Real estate practitioners, govt urged to be proactive in addressing housing deficit

Beyond the complaints over the escalating housing deficit in Nigeria, real estate practitioners, government and other stakeholders have been urged to be more proactive in surmounting the challenge.

The advice was given in Lagos recently by Adesina Fagbenro-Byron, DFID-South West; Dosun Jeje, commissioner for housing, Lagos State; Timothy Nubi, a professor of housing and urban regeneration, University of Lagos; and Afolabi Imoukhuede, CEO, MCS Consulting, at a wrap-up seminar of Growth and Employment in States (GEMS) programme intervention activities in the housing market.

In his lecture, ‘Building an Effective Market Mechanism for Affordable Housing Development’, Timothy Nubi said rather than complain endlessly, it was high time government and real estate practitioners got cracking in ensuring that housing deficit is drastically reduced.

The professor, who lamented that the same factors that were adduced more than 50 years ago as being responsible for the deficit had continued to exist, observing that one of the major problems was the absence of housing education in the country.

He, however, disagreed with the figures/statistics being bandied about on the housing deficit in the country, saying that such statistics were aimed at frightening the people.

“There are too many fallacies holding us back. We keep changing figures. From 12 million about four years ago, we just increased it to 17 million, 18 million. What is really the housing deficit in the country? It is a fraud! We just frighten ourselves unnecessarily. I must tell you, the deficit is not 17 million. I will not even agree that it is up to 10 million. There are houses all over the place; what you may say is that they lack the required basic infrastructure in line with the United Nations’ standard,” he said.

In his remarks, Bosun Jeje, commissioner for housing, Lagos State, said the Lagos State government had since taken the bull by the horns by constructing 16 housing estates in the three senatorial districts.

According to Jeje, although it is said that government has no business building houses, “we have to start somewhere. People need houses and private investment is not coming the way it should be, that’s why Lagos State government has started constructing houses in the three senatorial districts”.