Nigeria’s housing crisis is not about scarcity – it is about a state that has abdicated its responsibility to provide adequate shelter in favour of market-driven solutions that enrich private actors while failing ordinary citizens. Despite constitutional promises of “suitable and adequate shelter,” Nigerian housing policy remains trapped in a cycle of market fundamentalism that treats homes as commodities rather than essential infrastructure.
The cycle has created a system where public resources subsidise private profits while millions remain inadequately housed. Breaking this cycle requires abandoning failed market-centric policies and embracing a coordinated public approach that treats housing as both a right and critical infrastructure.
A silent logic pervades Nigerian policy circles: when citizens lack purchasing power, the state must protect profits and subsidise consumption. From energy subsidies to exchange rate management, policymakers cannot seem to shake the habit of privatising gains while socialising losses. The contradiction is most apparent in housing, where politicians simultaneously talk about enabling markets while deploying grants and tax breaks that inflate private profits at ordinary Nigerians’ expense.
Housing discourse fixates on the invisible hand while pushing liveable housing as a fundamental human right to the margins. With this constrained view, the Federal Government continues relying on centralised financial instruments such as FMBN loans, NHF subsidies, and federal housing estates as silver bullets. These top-down interventions routinely fail because they assume that Abuja can micro-manage solutions for contexts it does not inhabit.
What does constitutional “suitable and adequate shelter” look like for a flood-prone riverine community in Bayelsa? Or within Kano’s gandu system where ancestral land is collectively held? And among Lagos’ informal traders whose daily incomes fluctuate? The answers lie in hyperlocal blueprints co-created with those who live, build, and adapt within these communities.
Government’s Renewed Hope Cities and Estates programme inadvertently exposes the structural limits of public-private partnerships. Under the Cities model, private developers finance construction through commercial loans while absorbing land and infrastructure costs, with Housing Minister Ahmed Musa Dangiwa pricing one-bedroom units at N22 million. By contrast, the publicly funded estates model, using budgetary allocations and state-owned land, delivers similar units for just N8-9 million. Clearly, the private sector lacks a monopoly on cost advantage.
The lesson extends beyond fiscal efficiency. The mathematics are stark: PPP mortgage pipelines function as subsidy traps, socialising key risks while privatising returns through phantom effective demand. They deliver outcomes that are financially viable for investors but have limited social utility. The invisible hand is neither designed to meet indigent needs nor best placed to do so.
The Nigerian state’s duty is providing access to safe, adequate housing, not subsidising the acquisition of financial assets. Yet the housing crisis is often mis-framed as a homeownership gap, obscuring deeper issues of security, dignity, and community that animate constitutional promises. This conflation of homeownership with housing justice represents a critical misstep.
While homeownership strategies financially exclude most Nigerians, housing justice demands spatial, cultural, and climatic sensitivity — the very capacities local governments are designed to provide. The crisis endures because spatial design is outsourced to an unregulated private market driven by profit, not need. The Federal Government lacks the localised knowledge required to address Nigeria’s diverse housing realities.
Market fundamentalism ignores that housing is not simply a commodity but societal infrastructure shaping how citizens interact, live, and produce as a nation. Housing conditions fundamentally determine health, education, and economic mobility outcomes. What is required is holistic housing policy that retains public assets, integrates essential services, and prioritises care over profit margins.
Moving beyond tired policy levers — mortgages, subsidies, supply-side paternalism — requires coordinated, multi-tiered approaches that empower local knowledge and build care infrastructure rather than exclusion systems. Colonial spatial apartheid and decades of market predation have shaped the landscape in ways that demand more than standard financial fixes.
The Federal Government should pivot from direct construction to strategic financing through long-term Social Infrastructure Bonds issued at preferential sovereign rates, establishing a national social housing fund. Fund deployment should remain with States and Local Governments offering counterpart funding through public land valuation, cash allocations, or minority equity in rental schemes. Bond repayments drawn from rental cashflow shares would create self-replenishing revolving funds.
State governments must evolve into market stewards, shifting regulation from litigation to systems that embed compliance in market design. Mandatory landlord licensing would require all rental property registration, creating reliable housing databases. Compulsory deposit protection schemes would hold tenants’ fees with accredited custodians, releasing deposits only after independent property condition verification. Required maintenance insurance for licensed landlords, with policy verification tied to license renewal, would complete this regulatory framework.
Local governments are best positioned as community housing custodians, partnering federal bonds and state land banks to develop permanently public-owned estates. All social rents after maintenance and debt service should be ring-fenced for reinvestment in new housing stock, creating sustainable funding where rent underwrites future supply and shelter is de-commodified through secure tenancies maintaining collective public assets.
Housing isn’t scarce because Nigerians cannot pay — it is scarce because the state abandoned its role building holistic communities. Mortgage guarantees and rent-to-own schemes do not solve deficits; they convert public funds into private profits while forfeiting three irreplaceable assets: land, trust, and the power to shape a place.
We make our cities, then our cities make us. Nigeria must reimagine housing policy not as credit expansion tools but as public commitments to spatial justice, democratic stewardship, and the right to dwell in dignity. Only by reclaiming housing as public infrastructure can we build communities that serve people rather than profit margins.
