Lagos needs to build 187,000 housing units annually to bridge 3m deficit
Lagos, Nigeria’s bustling commercial nerve centre, has a heavy housing deficit burden estimated at 3 million units which requires the state government to build consistently 187,000 housing units annually for the next 15 to 20 years to close that gap.
Lagos has an estimated population of 20 million people and about 30 percent of this population, representing about 900,000 people cannot, on their own, afford homes and therefore require some form of ‘cheap’ housing with government’s heavy input known as social housing.
Despite private sector efforts at providing housing on incremental basis, coupled with interventions from the state government such as the Jakande Low Cost Housing which delivered about 2000 units, Bola Tinubu’s Millennium Homes, and Babatunde Fashola’s LagosHOMS which has about 10,000 housing units at various stages of completion, many residents of the state are still ‘homeless’.
“The three million housing deficit in the state comprises social housing, luxury homes and apartments”, Roland Igbinoba, the Executive Vice Chairman of Roland Igbinoba Real Foundation for Housing and Urban Development noted at the launch of the second edition of The State of Lagos Housing Market Report at the weekend.
The report, a compendium of insightful information on the Lagos housing market, gives exciting insights on the opportunities, prospects, and challenges in the city’s housing market where developers are now reviewing their project portfolio and size as people are, increasingly, moving away from 1,000-1,500 square metre homes to luxury apartments.
The report also reveals that, largely on account of the prevailing economic realities in the country, rate of rental default has increased, estimating that 71 percent of Lagosians default in their rent payment while 25 percent of them change residence for reasons of faltering income or building own homes.
Though new building technologies and techniques have come to town such as Alpha Mead Development Company’s Formwork Panels, Structura Casa’s modular systems, and Taf Africa Homes model, the report says 66 percent of developers in this city still stick to conventional method of building.
Earlier, the Lagos Commissioner for Housing, Gbolahon Lawal, had noted that in addition to the various interventions earlier mentioned, the state government was unrelenting in tackling its housing problem, disclosing that the state governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, flagged off a Rent-to-Own homeownership scheme recently with the aim of enabling tenants own homes through a structured rent payment plan.
The commissioner, who represented the state governor at the event, canvassed a new technology that would help to mass produce housing, lamenting the discovery that Lagos contractors have as high as 40 percent of their workforce sourced from outside the country.
He announced the state government’s plan to introduce a Master Craft Training Programme aimed at retooling the artisans and other skill sets in the state’s housing sector, noting that, at the moment, the sector was in dire need of good bricklayers, tilers, carpenters, and allied skills.
As a way forward for the housing industry in the state in particular and the country in general, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, the Ooni of Ife, called for closer collaboration among various stakeholders in the building industry, insisting that individual efforts would not take the industry out of its present woes.
“Now is the time for us to walk the talk because all these years we have been talking the talk; let there be collaborative efforts to manufacture homes; let stakeholders come together to be able to influence government policies; there is need for urban renewal and to achieve all these, we also need to employ new building technologies and techniques”, the Ooni advised.
CHUKA UROKO