There is an acute shortage of adequate, secure, and affordable urban housing in the Global South, a crisis that is projected to affect 1.6 billion people by 2025, a report from the World Resources Institute finds. According to the report, Confronting the Urban Housing Crisis in the Global South: Adequate, Secure, and Affordable Housing (40 pages, PDF), affordable housing efforts in developing countries face three key challenges — the growth of informal or substandard settlements; an overemphasis on homeownership, which tends to exclude the poor; and land policies and regulations that end up pushing the poor to the urban periphery — and away from jobs. To address these challenges, the report's authors call on city governments to adopt in situ upgrades of informal settlements based on solutions co-designed with their residents; promote affordable rental housing through subsidies and improved legal frameworks; and convert under-utilized ublic land and buildings intto affordable housing.

(Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos)