Building Sustainable Cities in Nigeria: The Need for Mass and Social Housing Provision

Abstract

This paper provides the economic rationale behind the call for Mass and Social housing provision based on analysis of housing affordability dilemma and performance evaluation of public housing delivery in Nigeria. It draws attention to the rising trend of displacement/outmigration of the poor aborigines in major city centres in Nigeria, the potential for reverse-migration, and resulting cost of unsustainability of the cities. The study reveals that Nigeria’s public housing schemes and social housing experiments has, for the past five decades, consistently aligned with changes in international housing policy thinking albeit with abysmal results. Caught in a housing policy quagmire, essentially, of how to strike a balance between the entrenchment of market efficiency in public housing delivery (as it pursues more pro-market housing policies) and the objective of providing ‘adequate shelter for all’, the nation has seen much of its housing schemes translate into grandiose paper policies rather than actual housing delivery. Evidence from the housing affordability index indicates alarming and unbearable level of Shelter Poverty in Nigeria. These show that the nation no longer needs the prompting of a global paradigm before pushing through a populist housing project.