Since the poor are in the city in large numbers, the quantity of land needs to house them is quite substantial, even though they usually occupy sites at considerably higher densities than middle-income or high-income groups. The poor are, no doubt, efficient users of urban land. They use a small amount of urban land per person, and they can find good use find good use for every small piece of land virtually anywhere. Yet planning authorities, municipal governments and the national leadership usually fail to see the need for providing adequate land for housing the poor. Most prefer to regard their use of the land as temporary with the expectation that eventually they will vacate it to make way for the most profitable use of every plot in the city. There is a refusal to recognize the fact that poor people need to live somewhere, and to the extent that their occupation of land is considered to be a “problem”, their eviction from the land does nothing but shift the “problem” to some other location in the city. Such shifts, which are usually accompanied by considerable losses to the poor, do little to improve the situation in the city as a whole. On the contrary, they often result in net reduction in the already limited housing stock.