Slumdog Millionaire brought new attention to urban poverty in India. Sadly, though, the kind of disaster highlighted by the NY Times is a common occurrence for urban poor families living in slums around the world. A new book, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, describes a similar situation in Bangladesh:

“Many of the property losses in Bangladesh were caused when slum environments were cleared by police or by contractors doing infrastructure work. Because Dhaka’s urban slum dwellers are aware of these risks, they tend to invest less in housing that has an insecure tenure. Homes may be huts that are quickly packed up and shifted on a handcart to another location.  When we revisited our Bangladeshi households in 2005, all three of our urban research sites had been wholly or partly destroyed since we were there in 1999-2000.”