UN-Habitat has presented its World Cities Report 2026, devoted this year to the global crisis of housing affordability. Its main conclusion is stark: Housing has become less affordable almost everywhere than it was two decades ago.
- In recent years, housing prices have risen sharply, while the global average price-to-household-income ratio increased from 9.5 in 2010 to 11.7 in 2023. Housing costs have grown much faster than incomes, reducing affordability overall and especially for lower-income families.
- As the share of rental housing rises worldwide – and has already reached 30% of the housing stock in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand – tenant households face severe economic strain. Globally, 44% of renting households spend more than 30% of their income on housing. The report highlights sub-Saharan Africa, where that figure reaches 54.5%, but Europe and North America are close behind at 50.4%. Under these conditions, nearly a quarter of the adult population in 108 countries lives in fear of losing their land or housing rights, with insecurity rising fastest among renters.
- The global housing deficit continues to grow, rising from 251 million units in 2010 to 288 million in 2023. The deficit has reached catastrophic levels in sub-Saharan Africa: Even though the housing stock there grew by nearly 100 million units since 2010, the deficit still increased from 78 million to 121 million units. In Latin America, it remains stuck at 40 million units. Housing shortages have also increased not only in East and Southeast Asia and in West Asia and North Africa, but also in the developed countries of Europe and North America. In fact, the Euro-Atlantic area is seeing the world’s fastest growth in housing shortage: From 9.9 million units in 2010 to 24.8 million in 2023, nearly two and a half times higher.
- The number of people living in slums and informal settlements is also rising. In 2010, the global slum population stood at 980 million people; by 2023, it reached 1.165 billion. Growth in the number of slum households has been recorded in every region except Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
The disappearance of slums in the global West is a phenomenon of Western statistics that cannot conceal an obvious reality and contradicts the same statistics’ documented growth in housing shortages amid waves of immigration. In some cases, the figures do reflect reality: In Poland, the population of slums and informal settlements rose from 350,000 in 2010 to 504,000 in 2023; in Ireland, from 211,000 to 287,000; in Canada, from 147,000 to 525,000. Moreover, many countries in Europe and North America have recorded a rise in the share of the population living in overcrowded households – defined as more than three people per room. In Austria, for example, that share rose from 10% in 2010 to 14.5% in 2023; in Sweden, from 12% to 16.4%; in Italy, from 15% to 25.4%. In other words, immigrants in Europe and the US are filling and densifying the existing housing stock. According to the report, the West has the oldest housing stock in the world. That means that wear and tear, combined with the living culture of new tenants – more than three to a room – has already turned immigrant-occupied housing into slums that Western statistics have not yet fully recognized.
As for the causes of this housing-affordability crisis, the report’s authors – true to the style of UN documents – point to ”sustained demographic growth” and ”restrictive regulations” that hinder the construction of affordable housing. The remaining question is what restrictive regulations could have produced the record growth in housing shortages in Europe and North America.
The “sustained demographic growth” cited by the authors is not to be found in Africa, where south of the Sahara it is unbalanced. Examples of sustainable demographic growth are instead found in Israel, the Arab monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, and Kazakhstan, where the fertility rates of citizen communities lie between 2.1 and 3. At the same time, the Arabian monarchies and Israel display some of the best housing-affordability indicators, while Kazakhstan shows positive dynamics. In black African countries, by contrast, weak state institutions compound the problem.
Let us define more clearly the global situation reflected in the UN-Habitat report. Today’s reality is the result of the globalization of all or nearly all human societies according to the templates and rules of Western capitalism.
The roadmap of globalization has been successfully implanted in mass consciousness through the popular concept of ”sustainable development,” whose central condition is curbing the “population explosion.” Today that explosion is largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa, and even there it is beginning to slow. In the rest of the world, humanity has already moved into demographic contraction. According to experts, since the mid-2020s the human population has begun to decline on a global scale.
And it is precisely at this turning point in world history that we are witnessing a global housing-affordability crisis – one that can no longer be explained away by population growth. Not long ago, amid demographic expansion, housing access was improving. Now that the “population explosion” has been curbed, the situation has sharply deteriorated.
Nor can the crisis be blamed on harmful interference in the market economy by sluggish and corrupt state bureaucracies. The very essence of globalization – which nearly all but the outsiders swore allegiance to – was market liberalization, supposedly bringing capitalism to its fullest expression. That is why, as the UN-Habitat report correctly notes, ”subsidized housing is available only to a limited share of households, leaving the majority to rely on increasingly unaffordable market options.”
A vivid example of the “success” of capitalist development can be seen in China’s housing market, where the average house-price-to-household-income ratio rose from 17.1 in 2010 to 34.6 in 2023, one of the worst gaps in the world. As a result, the stock of unsold new housing reached 748 square kilometers, more than the area of Singapore and roughly equal to the size of Bahrain. In response to this “death of the market,” the state, through local governments and state enterprises, began buying up unsold commercial housing and converting it into social or rental housing. To support this, the state extended 300 billion yuan in loans to state-owned enterprises. It is often said that the Chinese government was rescuing developers to “clear space” for a new wave of market growth. But a state that calls itself a people’s republic has others to save besides developers: In China, more than a quarter of urban residents live in slums and informal settlements – 246 million people, the largest slum population on Earth.
Chile offers another “success story” of a liberalized economy. It is one of the very few countries in Latin America to gain the official status of a developed state and the unofficial reputation of a “miracle” born of globalization. Yet from 2010 to 2023, its average house-price-to-household-income ratio rose from 4.1 to 15.6, nearly quadrupling. And in terms of the share of the urban population living in slums – 22.5%, nearly 4 million people – Chile surpassed Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and in fact all Latin American countries except Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Haiti.
Thus, today’s global housing-affordability crisis is the product of globalization itself: The spread of the logic of capital accumulation to all humanity, with its natural consequences – social Darwinism, the erosion of family and religion, the progressive demographic contraction of the masses, and the liberation of global elites from even the remnants of “social responsibility.” The decline in housing affordability and in the security of tenant households corresponds perfectly to the roadmap of globalization, which requires elite concentration of resources, the maximization of dependency with the minimization of agency for the atomized global precariat, and – last but not least – the discarding of demographic ballast.
The global housing crisis is both a vivid manifestation and an added driver of declining social well-being, the disintegration and shrinkage of nations, in conditions where markets and elites are globalized and where enormous resources, including digital communications and artificial intelligence, are concentrated in the hands of the few.
Declining access to owned housing or reliable rental housing is one of the decisive factors behind the sharp drop in birth rates worldwide. The atmosphere of loneliness and the unaffordability of starting a family in modern megacities helps drive an epidemic of suicides, which have become one of the most common forms of death from external causes. The growth of irregular settlements in global cities, and of populations there deprived of clean water and sanitation, hinders reductions in infant mortality. Chronic poverty and overcrowding in such areas turn them into spaces of aggression and violence, often escalating into murder. The unhealthy social environment of the favelas, along with rising domestic and foreign migration, lowers both the quality and accessibility of secondary education, which in turn entrenches poverty and social apartheid. Taken together, the housing crisis is one of the clearest examples of growing income inequality: Adequate housing as an asset is concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy minority, while broad masses grow poorer and can no longer afford it.
Housing affordability does not emerge spontaneously from the market. It requires purposeful effort by the national state. States that are genuinely oriented toward the well-being of the nation ensure housing affordability for their citizens.
To see how this works in practice, it is enough to compare RT’s global Social Well-Being Index with the data in the UN-Habitat report. It is telling that the states of the Middle East, which lead the world in social well-being, also show the best results in housing affordability for their citizens. And conversely, in countries with a low level of social well-being, most citizens do not have adequate housing.