The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has raised concerns that up to 3.4 billion people worldwide are estimated to be living without secure, safe, and adequate housing. Out of this number, over 1.1 billion reside in informal settlements and slums. The affected individuals face acute threats daily, including insecure tenure, overcrowding, exposure to natural hazards, and the absence of essential services like safely managed sanitation.
World Cities Report 2026
The UN body released these findings in its latest World Cities Report 2026, titled "The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action." The report emphasizes that making cities equitable, livable, and inclusive remains one of the central challenges of the 21st century, with housing playing a decisive role. However, it laments that housing is often delivered as an isolated product, with insufficient attention to neighborhood context, environmental conditions, location, and cultural setting.
Unprecedented Housing Crisis
The report highlights that the world faces an unprecedented housing crisis driven by rising costs, limited supply, widespread displacement, and other issues. It cautions that only 19 percent of cities show strong civil society participation in urban planning, and limited engagement remains a major obstacle to effective housing responses. These pressures have made access to affordable and adequate housing one of the most persistent and complex global challenges of the 21st century. Although the crisis is universal, it manifests differently across regions and income levels.
Five Interconnected Issues
Five interconnected issues define the crisis: affordability, displacement, informality, sustainability, and livability. UN-Habitat states that the global housing crisis must be addressed as a matter of critical urgency for humanity now and in the future. People-centered housing is essential for inclusive urban development.
Key Findings
- The scale of global housing inadequacy is unprecedented.
- The crisis is shaped by five interlinked and mutually reinforcing challenges.
- Climate change poses a significant and escalating threat to housing systems.
- Structural drivers continue to deepen housing deficits.
- Housing is a major economic sector with transformative potential.
Policy Recommendations
The report calls for strengthening the social function of housing while harnessing its economic value, positioning adequate housing as a strategic pillar of sustainable development, adopting holistic and multidimensional housing approaches, advancing comprehensive affordability strategies, and recognizing and strengthening informal and community-led housing solutions. It urges governments to re-establish housing as a public priority, noting that national housing policies are widespread but lack comprehensive integration, and weak multilevel coordination undermines implementation. Stronger multilevel coordination is essential for effective housing delivery, and housing policy should operate within a coherent, integrated framework.
Non-state actors shape housing far more than policy reflects, so effective housing policy needs to involve a wide range of stakeholders. Housing law, policy, and finance should align with human rights obligations, as human rights violations are deeply intertwined with the global housing crisis.
Price-to-Income Ratios
The report establishes that housing prices have risen sharply in recent years, with average price-to-income ratios increasing from 9.5 in 2010 to 11.7 in 2023 globally. It stresses the need to ensure that housing policy is aligned with broader urban and national development strategies. Persistent supply-demand gaps call for reforms in land management, planning, infrastructure, and delivery systems to accelerate the provision of well-located, affordable housing for low-income households.
Affordable housing finance should prioritize vulnerable and low-income groups, including young adults, migrants, informal workers, and female-headed households. High levels of inequality exacerbate affordability pressures, resulting in rising rents, overcrowding, and restricted access to adequate housing. Addressing these challenges requires pro-poor measures such as public housing, rental subsidies, and accessible credit for informal workers. However, demand-side support should be matched with strong supply-side action, as assistance to renters and first-time buyers can inflate prices if housing supply remains constrained.
Executive Director's Statement
Speaking on the report, the Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Anacláudia Rossbach, stated that today's global housing crisis is the result of decades of inaction, including limited investment, rapid urbanization, macroeconomic pressures, and crises-driven loss of homes. She noted that the latest global estimates make the situation unmistakably clear. Yet, notwithstanding the universally recognized right to adequate housing, the world remains far from resolving this crisis.
"Even during periods of global commitment to action, first under the Millennium Development Goals and later the Sustainable Development Goals, adequate housing shortages have intensified rather than diminished. The global deficit increased from 251 million units in 2010 to 288 million in 2023. Millions of people continue to be forcibly uprooted from their homes each year, with an estimated 133 million people displaced globally in 2024 by conflict, persecution, violence, human rights violations, and natural disasters," she said.
According to her, urban evictions remain pervasive but are poorly documented and frequently go unreported. New research undertaken by UN-Habitat for this report indicates that approximately 64 million people were evicted between 2003 and 2023. The consequences for affected households are profound, destroying livelihoods and pushing already vulnerable populations into deeper poverty.
"There is an urgent need to prevent and address forced evictions and the loss of displaced people's livelihoods. The number of people forcibly displaced by conflict, disaster, or development worldwide is growing, with the majority now concentrated in cities. As of the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations – double the total a decade before – with a further 9.8 million displaced by disaster. Many of these people end up moving as refugees or internally displaced persons to cities, often into insecure or substandard housing where they face the risk of further displacement," the study noted.
