The UN-Habitat has raised concerns that up to 3.4 billion people worldwide are estimated to be living without secure, safe, and adequate housing, out of which over 1.1 billion reside in informal settlements and slums.

It noted that the affected face acute threats daily, including insecure tenure, overcrowding, exposure to natural hazards, and the absence of essential services like safely managed sanitation.
 
The United Nations body raised the alarm in its latest World Cities Report 2026, entitled “The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action.” The report highlighted that making cities equitable, liveable, and inclusive remains one of the central challenges of the 21st Century, and housing plays a decisive role in meeting it.

Yet, it lamented that housing is too often delivered as an isolated product, with insufficient attention to its neighbourhood context, environmental conditions, location, and cultural setting.
 
The report highlighted that the world is facing an unprecedented housing crisis driven by rising costs, limited supply, widespread displacement and other issues. It cautioned that with only 19 per cent of cities showing strong civil society participation in urban planning, limited engagement remains a major obstacle to effective housing responses.
 
These pressures, it was revealed, have made access to affordable and adequate housing one of the most persistent and complex global challenges of the 21st century. Although the crisis is universal, it appears differently across regions and income levels. Five interconnected issues define the crisis: affordability, displacement, informality, sustainability and liveability.
 
UN-Habitat said the global housing crisis must be addressed as a matter of critical urgency for the sake of humanity now and in the future, and argued that people-centred housing is essential for inclusive urban development.
 
Some of the key findings include that the scale of global housing inadequacy is unprecedented, the global housing crisis is shaped by five interlinked and mutually reinforcing challenges, climate change poses a significant and escalating threat to housing systems, structural drivers continue to deepen housing deficits, and housing is a major economic sector with transformative potential.
 
The report called for strengthening the social function of housing while harnessing its economic value, positioning adequate housing as a strategic pillar of sustainable development, adopting holistic and multidimensional housing approaches, advancing comprehensive affordability strategies and recognising and strengthening informal and community-led housing solutions.