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Lack of affordable housing is a worldwide problem. Rapid urbanization, rural exodus, and poor governance policies have contributed to the problem and, in response, low-income populations resort to self-construction. The result are informal settlements located predominantly in marginalized urban areas (United Nations, 2015) that develop with neither urban infrastructure nor compliance with building and planning codes (Lall et al., 2006; Patel et al., 2018; United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2012) and, consequently, offer a poor-quality built environment. The goal of this paper is to methodologically identify physical aspects of such built environments that could be improved. We evaluate a case study, the Santa Marta favela in Brazil, using a holistic housing-quality assessment tool and local building and planning codes as reference. Our results identify the physical characteristics with lower quality standards in the case study and demonstrate the efficacy of the methodology introduced for this purpose.