The location of the subdivision is important: Low-income Sites-and-Services subdivisions should be carefully located – for several reasons.
Therefore an important part of planning Sites-and-Services subdivisions is maximizing land use and infrastructure efficiency.
This paper examines developer practices and self-help housing in serviced subdivisions targeting very low-income Hispanic homesteaders in the Texas border region.
Sites-and-Services subdivisions need special planning and engineering standards, and an appropriate package of basic services, not only to lower costs, but also to make subdivisions more livable while supporting to incremental building process.
However on average, providing infrastructure to appropriately planned and Sites-and-Services subdivisions can be about half the cost per plot of land as the per-household cost of upgrading infrastructure of an existing squatter settlement.
This commission was unique in having effective control over undeveloped land, since it was all in public ownership, and in being responsible for the servicing and subdivision of this land and for the construction of infrastructure services and public buildings.
Land development techniques where a group of separate land parcels are assembled for unified planning, servicing and subdivision as a single estate, with the sale of some of the new building plots to recover the costs and the redistribution of the other plots back to the landowners.
There is a lack of supporting facilities and services in the subdivisions.
One out of every four California homeowners belongs to a homeowners association -- entities that sell property and provide services in residential subdivisions with support from member dues.
This is not only environmentally destructive, but also costly to taxpayers, since the cost of supplying services to sprawling subdivisions is often greater than the tax revenues they generate.
Also, much of land development in developing countries is by private informal developers, bypassing the costly standards, official controls and avoiding high transaction costs by selling small lots without services in "illegal subdivisions" at prices affordable the poor.
