H Housing policies for sustainable and inclusive cities: how national governments can deliver affordable housing and compact urban development
MORENO-MONROY Ana, GARS Jared, MATSUMOTO Tadashi, CROOK Jonathan, AHREND Rudiger, SCHUMANN Abel
2020 56p. Housing is an essential human need that affects the well-being of all citizens and has profound social and economic impacts on people’s lives in every country. Providing adequate and affordable housing is a core national policy objective, and has also risen to the fore in international frameworks through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda. Cities face particularly strong demand for housing, partly due to the global trend of urbanisation. Urban areas are already home to more than half of the world’s population, and by 2050 are expected to house 6.7 billion people – nearly 70% of the global population. Housing demand outpaces supply in most cities around the world, leading to rising house and rental prices. Currently, one in three lowincome private renters in countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) spends more than 40% of their disposable income on rental costs alone. At the same time, physical urban space is growing faster than the population: the overall built-up area around the globe has increased 2.5 times over the last 40 years, while the population has increased 1.8 times. Sprawl is partially driven by lower land prices around the urban periphery, but it means that urban residents need to travel longer distances, at greater personal and environmental expense. Urban sprawl has numerous other social, economic and environmental repercussions, from lower productivity to rising greenhouse gas emissions and encroachment on fertile agricultural land. White Paper
housing, urban area, transition to sustainability