2026 World Cities Report: 5 takeaways for the future of housing

Below are five takeaways for the future of housing around the world, and why they matter:

This year’s World Cities Report makes clear that the global housing affordability crisis is at a record high, with housing costs rising much faster than incomes. Between 2010 and 2023, the global price-to-income ratio increased from 9.3 to 11.2 — nearly four times the traditional affordability benchmark of 3.0 — while 44% of renters now face unaffordable housing costs, underscoring the scale of the challenge. At the same time, the global housing shortfall exceeds 268.8 million units. Yet the report stresses that expanding supply alone will not deliver affordability. Instead, integrated, multipronged strategies must combine demand- and supply-side measures. It also calls for moving toward a wide range of tenure options, including rental, cooperative, social and incremental housing. Ultimately, affordability and inclusion depend on well-functioning, integrated housing systems and a renewed recognition of the social function of land and housing, balancing their roles as both a fundamental human right and an economic asset.

The report calls for a fundamental shift in how informality is understood, reframing it not as a problem to be eliminated but as the predominant form of urbanization — one that is not synonymous with poverty and is deeply intertwined with formal systems. Rather than viewing informal settlements only as spaces of deprivation, it highlights their role in providing affordable housing, supporting livelihoods, fostering community networks and enabling flexible, adaptive urban growth — particularly for low-income populations. 

Non-governmental actors provide a significant share of housing provision globally, yet they remain largely unsupported by planning, regulatory and financial systems. While the proportion of people living in informal settlements has declined, the absolute number has risen sharply — from 895 million in 2000 to 1.13 billion in 2024. That figure, while unprecedentedly high, is likely still a gross underestimate. 

Ultimately, the real challenge lies not in informality itself but in the inequalities, service gaps and regulatory failures that shape outcomes within it. As Habitat for Humanity has stressed through the Home Equals campaign, this reframing calls for policies that leverage, rather than suppress, informal development.

New analysis and statistics illuminate a largely overlooked dimension of the global housing crisis: a “hidden epidemic of evictions” that remains widely underreported but is now quantified for the first time. At least 64 million people have been displaced from informal settlements over the past two decades, contributing to a broader global total of around 133 million forcibly displaced people as of 2024. These figures suggest that evictees should be included in the total number of internally displaced persons and refugees, which is not the current practice. 

Evictions are neither temporary nor marginal. They are driven not only by conflict and disasters but also by urban redevelopment, infrastructure projects and even climate adaptation efforts. Informal settlements — rather than camps — absorb most of displaced populations, challenging prevailing humanitarian models and calling for stronger links between humanitarian and development responses. The report calls for better monitoring of urban evictions, greater attention to the drivers forced displacement and increased support to host communities. Ultimately, this issue underscores the importance of policies that bridge the humanitarian-development divide and address displacement as a central, not peripheral, feature of global housing systems.

Mounting evidence confirms that the climate crisis is fundamentally a housing crisis. The building and construction sector accounts for 37% of global CO₂ emissions. This report highlights with renewed clarity that housing alone is responsible for 17% to 21% of total emissions, which is significant. Housing’s role in driving global emissions and shaping vulnerability can no longer be ignored. The challenge is not only how many homes are built, but where and how they are built. With 60% of the buildings expected to exist in 2050 yet to be built, the coming decades present a major opportunity to decarbonize housing through better design, materials and planning. Beyond mitigation, housing systems are also on the front lines of climate impacts, disproportionately affecting low-income and vulnerable populations. Their housing needs must be placed at the center of both resilience and adaptation strategies, for their improved housing can be a catalyst for resilience. Notably, the report strongly supports adding “sustainability” as an eighth dimension of adequate housing, a much-needed amendment to the official definition.

The report calls for a decisive “return of the state” to housing policy. Housing must be treated as both social infrastructure and a public policy priority, not merely a market commodity. The global housing crisis is driven by a combination of demand-side pressures — such as urbanization, inequality, financialization, cost, climate change and geopolitical conflict — and supply-side constraints, including rising construction costs, limited land and declining public investment. Addressing these challenges will require integrated, multipronged approaches, stronger regulatory systems and significant investment — estimated to be more than US$3 trillion annually through 2030. A shift is also needed away from predominently inefficient sprawl-inducing models like single-family housing toward more inclusive and sustainable urban forms. 

Taken together, these findings show that the housing crisis is not one crisis but a set of interconnected challenges: unaffordability, displacement, informality, climate risk and declining liveability. Housing inadequacy is now at record levels. Opening the door to safe, adequate housing for people around the world requires a holistic understanding of housing as more than a physical structure. It is essential to treat housing as a long-term social and economic process, rather than a one-time product or financial asset. We must prioritize adequate housing as a sustained development goal and advance integrated, decentralized, and context-specific solutions that address needs across the Global Housing Continuum. 

Habitat for Humanity welcomes the strong focus on housing in this World Cities Report and urges governments and other stakeholders to elevate its lessons by actively engaging in the Open-Ended Working Group on Adequate Housing for All. Achieving meaningful, large-scale progress will require increased and better-coordinated financing at the local, national and global levels, including stronger commitments to Official Development Assistance, expanded domestic resource mobilization and innovative financing mechanisms to help address the global housing crisis. Affordable and adequate housing ought to be the central tool for poverty reduction and inclusive development.