban housing development regulation and control, which is designed among others to regulate Page | 2 the effect of population-cum-activity pressure on buildings and their neighborhood utilities which are vulnerable to degradation. Subsequently, the tendency in the housing market is for property to be converted to more economically rewarding uses regardless of their original use- designation and the zoning policy in the metropolis. This indiscriminate use-conversion exacerbated use-invasion and displacement which have impacted negatively more on the residential designated buildings and residential areas because it command low rent compared to other land uses. Often, the displacement is usually accompanied by use-conflicting demands and overuse given the insufficiency of basic urban infrastructures to support the new uses which invariably leads to chaotic development and unsightly cityscape (Agbola & Agunbiade, 2009). In view of shortage in housing supply the continuous indiscriminate conversion of residential building resulted in, increasing occupancy ratio, excessive high population density ratio in relation to the complementary housing and neighbourhood utilities and degenerating environment. The study of changes in land use, its housing component including such issues as housing price and the environmental quality have gained a lot of attention from scholars (Oduwaye & Okusipe, 2004, Olayiwola et al, 2006, Oduwaye & Lawanson, 2007 and Adebayo, 2009). Research works in this area have addressed the problem of land use changes which is the macro perspective and involve contiguously extensive area. However, the micro study of building-use conversion differs from those of land use changes. For example, while land-use change may be interested in the areal extent of use changes, property- usage conversion among others examine the frequency of inter-functional conversion. Other micro-related issues such as the variables of use-conversion decision at the property-ownership level, as well as the implication of use-conversion on the level of utility-satisfaction derived by Page | 3 residents from commonly owned utilities which are negatively impacted by overuse induced by use-conversion, are few of notable research quests. Research which adopts the micro purview is rather scanty despite the uniqueness of its sets of research quests. It is against the foregoing that this study chose its research questions which analyses building-use conversion and the perceptual assessment of the serviceability rating of utilities in metropolitan Lagos. 1.1 Statement of the Problem Studies have shown that population and urbanization trigger changes in land use (Gallent, 2009 and Paulussen, 2003). In Lagos metropolis certain factors collectively account for the rapid growth and expansion. The first is its function as Nigeria‟s Federal capital till 1990; its service as the commercial nerve centre for both the nation and West African sub-region, its high transportation linkage with other economies through dense development of infrastructures such as road network, seaports, airports, communication and ready market. Merging the effects of these pull forces with the natural population growth results in rapid population growth and urbanization expansion of the metropolis. Hence, the combined influence of its phenomenal population growth and its propulsive attraction forces invariably subject Lagos to rapid urbanization and its incidental challenges. The exceptional population growth gave rise to an increasing rate of demand for housing and competition for urban land space in a metropolis that is plagued with peculiar land problem. Precisely, the quantum of buildable land in Lagos is in short supply given the morphology and terrain of the greater part of the metropolis, which lie below the sea level. Besides, the cost of procuring such parcels of land through a perfected legal acquisition procedure is far beyond the Page | 4 means of majority of the populace. Moreover, construction on this type of land requires huge capital for structural stability despite the fact that housing development generally involves high capital investment. Ordinarily, in the face of competition, the normal operations of the free market forces would produce an urban-property space in which higher-bidder functions continue to displace the less- competitive ones, particularly the residential use which commands low rent. This explains the role of the government as an arbiter, regulating and controlling land and property usage to avert chaos in the organization of the urban property space. In Lagos metropolis government compromised its obligatory responsibility of regulating development control by imposing fines rather than outright prevention or demolition of contravening structures. This compromise increases the degree of contravention and compounds the negative implications on residential usage which suffers the most. Such a compromise has brought about indiscriminate conversion of original residential buildings to more revenue yielding purposes such as banking hall, eateries, shopping malls, fashion houses and offices among others; such conversion is notable in residential area of Victoria Island, Allen Avenue, Adeniran Ogunsanya and Ebute-Metta to mention a few in the metropolis. Major fallout of use-conversion conflict is that a number of building and neighbourhood related utilities suffer from varying degrees of overuse and without timely intervention ultimately degenerate into different levels of degradation. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the degree of utility degradation will vary between neighbourhoods and more likely among geographically or functionally defined metropolitan regions. Page | 5 The inference from this is that, a contravention of town-planning regulation which increases pressure on utility usage ultimately increases the degree to which otherwise functionally healthy utilities degenerate to various stages of utilities or related surrogates degradation. It is in this context that the UN-Habitat (2003a) conception of slum-indicator thresholds which focuses on critical building-based as well as neighborhood serving utilities is relevant to the study. In essence, the