Over the past decade, housing policy in developing countries has witnessed an important shift. After decades of limited and in some cases decreasing investments in housing, there has been a sudden, extraordinarily large, and simultaneous expansion of multi-billion-dollar housing programmes. These new investments reveal a radical policy change, one that signals the serious and welcomed effort of tackling the looming affordability concerns that have been plaguing cities across the world. Yet this paper raises concerns over the direction of current housing policies and programmes. It argues that the new emphasis on addressing the problem through the production of industrial-scale new housing on the outskirts of cities, or through the development of new cities requiring extraordinarily expensive infrastructure, does not necessarily address the affordability concerns. For this reason, the paper raises a series of questions and offers recommendations that address some of the most important elements of decision-making that should be taken into account when planning affordable housing.

These are meant to help identify why housing challenges arise, in order to avoid Thomas Pynchon’s well-known aphorism: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. This paper raises concerns over the direction of current housing policies and programmes. It argues that the new emphasis on addressing the problem through the production of industrial-scale new housing on the outskirts of cities, or through the development of new cities requiring extraordinarily expensive infrastructure, does not necessarily address the affordability concerns; nor does it seem capable of creating cities that will be, as Edward Glaeser put it, man’s greatest invention. On the contrary, we question the efficiency of these approaches and, in particular, their adequacy in the context of countries and regions that urbanize at very low income levels. Rather than offering pragmatic responses to the housing challenge, we believe that the programmes undertaken illustrate the landscape of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, dangerously echoing past failures of social housing as witnessed in the post-World War II era in European and American cities.