The Crisis
It is a set of conditions — adequacy, affordability, supply, and insecurity — that look different in Lagos than in London, and still share some causes.
The Housing Future Project investigates housing through three questions: how we got here, what the evidence shows now, and where current paths could lead. This section is the spine of that work.
UN-Habitat's 2024 Annual Report states that 2.8 billion people lack adequate housing, including 1.1 billion in slums and informal settlements. That is a rights-based adequacy finding, not a count of vacant units worldwide.
In high-income countries the same decade looks different. OECD work finds that real house prices rose by more than 40% on average over about ten years, and that one in three low-income tenant households spend more than 40% of disposable income on rent.
Those two facts can sit on the same site without being mashed into a fake global median price. Use the dossiers below for the topic, the essays for the argument, and Data for the series.
Each figure carries a geography, period, and named source. None of these is a global median home price.
People lacking adequate housing
2.8 billion
people
UN-Habitat 2024 Annual Report. 'Adequate housing' is a rights-based concept, not a single dwelling-unit count. Earlier UN-Habitat papers have used a range of 1.6–3 billion.
OECD real house prices vs. a decade earlier
+40%
real price change, OECD average
OECD states that real house prices increased by over 40% over the past decade on average across the OECD. This is an average of member countries, not a global median price.
Low-income OECD tenants overburdened
1 in 3
share of low-income tenant households
OECD: on average, one in three low-income tenant households spend over 40% of disposable income on rent. Overburden is higher than half in some countries, including the United States.
