The housing crisis hiding in plain sight

Housing crises rarely have a single cause. In cities and communities around the world, rising costs collide with stagnant or unstable incomes, shortages of affordable homes, deteriorating buildings and growing exposure to extreme weather. The consequences are not confined to people who lose their homes. They also reach households that remain housed, but do so by accepting unsafe conditions, postponing other expenses or putting major decisions about their futures on hold.

More than one in three people worldwide, at least 3.4 billion, face some form of housing inadequacy, according to Habitat for Humanity. Its new Home at What Cost? report, based on a survey of more than 30,000 people across 22 countries, examines what that pressure requires households to sacrifice simply to remain housed. Three-quarters of respondents said they had cut at least one expense during the past year to afford housing, while 40% said they accepted some housing-related safety risks because safer alternatives were out of reach.

“Around the world, people face overlapping barriers to safe, adequate and affordable housing,” Hafez Neeno, Habitat for Humanity MENA Hub Director, told The Beiruter.

Lasting progress requires governments, businesses, and civil society organizations to work together so that people have practical pathways to housing they can afford and rely on.

The costs outside the rent

Conventional measures of housing affordability tend to focus on the relationship between income and rent, mortgage payments or property prices. But the burden of expensive housing is also visible in the choices households make to keep paying for it.

Among respondents to Home at What Cost?, 33% said they had spent less on food or groceries because of housing costs over the previous year. Another 32% had used savings or emergency funds, 31% had taken on additional work and 13% had delayed or avoided medical care.

“Families experience housing unaffordability every day through food left out of the grocery basket, savings used before an emergency, medical care delayed, additional work taken on and major life plans put on hold,” Neeno said. 

The full cost of housing is not only what people pay each month. It also includes what they are forced to give up to afford and maintain a home. 

Those compromises can reach well into the future. More than half of respondents, 56%, said housing costs made it difficult to consider starting a family, rising to 62% among Gen Z and Millennials. For younger adults in particular, the cost of a home is becoming part of the calculation of when, or whether, they can afford to build a family.

When a home is not enough

Housing insecurity is not limited to losing a home. For many households, it also means living somewhere that is increasingly difficult to maintain or offers inadequate protection from environmental risks. 

The survey found that 18% of respondents said their homes did not protect them from extreme weather such as heat, cold or flooding. Three in 10 expected extreme weather to make it harder to live where they were over the next three years. 

“The world is facing a dual crisis: the urgent need for adequate housing and an increase in extreme weather events,” Neeno said. 

Far too many people are living in homes that cannot withstand disasters or protect against disease threats that are growing more severe.

For households with little financial room, those risks can be difficult to escape. People may remain in homes that need repairs, lack essential services or offer inadequate protection from environmental hazards because repairing them or moving somewhere safer is beyond their means. The pressures can be particularly acute in informal settlements, Neeno explained, where weak infrastructure and limited access to clean water and sanitation can coincide with insecure land and property rights, leaving households with fewer resources and fewer alternatives when conditions deteriorate.

Lebanon’s crisis of habitable homes

In Lebanon, housing pressures have been compounded by successive crises that have damaged homes while eroding households’ ability to repair them.The 2019 economic crisis sharply reduced household purchasing power and families’ capacity to pay rent, maintain their homes or finance repairs. COVID-19, the Beirut port explosion, longstanding displacement and successive periods of conflict have added further damage to homes, infrastructure and household finances. 

“Today, the challenge is not simply the availability of housing, but affordability, habitability and people’s ability to return home and recover,” Neeno said. 

Years of limited maintenance and households’ declining ability to finance repairs have contributed to the deterioration of existing housing stock in Lebanon. 

The immediate problems vary across the country. In South Lebanon and Nabatieh, Habitat says displaced families face damaged or destroyed homes, unexploded ordnance, restricted access, disrupted basic services and continuing insecurity that can impede their return. In North Lebanon, including Tripoli, aging and poorly maintained buildings have repeatedly been identified as unsafe, with evacuations and building collapses reported. Some vulnerable households continue living in deteriorating properties because they cannot afford repairs or alternative accommodation. 

Those with the smallest financial buffers have the least room to absorb another setback. Neeno identified low-income and female-headed households, older people, people with disabilities, displaced families, refugees, and households that have lost homes or livelihoods among those facing the greatest pressure. 

Habitat says it has supported more than 200,000 people in Lebanon over the past five years through work including housing rehabilitation, water and sanitation improvements, housing finance and repairs following the Beirut port explosion. 

More recent work has confronted a different stage of the housing crisis, as displaced families begin to consider returning home. But leaving emergency accommodation does not necessarily mean returning to somewhere habitable. Relatively targeted work on water and sanitation systems, electrical installations, doors, windows or weatherproofing can determine whether a family is able to return, yet years of economic hardship have left many unable to finance those repairs themselves. 

“One of the most significant gaps we see in Lebanon is the space between emergency shelter and longer-term housing recovery,” Neeno said. 

Many families do not require full reconstruction, but after years of economic hardship they cannot finance the repairs needed to make their homes safe. 

The findings leave affordability with a wider meaning. A home is not truly affordable if paying for it comes at the expense of basic needs, or if keeping it leaves too little to make it safe.