Affordable Housing Projects in Enugu, Nigeria:

Since attaining urban status, the population of Enugu, Nigeria, has continued to grow rapidly, leading to growing demands for housing by the teeming population which is predominantly low-income. Several government dispensations have developed various affordable housing projects to help deliver decent housing to the Enugu populace.

However, over a long period of usage, some of those housing projects in Enugu are unabatedly deteriorating into slums alongside rising housing deficits which has remained problematic for most Nigerian urban centers to address. Emerging from a literature review, this research posits that the link between slum and affordable housing is that both the seekers of affordable housing and slum housing are low-income earners.

This research further investigated the possible causalities of slum emergence from decently built affordable housing projects in Enugu, Nigeria. To do so, we first analyzed the Nigerian housing policy to examine how the policy addresses slum prevention. We further conducted semi-structured expert interviews (qualitative) to sample the views of private housing developers on the degeneration of government housing projects into slums in Enugu, Nigeria.

Findings from the housing policy analysis suggest that the housing policy itself is not legally binding on anybody to implement. A sequel to this non-compulsory nature of the housing policy is the poor/non-implementation of the Nigerian housing policy, leading to a constant tendency by the government developers (contractors) to deliver potential slums. The expert respondents corroborated this viewpoint by suggesting that poor planning (including designs of the housing units and the master plan) and poor management (including nonmaintenance, poor documentation, and inaccurate housing inventory) are germane to the emergence of slums from affordable housing.

This research recommends periodic auditing of delivered housing projects to evaluate the developers’ adherence to the housing policy guidelines–it proposes incentives to policy adherents since the housing policy is not legally binding. We also recommend participatory management to engage the occupants in the monitoring and reporting of breakdowns in the housing properties – to help improve the quality of management and maintenance to have slum-free settlements.

In most African cities and towns today, a twin development process is occurring wherein formal and informal cities are developing in parallel. In Nigeria, most of the urban population lives in a dehumanizing housing environment while those that have access to average decent housing do so at an exorbitant cost. Most of the Nigerian population belongs to the middle-income (lower middle-income) economy on a global scale.

Thus, to help deliver decent and affordable housing to this lower middle-income population, both past and present governments in Nigeria often embark on affordable housing projects targeting the prevailing middle-income population. Reference recorded several of Nigeria’s government affordable housing projects and showed how the various government regimes could not achieve the target housing demands in each case.

Alongside these recorded failures to achieve a target number of housing units in each housing project, some of the already-delivered housing projects seem to be decaying and turning into slums. Hence, housing affordability and increasing housing shortage seem yet unsolved while the third dilemma, slum emergence, is rapidly rising. Although slum emergence from decently built housing projects is quickly increasing in government housing properties within Enugu, not much scholastic attention has been paid to it, especially regarding research and publications.

The few existing studies that tried to address slum emergence from decently built housing projects in Enugu include. While focused on government-owned housing projects, focused on privately-owned housing projects. The findings seem to affirm that their sampled government housing projects exhibit signs of a slum while the findings which focused on private housing properties, suggest that their sampled housing units are well maintained and show no signs of becoming a slum.