By Victor Gbonegun

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.

“Governments should re-establish housing as a public priority. National Housing Policies are widespread but lack comprehensive integration, and weak multilevel coordination undermines the implementation of housing policy. Stronger multilevel coordination is essential for effective housing delivery. Housing policy should operate within a coherent, integrated framework.

“Non-state actors shape housing far more than policy reflects. An effective housing policy needs to involve a wide range of stakeholders, housing law, policy and finance should align with human rights obligations and human rights violations are deeply intertwined with the global housing crisis.”

The report established that housing prices have risen sharply in recent years, with average price-to-income ratios increasing from 9.5 in 2010 to 11.7 in 2023 globally, adding that there was need to ensure that housing policy is aligned with broader urban and national development strategies while Persistent supply–demand gaps call for reforms in land management, planning, infrastructure, and delivery systems to accelerate the provision of well located, affordable housing for low income households.

“Affordable housing finance should prioritise vulnerable and low-income groups, including young adults, migrants, informal workers, and female-headed households. High levels of inequality exacerbate affordability pressures, resulting in rising rents, overcrowding, and restricted access to adequate housing.

Addressing these challenges requires pro-poor measures such as public housing, rental subsidies, and accessible credit for informal workers. However, demand side support should be matched with strong supply side action, as assistance to renters and first-time buyers can inflate prices if housing supply remains constrained,” the UN-Habitat report said.

Speaking on the report, the Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Anacláudia Rossbach, said today’s global housing crisis is the result of decades of inaction, including limited investment, rapid urbanisation, macro-economic pressures and crises-driven loss of homes, as among the factors that have contributed to current shortcomings.

She said the latest global estimates now make the situation unmistakably clear. Yet, notwithstanding the universally recognised right to adequate housing, the world remains far from resolving this crisis.

“Even during periods of global commitment to action, first under the Millennium Development Goals and later the Sustainable Development Goals, adequate housing shortages have intensified rather than diminished. The global deficit increased from 251 million units in 2010 to 288 million in 2023. Millions of people continue to be forcibly uprooted from their homes each year, with an estimated 133 million people displaced globally in 2024 by conflict, persecution, violence, human rights violations, and natural disasters,” she said.

According to her, urban evictions remain pervasive but are poorly documented and frequently go unreported. The new research undertaken by the N-Habitat for this report indicates that approximately 64 million people were evicted between 2003 and 2023.
She said the consequences for affected households are profound, destroying livelihoods and pushing already vulnerable populations into deeper poverty.

“There is an urgent need to prevent and address forced evictions and the loss of displaced people’s livelihoods. The number of people forcibly displaced by conflict, disaster or development worldwide is growing, with the majority now concentrated in cities. As of the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations – double the total a decade before – with a further 9.8 million displaced by disaster. Many of these people end up moving as refugees or IDPs (internally displaced persons) to cities, often into insecure or substandard housing where they face the risk of further displacement,” the study noted.