The Past
Today's housing conditions were assembled over decades of land-use rules, finance, construction methods, and urban growth. This page is the briefing. The essay is the argument.
Most housing arguments start too late: last year's prices, last month's interest rate, last week's target. Those facts matter. They do not explain how UN-Habitat can report that 2.8 billion people lack adequate housing while, in the same decade, average real house prices across OECD countries rose by more than 40%.
The causes are mixed, and they are not the same in every city. In Nairobi, Lagos, or Dhaka the problem is often the absence of an adequate dwelling — secure tenure, water, sanitation, enough space. UN-Habitat places 1.1 billion people in slums and informal settlements inside that wider 2.8 billion estimate. In Toronto, London, or Los Angeles almost everyone is housed, and the crisis arrives as a ratio: prices and rents against pay.
The world population reached 8.2 billion in 2024. About 57.7% of people now live in urban areas as nationally defined. Households still form where work and services are. If those places make it hard to add homes — height limits, single-family zoning, Green Belts, slow permission — prices become the rationing device. OECD work in 2026 again lists restrictive land-use policy among the supply-side drivers of the affordability gap.
Finance made housing a better asset at the same time construction stayed local, cyclical, and slow. Cheap credit can improve a monthly payment and still leave the next buyer facing a higher price. That is why this briefing does not treat one lever — rates, factories, or social rental — as a complete origin story.
The full essay walks the history: land and rules, credit, construction productivity, and demography, with citations. Country dossiers hold the national series. This page exists so the Past to Present to Future framework has a real landing URL, not a dead end that only says read the essay.
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.
Urban population
57.7%
share of world population
World Bank WDI SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, based on UN World Urbanization Prospects. National definitions of urban areas differ.
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.
