Financing affordable and adequate housing in Tanzania Company(PHFC) Ltd., which was later replaced by the Tanzania Housing Bank (THB). Besides directly funding housing construction by NHC, in 1963 the gov­ernment established a Revolving Hous­ing Loan Fund(RHLF) for civil servants to finance renovation of their homes. As it will be seen later, the Fund was put under the management of THB but hived out when the bank started expe­riencing problems. The Fund is current­ly managed by the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements De­velopment(MLHHSD). 3. The enabling approach (1972 – 1985) Building on the experiences of the 1960s, housing financing during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s shifted to an enabling approach ori­ented toward state facilitation and targeted self-help. This was the period immediately after adoption of the Aru­sha Declaration(1967), the blueprint for socialist transformation which en­tailed, inter alia, nationalization of the major means of production, including privately owned banks and financial institutions. It also involved national­ization of buildings worth Sh. 100,000 (equivalent to US$ 20,000) or more unoccupied by the owners 4 . The Build­ings Acquisition Act 1971, which em­powered the president to acquire such buildings, was amended in 1985 to remove the provision that empowered the president to acquire buildings and 20 years later, in 1991, it was repealed (URT, 1985, 1991). In the intervening period, most likely large-scale private sector investments in housing and real estate was stifled, contributing to housing shortages, notably for middle­and high-income households. Nation­alization of private banks might have contributed to reduced availability of credit finance as THB became the sole housing mortgage lender as presented in the next section. 3.1 Housing credit availabili­ty under the state-controlled mortgage system The Tanzania Housing Bank(THB) was established by the Act of Parliament No. 34 of 1972 and commenced hous­ing finance operations in 1973. The main objectives of THB were: mobi­lization of local savings and external resources for housing development; promoting housing development by making technical and financial services for owner-occupied housing available; promote the use of local building ma­terials to reduce building costs; admin­ister any special funds placed at the 4 In 1971, when the Building Acquisition Act was enacted, 1 US$ was equivalent to approxi­mately 5 Shillings. 103