A/HRC/10/7 page 16 45. When credit is available and the financial capital seeking investment opportunities increases, competition for urban land grows and the value of land appreciates, so that only higher income households can afford to buy. 46. The rise in housing prices is usually due to a variety of factors; speculation in land and housing, urban renewal, city beautification, and the creation of so-called world class cities directly impacts housing affordability in cities. The result is to create specific areas of the city for use by the wealthy, with all the services and comfort that could be desired. On the other side, those that cannot afford to live in these areas are pushed into slums or inadequate housing, living in areas with poor or no basic services and too distant from their sources of livelihood. Vulnerable groups, in particular women, are the most affected by the lack of solutions and are frequently those who suffer most from the centrifuge effect that expels them to the outskirts of cities, and into suburbs or slums without basic infrastructure and services. This migration from the inner cities is in great measure the result of the lack of affordability of housing, services and other goods, as well as of the lack of adequate policies. 47. Thus the increased role of financial markets in the production of housing and infrastructure has produced in metropolitan areas as different as those of Madrid, Mexico City or Santiago a new form of discrimination based on economic status or social class.55 In Chile, the Government acknowledges that its social housing policies were not really a housing policy but were instead policies to finance construction of cheap housing. It had been thought that the new housing stock would be part of the effort to improve access to housing, as policies were designed and justified in order to reduce the housing deficit and to improve the quality of life of poor families by helping them move from precarious settlements to new housing. However, studies undertaken since the mid-1990s reveal the opposite result: the new social housing was not part of the solution, but rather created a new problem: urban ghettos.56 48. As a highly profitable sector, housing and land have also been the object of speculation in every part of the world.57 Speculation contributes to the rise in prices and affordability. 49. The current crisis worsens affordability problems for housing and land across the world. It is also a blunt reminder that affordability concerns do not only affect the poor but also low-income groups and increasingly also middle-income groups. The discrepancy in the rise in incomes and housing and rental prices is crucial in this context, leading households to constantly fear losing their homes through defaulting on payments of their rents or mortgages. 55 Observatorio Metropolitano, Madrid ¿la suma de todos? Globalización, territorio, desigualdad, (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2007). 56 A. Rodriguez and A. Sugraynes, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Social Housing Financing Policies in Santiago, Chile”, Civil Society and Social Movements: Building Sustainable Democracies in Latin America, A. Domike, ed. (Washington D.C., Inter-American Development Bank, Special Publications on Development, No. 5, 2008). 57 See footnote 21, p. 417.