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Addressing the housing challenge: avoiding the Ozymandias syndrome

Over the past decade, housing policy in developing countries has witnessed an important shift. After decades of limited and in some cases decreasing investments in housing, there has been a sudden, extraordinarily large, and simultaneous expansion of multi-billion-dollar housing programmes. These new investments reveal a radical policy change, one that signals the serious and welcomed effort of tackling the looming affordability concerns that have been plaguing cities across the world. Yet this paper raises concerns over the direction of current housing policies and programmes. It argues that the new emphasis on addressing the problem through the production of industrial-scale new housing on the outskirts of cities, or through the development of new cities requiring extraordinarily expensive infrastructure, does not necessarily address the affordability concerns. For this reason, the paper raises a series of questions and offers recommendations that address some of the most important elements of decision-making that should be taken into account when planning affordable housing. These are meant to help identify why housing challenges arise, in order to avoid Thomas Pynchon’s well-known aphorism: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”