The rapid urbanization during the last few decades has created severe problems of housing, especially in the major cities of Pakistan. Housing shortage and an enormous rise in housing prices create unaffordability of housing. Most of the people in Pakistan are suffering from housing unaffordability even after allocating a major portion of their incomes to housing. The focus of this paper is to identify the factors impeding housing affordability in different developing countries. Different parameters have been identified; these include location, design efficiency, construction material, infrastructure, services, neighborhood design and financial assistance. This paper highlights, how all these parameters could be made effective in order to realize the goal of making housing affordable.

South East Asia is experiencing a high rate of urbanization. Among other countries, Pakistan too faces massive migration from villages to megacities, resulting in severe housing conditions in urban areas. Pakistan is currently facing a housing backlog of around 9 Million units and the number is increasing by 270,000 units every year. To cope with this situation Pakistan needs to deliver around 400,000 housing units per annum for the next 15 to 20 years. The housing problem basically relates to quantitative and qualitative insufficiencies. On the supply side, the Government has made various strategies to respond to this huge shortage. But all these efforts are thwarted due to high building costs, deficiency of housing finance arrangements, strict loan agreements, mortgages from banks etc. There is a misconception about between need of housing and the demand for housing or the capacity to choose preferred housing. Though there is a huge housing backlog, it is essential to identify the fact that people can only obtain what they can pay for. Housing affordability in this context can be described as the “housing units that are affordable by that section of society whose income is below the median household income”. High land, funding and building costs are responsible for increased prices of housing units. Increased prices of land have made it very difficult to provide affordable housing to low-income groups even in the cases when Government itself is the part of development. Like other countries in the world, Pakistan is also facing property and real estate burdens. Property prices in mega cities like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad are already above millions of US dollars. The price of a 4500 ft house in the area of Gulberg, Model Town and Defense Housing Authority (DHA) is $200,000, and a 9000 ft house is $300,000 to $500,000 and so on. From the previous few years, there is an increase of about 5 times. Also, the increasing inflation rate has caused an immense rise in land/house prices and rents, thereby making housing not affordable for the poor [v]. Recently, few lost-cost housing schemes have been introduced in Lahore, however, still, they are not within the reach of a common man.