Scenario
Current trajectory
If urbanization, land-use constraints, and construction capacity stay near their recent paths, inadequate housing remains a mass condition globally and high-income affordability stays strained.
SCENARIOA possible future outcome based on stated assumptions.
The current-trajectory scenario is the least imaginative and the most important. It asks what happens if institutions keep doing approximately what they are doing.
Globally, that means the adequacy gap does not close on UN-Habitat's 2030 timetable. In high-income markets, it means another cycle of price pauses without a structural reset in the tightest cities.
- Time period
- Through 2030, with a qualitative look toward 2036
- Assumptions
- Adequate housing production remains far below UN-Habitat's 96,000-unit-a-day need estimate.
- OECD-style price-to-income pressure eases only when credit or prices cycle, not because supply catches demand in the tightest cities.
- No major, sustained increase in social and affordable rental construction in high-income countries.
- Methodology
- This scenario stacks published need estimates and official supply-gap ranges. It does not run a proprietary econometric model. Where a national agency has already published a trajectory, that trajectory is cited rather than reinvented.
- Variables
- Population and urbanization · Housing completions · Real house prices vs incomes · Planning permissions · Construction costs
- Uncertainty
- A recession, a rate shock, or a genuine planning breakthrough could bend the path. Informal-settlement estimates also have wide bands.
- What could change the result
- A large, sustained rise in completions where jobs are
- Income growth that outpaces housing costs
- Social housing investment at a scale that shows up in stock, not just announcements