This paper provides the economic rationale behind the call for Mass and Social
housing provision based on analysis of housing affordability dilemma and
performance evaluation of public housing delivery in Nigeria. It draws attention to
the rising trend of displacement/outmigration of the poor aborigines in major city
centres in Nigeria, the potential for reverse-migration, and resulting cost of
unsustainability of the cities. The study reveals that Nigeria’s public housing schemes
and social housing experiments has, for the past five decades, consistently aligned
with changes in international housing policy thinking albeit with abysmal results.
Caught in a housing policy quagmire, essentially, of how to strike a balance between
the entrenchment of market efficiency in public housing delivery (as it pursues more
pro-market housing policies) and the objective of providing ‘adequate shelter for all’,
the nation has seen much of its housing schemes translate into grandiose paper
policies rather than actual housing delivery. Evidence from the housing affordability
index indicates alarming and unbearable level of Shelter Poverty in Nigeria. These
show that the nation no longer needs the prompting of a global paradigm before
pushing through a populist housing project.