The UN-Habitat has expressed concern that an estimated 3.4 billion people worldwide are living without secure, safe, and adequate housing. Among them, over 1.1 billion reside in informal settlements and slums. The affected individuals face acute daily threats, including insecure tenure, overcrowding, exposure to natural hazards, and a lack of essential services such as safely managed sanitation.
World Cities Report 2026 Highlights
The United Nations body raised the alarm in its latest World Cities Report 2026, titled “The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action.” The report emphasizes that making cities equitable, liveable, 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 is facing 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, making limited engagement 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.
Regional Variations and Key Challenges
Although the crisis is universal, it manifests differently across regions and income levels. Five interconnected issues define the crisis: affordability, displacement, informality, sustainability, and liveability. UN-Habitat stresses that the global housing crisis must be addressed as a matter of critical urgency for the sake of humanity now and in the future. It argues that people-centered housing is essential for inclusive urban development.
Key Findings from the Report
The report presents several 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; and housing is a major economic sector with transformative potential.
Call to Action
The report calls for strengthening the social function of housing while harnessing its economic value. It recommends 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.
