Baku: Nearly half of humanity may be affected by a global crisis in housing, according to a new UN report. 3 billion people, representing close to 40 percent of the world’s population, are experiencing an inadequate housing crisis. This encompasses issues such as unaffordable prices, housing shortages, poor-quality accommodation, and a lack of access to essential urban services like water and sanitation.
According to Azerbaijan State News Agency, cities are expected to accommodate an additional 2 billion residents by 2050. This is likely to exacerbate the pressure on housing systems, which are already strained by rapid urbanization, rising land values, widening inequality, and the impacts of climate change. Climate-related hazards are projected to destroy 167 million homes by 2040. In 2023 alone, natural catastrophes resulted in USD 280 billion in losses, with most of these losses being uninsured.
By the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced, a figure that has doubled over the past decade. An additional 64 million people were displaced from informal settlements over the last twenty years. Many of these forcibly displaced individuals relocate to cities, settling in insecure or substandard housing, where they face further risks of displacement. Informal housing constitutes up to 80 percent of residential construction in developing countries.
A study indicates that shortages of adequate and affordable housing have surged by 30 percent in just over a decade, reaching more than 268 million units, with 1.1 billion individuals residing in informal settlements. Housing prices have increased at a rate faster than incomes in most regions. Globally, the price-to-income ratios rose from 9.3 in 2010 to 11.2 in 2023, reaching 16.8 in Central and Southern Asia. In 2023, only 25.5 percent of applicants were successful in obtaining a housing loan globally, with access as low as 1 percent in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, where housing mortgage markets are still in early stages of development.
Globally, 44 percent of households spend over 30 percent of their income on housing, with rental unaffordability most severe in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 55 percent of renters are overburdened. There is a pressing need for domestic finance across governance levels-national, regional, and local-to better target effective demand and supply-side subsidies to bridge these affordability gaps.
UN-Habitat, the UN agency for sustainable housing and urban development, in its World Cities Report 2026, “Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action,” released today, finds that the global housing crisis is multidimensional and driven by structural factors. The report underscores that the crisis is further complicated by demographic changes, environmental pressures, and evolving economic conditions, which exacerbate broader human development gaps, including inequality, poverty, and vulnerability to climate shocks.
The report, however, posits that the housing crisis is solvable. It advocates for a shift in policy responses from eradication and exclusion of informal settlements to leveraging informality to improve livelihoods and address the housing crisis. It also stresses the need for a significant expansion of domestic public investment in social and affordable housing, while incentivizing private housing investment to increase housing supply, especially in the affordable segment. Community participation and co-production, with a focus on including marginalized groups, are crucial during the policy formulation stage and in projects that must be co-designed and implemented alongside residents, ensuring community involvement in both pre- and post-occupation phases.
“A new social contract for adequate and affordable housing is required-a sense of shared responsibility among governments, the private sector, and communities to mobilize investment and align the social and economic functions of housing,” stated Anacl¡udia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat.
The report’s release coincides with the thirteenth session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13), the premier global conference on sustainable urban development, which began in Baku on 17 May.