Housing today: what the evidence actually shows

If you only follow housing through headlines, the present feels like a mood: everything is unaffordable, everywhere, always. Official statistics are less dramatic and more useful. They force a question this publication will keep asking: what, exactly, was measured, for which people, in which place, in which period?

The global present is an adequacy problem

UN-Habitat's 2024 Annual Report, and the June 2025 press release that accompanied it, state that 2.8 billion people lack access to adequate housing. The same materials say 1.1 billion live in informal settlements and slums, and that on the order of 96,000 new units a day would be required to meet adequate-housing needs by 2030.[1][2]

The high-income present is an affordability problem

Across OECD countries, real house prices rose by more than 40% over the past decade on average. One in three low-income tenant households spend more than 40% of disposable income on rent; in some countries, including the United States, more than half do.[3]

The bars above are OECD price-to-income indices, 2015 = 100. Canada at 136.3 is not '36 times income.' It means house prices outpaced disposable income per head by about 36% relative to 2015.[4] That is still a serious deterioration. It is a different claim from a popular multiple.

National presents, not a blended world

In July 2026 the UK's official average house price was £273,000, up 1.4% on the year.[5] That is a real, dated, bounded fact. It does not tell you whether a nurse in Manchester can buy, and it should not be averaged with a Toronto detached price or a Nairobi informal rent.

Canada's official construction trend in August 2026 was 244,149 starts on CMHC's six-month measure, even as the same agency says 417,000 to 469,000 annual starts would be needed to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036.[6][7] The gap between those two numbers is the Canadian present in one sentence.

How to use the present

Read global adequacy numbers globally. Read OECD indices as OECD indices. Read UK, Canadian, and Australian official series inside those countries. Then, and only then, ask what might happen next. That question belongs to the future essays, and it will be labeled as scenario, not as fact.